Ban Non Wat: a great site reviewed.

Higham, C.F.W.

Ban Non Wat: a great site reviewed Three volumes on Ban Non Wat by Higham and Kijngam (2010, 2012a & b) were reviewed in Antiquity 87(337) September 2013 by Joyce White. Here, author and editor C.EW. Higham responds.

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Joyce White began her recent review of three volumes reporting on our excavations at Ban Non War by stressing that it is a great archaeological site (White 2013). Unfortunately, she did not reason why. Location is one key. It commands a pass over the Phetchabun Range linking Central Thailand with the Mun Valley. Where the former region has access to marine resources and copper ore, Ban Non Wat has salt. The prehistoric transit of valuables--marine shell, copper, tin and, later, glass, carnelian, silver and gold--from Central Thailand to the Khorat Plateau sites had to pass through the bottleneck controlled by Ban Non War. Our three volumes cover the excavation seasons 2002-2007, which were co-directed by myself, Dr Amphan Kijngam and Dr Rachanie Thosarat as part of our project 'The Origins of Angkor', and uncovered an area of 880[m.sup.2]. For the first time in Southeast Asia, we encountered a sequence that began with late hunter-gatherers and proceeded through two Neolithic, six Bronze Age and three Iron Age phases documenting 100 or more human generations of social and cultural change.

The first essential was to provide an accurate chronological framework. Ours comes from 75 AMS determinations on charcoal from assured occupation contexts and bivalve shells placed with the dead. White expressed concern that shell diagenesis could provide inaccurately late determinations, but the paper she references comes from a site with most unusual geochemical conditions not mirrored at Ban Non Wat (Webb et al. 2007). The issue of bone diagenesis is irrelevant (King et al. 2011). Our Bayesian model indicates a good level of agreement between charcoal and shell determinations which, along with the carbonate tests undertaken in Oxford, make it extremely unlikely that the shells are contaminated with exogenous calcium carbonate.

The first volume reporting on the hunter-gatherer and Neolithic periods (1750-1050 cal BC), only briefly noted in the review, covers the mortuary remains from three phases, presenting images and descriptions of each burial together with tables that summarise key data. The flexed hunter-gatherer burials are unique in Thailand for the precision of their dating and unmatched mortuary offerings. The early Neolithic cemetery incorporated extended supine burials with superb incised, impressed and painted pottery vessels with widespread parallels. The second phase is also documented by inhumation graves, but the pot forms are now dominated by cord-marked globular bowls. Subsequent chapters see Warrachai Wiriyaromp describe the early Neolithic ceramic motifs and their wider parallels, and Kim McClintock's analysis of the ceramic tempers. The biological remains reveal that although the Neolithic occupants maintained domestic dogs, pigs and cattle, they also hunted a wide range of local mammals, fished and collected many shellfish. Rice was also found in the middens. All artefacts are described and illustrated. Boer-Mah's pioneering analysis of the adzes well merits White's approval. In the final chapter, I outlined a model placing the origins of the Neolithic in a gradual expansion of rice farmers ultimately from China, in contrast to White's preference for local origins (White 2011).

During the course of the eleventh century BC, burials markedly richer than those of the late Neolithic were interred with copper socketed axes. This and the succeeding five Bronze Age (BA) phases are the subject of the second volume (vol. 5). I agree with White that the evidence we present for phenomenally wealthy individuals during BA2 and 3A dramatically alters our conception of social changes that followed the advent of copper base metallurgy. Hitherto, based on limited excavations in Thailand (the 1975 excavation at Ban Chiang opened just 56[m.sup.2]), White and Pigott favoured heterarchy, noting that "so far no set of unusually wealthy graves has been found isolated from a larger, obviously poorer set of graves" (white & Piggott 1996: 168). This has now changed, and for this alone, Ban Non War deserves to be described as great. Images of BA2 and 3A burials reveal princely wealth: up to 80 decorated ceramic vessels, tens of thousands of shell ornaments, arms covered in exotic trochus shell and marble bangles, socketed copper axes, awls, chisels, bells and anklets. Even infants were interred with copper axes and shell beads by the thousand. Let facts speak for themselves: 47 BA2 and 3A individuals were accompanied by over a thousand pots, 88 copper base offerings, 772 marine shell bangles, 43 marble bangles and 159 135 shell beads. It will be interesting to compare these with the figures for Ban Chiang when that site is fully published.

With BA3B, 4 and 5, mortuary wealth fell and bronzes declined to almost none, while paradoxically, a bronze founder was interred with axe moulds and 25 moulds for casting bangles by a method of virtual mass production. Hayden Cawte's chapter on the bronze industry over time is only briefly mentioned in White's review, while she is dismissive of Oliver Pryce's impressive and pioneering presentation of the results of lead isotope analyses to identify the ore sources. White notes that "of the 1319 copper-base objects recovered from Bronze Age contexts, only 10 implements from burial contexts were sampled for technical analysis" (white 2013: 910-11). No reference was made to Pryce's comment that "no Bronze Age 5 samples were studied due to the artefacts being too fragmentary and/or corroded" (Higham & Kijngam 2012a: 489). The analysis of the bronze and iron is ongoing.

There is a dazzling array of new information on the Bronze Age over six centuries, involving colour illustrations of every grave, ceramic vessel and all ornaments. Pages 548-74 of the Bronze Age volume list every burial from Ban Non Wat and all other available Thai sites on the basis of age, sex and all mortuary offerings. White must have overlooked these when she wondered why "the authors did not present the burial information in appendices employing catalogue-style entries" (White 2013: 910). These underwrote a statistical analysis by Bryan Manly to identify the principal components of difference between the sites, enabling me to model social changes over time. Far from stressing the seminal importance of copper technology, as White asserts, I suggested that the swift rise of a social elite involved preferential access to a range of prestige valuables, not least shell and marble jewellery, and projected their status through the provision of lavish mortuary feasts. There is a model (White & Hamilton 2009) which suggests that knowledge of bronze casting reached the site of Ban Chiang, 230km north-east of Ban Non Wat, by 2000-1800 BC from a rapid migration originating in the Seima-Turbino complex of the Urals. The corollary, seen in the poverty of the Bronze Age burials at that site, is one of social stasis. Our new dating of the earliest bronzes at Ban Chiang to the eleventh century BC on the basis of the bones of those who lived there challenges that alternative model.

Our third volume (vol. 6) described the occupation and mortuary evidence for the Iron Age (IA). Several chapters present the evidence for IA occupation, the ceramic tempers and the glass artefacts, and Rachanie Thosarat provided a detailed report on the fish bones. There follows a description of the burials. The latest BA graves merge horizontally with those of the early Iron Age. The area of convergence is unique for Southeast Asia because it enables us to identify how iron was deployed, what other artefacts came at the same juncture, and the degree to which iron affected social organisation. The answer to this last question is: very little. Bronzes increased, we find the first lost wax castings, and arrowheads and spears with a bronze hilt and iron blade. Iron bangles, hoes and kits of small tools were also identified. But none of the 141 burials stood out for its wealth. Along with iron, there were a few beads of carnelian and agate, and glass earrings: so, ultimately, Indian stimulus seen in the hard stone and glass ornaments seems to have arrived simultaneously with iron.

I have to concede that in all my 43 years of fieldwork in Thailand, the Iron Age cemetery at Ban Non Wat was the very devil of complexity to record and interpret. Burials, each containing multiple fragile ceramic vessels, jostled each other into a maze often defying accurate synthesis. During the excavations we often debated which fragments of pottery belonged to which burial. I owe an enormous debt to my former student Carmen Sarjeant for her brilliant supervision of one of the most intractable areas of the cemetery, and to Peter Petchey and Warrachai Wiriyaromp for the dedication they displayed in recording layer upon layer of a veritable charnel house.

This results in what, on prima facie grounds, appears to be an example of contradictory reporting on my part, but which is explained by the site's complexity. White points out that burial 265 is ascribed to the late Bronze Age in volume 5, but the early Iron Age in volume 6. Moreover, a pot assigned to this individual recurs in the grave of burial 228. These two burials lay at the epicentre of complexity where transitional graves were crammed cheek by jowl, with much disturbance not only of the human bones, but also of the pottery vessels. Iron Age pots are thin, and often found fragmented and dispersed. Many vessels were reconstructed from over 100 fragments. The attribution of a given pot to a burial, and indeed the phase to which a burial belonged, cannot always be determined. With reference to that which appears in two different burials, I observed that six pottery vessels might have been associated with this burial. Regarding the period to which burial 265 was assigned, I wrote in volume 5 (Higham & Kijngam 2012a: 431), "this grave lies at the eastern margin of the Bronze Age cemetery ... it is relatively high for Bronze Age 5, and the ceramic vessels have a distinctly early Iron Age look. It is highly likely that this individual either represents a transitional phase between Bronze Age 5 and Iron Age, or actually belongs to the latter phase despite the absence from the grave of any iron". I therefore found a place for this burial in both volumes.

The Iron Age volume continued with descriptions of the final two mortuary phases. It was during these that the moats and banks were constructed round the sites, wealthy Iron Age individuals were interred at the nearby site of Noen U-Loke, iron ploughshares were used to intensify rice production and warfare increased. I employ these and other variables in the final chapter to present a model to account for the rapid transition in the sixth and seventh centuries from the late Iron Age into the period of early city states. This model, the objective of 20 years of research in the Upper Mun Valley and the entire purpose of the three volumes, did not stimulate White's attention.

The review refers to the lack of a systematic presentation of the pottery vessels. There are 12 mortuary phases and for each, pots have been given a form number. Due to the Trojan efforts of Dr Rachanie Thosarat and her team, we have reassembled 2627 complete mortuary vessels. All are illustrated in colour to the same scale, together with their locations in individual graves, and relevant analyses of ceramic tempers. This resource is already paying dividends. Cathleen Hauman, in volume 5, for example, has compared the Bronze Age pot forms from Ban Non Tat and Ban Lum Khao, while Warrachai Wiriyaromp has followed suit for Neolithic assemblages. I hope that other ceramic specialists will also find this a useful resource.

I appreciate the challenges faced in reviewing, in a few paragraphs, 1224 pages in three volumes incorporating 1291 illustrations, especially for a site as large and complex as Ban Non Wat. I hope here to have addressed concerns about some of the issues raised in White's review. "Speedy publication of these volumes", White (2013: 909) concluded, "is both a virtue and a weakness". I suggest that prompt publication is much to be preferred, to avoid the risk of non-publication or delaying for so long that excavations lose relevance.

Reference

C.F.W HIGHAM & A. KIJNGAM (ed.). 2010. Origins of the civilization of Angkor, volume 4. The excavation of Ban Non War: Part 2: the Neolithic occupation. Bangkok: Fine Arts Department of Thailand.

--(ed.). 2012a. Origins of the civilization of Angkor, volume 5. The excavation of Ban Non Wat: Part 3: the Bronze Age. Bangkok: Fine Arts Department of Thailand.

--(ed.). 2012b. Origins of the civilization of Angkor, volume 6. The excavation of Ban Non Tat: Part 4." the Iron Age, summary and conclusions. Bangkok: Fine Arts Department of Thailand.

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.

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

WHITE, J.C. 2011. Cultural diversity in mainland Southeast Asia: a view from prehistory, in N.J. Enfield (ed.) Dynamics of human diversity: the case of mainland Southeast Asia (Pacific Linguistics 627): 9-46. Canberra: The Australian National University.

--2013. Ban Non Wat: new light on the metal ages of Southeast Thailand. Antiquity 87:909-11.

WHITE, J.C & E.G. HAMILTON. 2009. The transmission of early bronze technology to Thailand: new perspectives. Journal of World Prehistory 22: 357-97.

WHITE, J.C. & V.C. PIGOTT. 1996. From community craft to regional specialisation: intensification of copper production in pre-state Thailand, in B. Wailes (ed.) Craft specialization and social evolution: in memory of V. Gordon Childe: 151-75. Philadelphia (PA): University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology.

C.F.W. HIGHAM

University of Otago, New Zealand