Back from oblivion

Archaeology can be both deadly dull and, if you are fortunate, incredibly exciting. It all depends on what you find.

I have been consistently lucky in my excavations in Thailand, never more so than at the site of Ban Non Wat. This is, at first sight, your typical farming village, a collection of wooden homes on a low mound set in a sea of rice fields. We came across it because air photos showed it was ringed by banks and moats, a sure sign it was once occupied in the prehistoric past.

About 2m down we began to reveal rows of human graves. The pottery vessels placed with the dead as part of the mortuary rituals belonged to the Bronze Age, dating back about 3000 years. That was long before any historic records, so, essentially, we were returning an extinct community from oblivion.

One of many surprises was coming across the graves of newborn infants. It was surprising because the graves were far bigger than was necessary to contain the tiny skeleton, in order to accommodate many fine pottery vessels. The infants wore superb jewellery too — shell bangles imported from the seashore more than 300km to the south, thousands of shell beads and even rare bronze axes, surely symbols of status because they had never been used.

Finding works of art came as an additional bonus. Someone had placed a pot next to the head of an infant, and as we gently revealed it, a painted design emerged. When restored, it turned out to be a pedestalled fruit stand. The design on the surface was a remarkable human face, stylised into a series of curves with the eyes looking up at us, and a closed mouth. Is this the face of a revered ancestor, one wonders?

Lying next to the infant was the grave of a very wealthy man, whose pots included a fine specimen, again with painted designs. One of my Thai colleagues restored the pot and found they depict a frieze of dancers, arms outstretched just as in modern Thai dance. It seems likely those distant funerals involved feasting and music.