Ban Non Wat: new light on the Metal Ages of Southeast Asia.

White, Joyce C.

C.F.W HIGHAM & A. KIJNGAM (ed.). Origins of the civilization of Angkor, volume 4. The excavation of Ban Non Wat: Part 2: the Neolithic occupation. xiv+223 pages, 257 colour and b&w illustrations, 40 tables. 2010. Bangkok: Thai Fine Arts Department; 978-974-417-389-8 hardback 50 [pounds sterling].

C.F.W HIGHAM & A. KIJNGAM (ed.). Origins of the civilization of Angkor, volume 5. The excavation of Ban Non Wat: Part 3: the Bronze Age. xxiv+598 pages, 665 colour and b&w illustrations, 46 tables. 2012. Bangkok: Thai Fine Arts Department; 978-974-417627-1 hardback 100 [pounds sterling].

C.F.W HIGHAM & A. KIJNGAM (ed.). Origins of the civilization of Angkor, volume 6. The excavation of Ban Non Wat: Part 4: the Iron Age, summary and conclusions. xviii+403 pages, 369 colour and b&w illustrations, 36 tables. 2012. Bangkok: Thai Fine Arts Department; 978-616-283-009-9 hardback.

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Ban Non Wat (BNW) is a great archaeological site. For the first time in Thailand, a large area of a major, multi-component prehistoric site that was occupied for more than two millennia (c. 1750 BC-AD 500) has been exposed by a joint project of Thailand's Fine Arts Department and the University of Otago. These excavations have revealed hundreds of burials and metres of occupation deposits. New aspects of prehistoric society--practices never before seen in prehistoric excavations in Thailand or Cambodia--have come to light, requiring regional specialists to expand their thinking about the variability of social development from the Late Neolithic through the Metal Ages. For the first time in Thailand, graves dating to the Bronze Age have been found with outstanding furnishings including dozens of ceramic pots and personal ornaments. Also of great interest is that the phase with relatively great wealth was short-lived and was followed by phases with less well-endowed graves. This waxing and waning of mortuary display provides an unparalleled opportunity to examine social dynamism in a prehistoric Southeast Asian context. These BNW finds will provide great fodder for theorising about Thailand's social development in prehistoric times for years to come.

This review, however, concerns not the site, but the three volumes presenting the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age data from the site. It should be noted that a separate volume (Higham & Kijngam 2009) provides an overview of the stratigraphy, chronology and cultural remains (reviewed by Elizabeth Moore in Antiquity (2011: 677-78)). These volumes appear impressive--colourful, attractive, with thousands of photographs and a pleasing layout. In particular, the colour photographs of the well-preserved and well-excavated burials are beautiful--clear, well-lit, and engaging. Many close-up shots show informative details. One can see why the authors were able to dispense with the more time-consuming, conventional illustrations via ink drawings, although annotated burial drawings would have helped to present the evidence in many cases. Colour photographs of the pottery and other finds are also informative. Publishing such full colour volumes would be prohibitively expensive in the West, and thus the printing of these volumes by the Thai Fine Arts Department is a real gift to archaeologists of the region.

But these volumes are nor coffee table books. As monographs that present the detailed original data from an important archaeological site excavated over seven field seasons (2002-2007), their main audience comprises professional prehistoric archaeologists. This target audience, however, will encounter a number of problems, many of which result from the speedy publication of these volumes--both a virtue and a weakness. For example, incomplete captions and figures (e.g. Vol. 5, fig. 4: 2), grammatical and typographical errors, missing text and repeated text (e.g. Vol. 6, pp. 62-63) indicate undue haste with copy-editing and page-proofing. Particularly frustrating are mismatches between figure or table numbers cited in the text and the pertinent figure or table. The determined reader can usually find the correct information and will want to mark the volumes with the corrected reference numbers to aid subsequent readings.

Many of the chapters in the three volumes, about 50 per cent of the pages, are descriptions of burials variously subdivided by phase, period, group, age and sex. These descriptions are discursive narratives from which it is hard to extract quantifiable data. One wonders why the authors did not present the burial information in appendices employing catalogue-style entries. At times the presentation of burial evidence is confused, and cross-tabulation of photographs and tables within and between the volumes reveals inconsistencies. For example, the photograph for pot form 57, a Bronze Age phase 5 pot (Vol. 5, p. 583) assigns this vessel to burial 265 in the Bronze Age volume, and Table 16.1 lists 10 pots from this burial. However, burial 265, with the same pot and burial photographs, is also found in the Iron Age volume, where Table 13.1 lists 15 pots from this burial. What's more, the identical pot with the same catalogue number is also shown as part of the grave assemblage of Iron Age burial 228. This is only one among many examples of the discrepancies encountered. Every archaeologist can appreciate that organising the mass of detail for a site like BNW is a major undertaking, and mistakes will occur. However, presentational errors of this type will clearly make it difficult to use these data in future analyses with ease and confidence.

One of the most important and basic contributions that archaeologists expect of a monograph series such as this is a systematic pottery classification. Here, I also found issues with the unsystematic presentation of the pottery. It seems odd that the BNW researchers did not build their ceramic classification from those developed at their previous excavations at the nearby sites of Ban Lum Khao and Noen U-Loke. The wider lack of a comprehensive, systematic and integrated regional ceramic sequence hampers the need of archaeologists to develop relative dating frameworks. Even so, enough data are provided in the volumes to show that meaningful cross-correlations among phases at different prehistoric sites in the Upper Mun Valley (UMV) might be made. The concluding chapter in the Bronze Age volume (e.g. Vol. 5, fig. 21: 32) does provide several convincing intra-regional correlations among UMV sites. These correlations provided the basis for an interesting commentary about social differences between sites during different phases. Phase correlation charts are important to propose even though they inevitably have short shelf lives in the context of Thai archaeology. For example, the shapes and sizes of pottery from Ban Lum Khao Mortuary Phase 1 seem to correlate with BNW Bronze Age 1 rather than to BNW Neolithic 2 as suggested.

Regarding the absolute dating framework, the volumes present more than 70 radiocarbon dates, modelled with Bayesian statistics. The majority of these dates come from freshwater bivalve shell recovered from burials. Reliance on shell dates, however, has been questioned on technical grounds. Webb et al. (2007) have shown that freshwater bivalve shell can undergo diagenesis in contexts where groundwater chemistry has a high Mg:Ca ratio, resulting in erroneously young radiocarbon determinations. The problematic groundwater chemistry can be found in contexts with high salinity, such as those found across northeast Thailand. Evidence for marked diagenesis in the BNW human bone is observed by King et al. (2011) who relate the chemical changes to high soil concentrations of magnesium and sodium, indicating that the shell used for dating is likely also affected. Both Webb et al. (2007) and King et al. (2011) argue that vetting shell or bone for diagenesis cannot be accurately accomplished using standard spectroscopy but requires Raman spectroscopy, in conjunction with evaluation of soil chemistry and SEM. The presentation of the BNW shell dates does not provide evidence that these vetting protocols were employed. Greater clarity on whether this important issue was taken into consideration would permit more confidence in the overall chronometric sequence.

Any archaeological site dating to the Metal Ages in Thailand can contribute to understanding the nature and place of metal technologies in the prehistoric period of Southeast Asia. BNW's metal remains add a number of new twists to the discussions. First to note are the important finds of 25 bangle mould valves from burial 549, along with many other mould valves and sets for adzes and a wide range of bangles found in various parts of the site. Several copper-base adzes and chisels, bangles, tanged arrow points and bells were also found.

Technical analyses have begun to provide tantalising data. Of the 1319 copper-base objects recovered from Bronze Age contexts, only 10 implements from burial contexts were sampled for Technical analyses, according to Pryce (Chapter 19, Vol. 5). None of the jewellery was studied technically, nor were any of the metal objects recovered from non-mortuary contexts. Interestingly, only three sampled adzes provided reliable elemental data and all three were made of copper, not bronze. These three come from Bronze Age phases 1 and 2, hence no elemental evidence is provided for copper-base artefacts from Bronze Age phases 3-5 or the Iron Age. This is a promising start, but specialists will crave much more data from a representative sample of the metals and associated artefacts in order to reconstruct plausibly the full production, distribution and consumption of metals over the course of the site's sequence.

There is a recurrent theme throughout the volumes that 'bronze' was the major catalyst for social change at the start of the Bronze Age at BNW. However the evidence provided is not sufficient to convince the reader that the causation of Bronze Age social change was related to metal, even if correlation of the appearance of copper-base items in graves of marked wealth is evident. The metal is rare among grave goods relative to the large quantities of pots and shell and stone jewellery; metal was also somewhat idiosyncratically distributed. Without the full evidence from metal recovered from non-burial contexts, there is insufficient basis for arguing exclusivity of metal access for the elite, even if only BNW elite were interred with metal in Bronze Age phases 2 and 3A. From the discussions of the crucibles, it may be that local casting of bronze took place primarily in phases later than 2 and 3A, but insufficient quantitative evidence is provided to support that and in any case the production evidence that is provided supports uncentralised (i.e. not controlled by elite) production.

With few exceptions, publications of prehistoric sites in Thailand tend to focus on burial remains and associated 'prestige' items, far overshadowing the extremely important occupation evidence. These volumes provide several stimulating contributions concerning the more quotidian remains that will be of interest to regional archaeologists because they begin to flesh out hitherto unappreciated aspects of daily life. Here we can note as examples Boer-Mah's systematic study of adzes and their sourcing (Vol. 4), Cameron's thoughtful presentation of spindle whorls (Vol. 5) and the butchery floors described by Iseppy (Vol. 6). Let us hope that chapters like these presage a trend for regional archaeologists to increase their attention on what can be learned of Thailand's prehistory beyond mortuary remains.

In summary, even with the flaws and limitations of these volumes, excavations at Ban Non Wat have changed the scholarly conversation about the Metal Ages of Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand. The evidence for much greater diversity in social behaviours during this period, especially the evidence for outstandingly well-furnished graves during the BNW Bronze Age phases 2 and 3A, has opened up new dimensions to be considered in societal analyses. How the new BNW data can best be conceptualised socially, economically and politically, and then integrated with the larger set of regional data for this period, will likely engage regional archaeologists for at least the coming decade.

References

HIGHAM, C.F.W & A. KIJNGAM (ed.). 2009. The origins of the civilization of Angkor, volume 3. The excavation of Ban Non Wat: introduction. Bangkok: Thai Fine Arts Department.

KING, C.L., N. TAYLES & K.C. GORDON. 2011. Re-examining the chemical evaluation of diagenesis in human bone apatite. Journal of Archaeological Science 38: 2222-30.

MOORE, E. 2011. Review of C.F.W. Higham & A. Kijngam (ed.) The origins of the civilization of Angkor, volume 3. The excavations of Ban Non Wat: introduction. Antiquity 85: 677-78.

WEBB, G.E., G.J. PRICE, L.D. NOTHDURFT, L. DEER & L. RINTOUL. 2007. Cryptic meteoric diagenesis in freshwater bivalves: implications for radiocarbon daring. Geology 35: 803-806.

Joyce C. White, University of Pennsylvania Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6324, USA (Email: banchang@sas.upenn.edu)