Micronesian Area Research CenterRichard F. Taitano

An online publication of the Micronesian Area Research Center

University of Guam

An online publication of the Micronesian Area Research Center

University of Guam

donn bayard

wilhelm g. solheim ii

by

and

1965 - 1968

non nok thaArchaeological Excavations at

northeastern Thailand

Part 2

ContentsPART 1

Preface By Donn Bayard i

1. Introduction: The Thai-Hawai`i Archeological Salvage Program1 1 and Non Nok Tha Wilhelm G. Solheim II

2. The Phu Wiang Region and the Khorat Plateau 27

Donn Bayard

3. Excavations at Non Nok Tha: 1965 – 1966 59

R. H. Parker

Introductory note by Donn Bayard

4. The 1968 Excavation 97

Donn Bayard

5. Chronology 121

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6. Ceramics 163

Donn Bayard

7. Non-Ceramic Artifacts 249

Donn Bayard

Wilhelm G. Solheim II

8. The Burials and Their Implications 403

Donn Bayard

PART 2

9. Non Nok Tha in Economic, Social and Regional Context: Conclusions 465

Donn Bayard

References 491

Plates 521

Chapter 9

Non Nok Tha in Economic, Social and Regional Context: Conclusions

By Donn Bayard

Introduction

When we began excavating at Non Nok Tha in 1965, prehistoric Northeast Thailand was a complete data vacuum, aside from the sites located in the first two years of the program (Solheim and Gorman 1966). Out nearest comparative material consisted of small excavations carried out by French scholars in Indochina (e.g., Mansuy 1902, Levy 1943) and the then recently completed Thai-Danish excavations at Ban Kao (Sørensen and Hatting 1967). Aside from the results of the 1963-1964 surveys, we had little or no prior information from Northeast Thailand specifically, although as Higham has pointed out western archaeological interest in the historic sites of the region has roots going back to the beginning of the 20th century (1989:95). But as Solheim said in 1963, “Neolithic sites with bronze and iron will unquestionably be found in the north-east. The question is only, ‘What will they be like?’” (1966a:13).

The situation began to improve almost immediately, with large area excavations being carried out by Watson and Loofs from 1967 to 1970 at Khok Charoen, on the western side of the Phetchabun divide (Loofs 1970, Loofs and Watson 1970), and a small test excavation at Don Kok Pho, immediately adjacent to Non Nok Tha itself; unfortunately, no data have ever been published on the latter. As mentioned in Chapter 5, Higham and Parker’s 1969-1970 survey of the Phu Wiang area provided valuable supporting data for the Non Nok Tha sequence, and their survey and test excavations in the Roi Et area gave us an initial glimpse of the deeply stratified iron-period sites of the Khorat Plateau (Higham and Parker 1970, Bayard 1977a, Higham 1977b).

The Thai Fine Arts Department began a series of excavations at Ban Chiang in 1967, and the resultant fame of the red-on-white pottery and notoriety of the looting stimulated by it produced more intensive F.A.D. investigations. These culminated in the two-year Thai-Pennsylvania program at the site and surveys of the immediate area around Ban Chiang and in the Phu Kao (1975) and Phu Kradu’ng (1978) regions as well (Schauffler 1976, Penny 1982). The Loei River valley was surveyed in a two-year program in 1973-1975 (Bayard 1980c); and a relatively large area excavation was carried out by Charoenwongsa at the large, late prehistoric site of Non Chai (Bayard, Charoenwongsa, and Rutnin. 1982-1983). The most valuable single project to be undertaken, however, was the extensive series of the site surveys and excavations in 1980-1981 by a Thai-Otago team led by Higham; this group surveyed two large areas in the Chi and Songkram Basins and excavated several test squares and one medium-sized area excavation at Ban Na Di, Udon Thani Province (Kijngam et al. 1980, Higham and Kijngam 1984). Rutnin’s 1983-1984 surveys and excavations in extreme northwest Udon and Loei Provinces have yielded data from the first stone adze quarry ever excavated in the region (Non Sila) that indicate a hitherto unsuspected early iron period trade in preformed stone adze/axe blanks (Rutnin 1988).

Simultaneously, other valuable work was being undertaken in the southern part of the Khorat Plateau and beyond. Supajanya, Vallibhotama, and Suchitta carried out surveys of the moated

sites first brought to our attention by Williams-Hunt in 1950 (since thoroughly described and classified by Moore [1986, 1988]), while Welch and McNeill were surveying and testing the Phimai region in 1979-1980 (Welch 1984, 1985; Welch and McNeill 1991; Mc Neill and Welch 1991). Pigott and his Thai associates began the very valuable Thailand Arhaeometallurgical Project (TAP) in 1984 with a survey of upland regions at Loei and Nong Khai Provinces not covered by the earlier Pa Mong Program; they located the first prehistoric copper mine to be found in Southeast Asia at Phu Lon, on the banks of the Mekong. The following year, Phu Lon was excavated and in 1986 TAP focused of survey and excavation in the Khao Wong Phrachan Valley, Lopburi Province, on the other side of the Phetchabun divide. The ongoing TAP project is continuing to provide us with our first insights into prehistoric mining, ore extraction, and smelting techniques (Pigott and Natapintu 1988, 1994; Natapintu 1991; Pigott, Natapintu, and Theetiparavatra 1992; see Chapter 7). Ho (1992) also carried out a site survey in the Lopburi area, locating some fifty sites of the bronze and iron periods. On the other side of the Chao Phraya Plain, Glover carried out excavations at Bon Don Ta Phet (1983) and surveyed the U Thong and Khwae Yai areas (1982-1983). More recently, Higham and Bannanurag’s massive (680 m3) excavations at Khok Phanom Di has already provided quantities of valuable data on the mortuary practices and economy of an advanced Neolithic society of the early second millennium B.C. with more yet to be published (Higham 1989:65-89, 1991; Higham and Bannanurag 1990, 1991; Tayles 1992, 1998). Higham and Bannanurag (now Tosarat) have also excavated a large part of a Bronze Age cemetery at Nong No (Nor), near Khok Phanom Di (Higham and Bannanurag 1992; Higham and Tosarat 1998).

Aside from Higham and Parker’s earlier Phu Wiang research (the site of Non Nong Chik in particular; Bayard 1977), the research with possibly most direct relevance to Non Nok Tha has been carried out by Wilen (1986-1987, 1989). In 1984-1985, he carried out a small area excavation at Non Pa Kluai, some 5 km west of Phu Wiang, and located twenty-five other sites in a survey of the Huai Sai Khao Basin. Wilen’s work has already produced a ceramic assemblage in the earlier of the two phases present at Non Pa Kluai with obvious close parallels to Non Nok Tha; equally importantly, the later of the two phases at Non Pa Kluai extends into what I called in Chapter 5 “General Period C” (Bayard 1984b), during or after the end of the Middle Period at Non Nok Tha.

Hence we now have a much greater abundance of data available than was present immediately after the Non Nok Tha excavations. This is further augmented by the impressive amount of work carried out by Vietnamese archaeologists in their own country over the past two decades (summarized by Davidson 1979a, b, Ha Van Tan 1980, and Higham 1989). I would estimate that an area of about 8,000 m2 has been excavated there-—almost double the area investigated to date in Thailand. However, only Vietnamese-language reports are available for most sites, and radiocarbon dates are limited to at most a few per site. So although our database is vastly improved over what it was in the late 1960s, it is still woefully inadequate when compared to other better-investigated regions like India and northern China-—and it is obviously of a whole different order of magnitude when compared to Mesoamerica or the Near East.

Nonetheless, there are certainly enough data present to allow at least a start to be made in placing some socioeconomic flesh on our still inadequate chronological and artifactual skeleton, and in fact just this had been done in Higham’s groundbreaking prehistory of the region (1989) and account of the Southeast Asian Bronze Age (1996), the first to apply

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contemporary archaeological methods and concepts to our rapidly increasing database. In this chapter, however, we will be more concerned mainly with Non Nok Tha and the northwestern Khorat Plateau specifically, although reference will be made to the site and its environs in a wider regional context. I will focus first on patterns of economic adaptation and exploitation at Non Nok Tha, then on what inferences can be made about social organization and on available evidence for trade and external relationships and their impact on the society of the prehistoric and parahistoric (in the sense of Hawkes 1954) inhabitants of the Phi Wiang region.

I should add a final note on the theoretical approach adopted here. It is intended, frankly, to be conservative in that I acknowledge both the limitations of the archaeological record in general and or our own data in particular. I try to avoid the terms model and variable; properly speaking, a model should incorporate variables that are made up of at least somewhat quantifiable values, not merely nominal presence-absence traits, and such models in the strict sense are still a rarity in archaeology. I have presented detailed justifications of my position elsewhere (Bayard 1978, 1992). I also attempt to avoid some of the many neologisms that have become fashionable in our discipline over the past few decades (“curate behavior” and the like); while I think some of these have served a useful purpose in stimulating new approaches to archaeological data, others appear to me to be more designed to keep “a lot of young archaeologists off the street” (Flannery 1978:52). Despite these caveats, reference will be made to various “explanatory models” in the general sense when necessary.

The Non Nok Tha Economy

Even this most archaeologically accessible of domains presents many unanswered or vaguely answered questions for Non Nok Tha; however, there are some aspects of the prehistoric economy that we can be quite definite about. Thanks almost wholly to a decade of unstinting effort by Higham and his student-—now colleague-—Amphan Kijngam, we have a great deal of closely comparable faunal data not only from Non Nok Tha (Higham 1975a, b) but also Ban Chiang (Higham and Kijngam 1979, 1982a), Ban Na Di (Higham and Kijngam 1984), and Non Chai (Kijngam 1979). A summary of Higham’s 1975 analyses of the faunal remains from Non Nok Tha will appear in the projected volume of specialist reports.

As mentioned in Chapter 4, the nature of the soils and scarcity of water at the site precluded screening or flotation analysis of even a sample of the Non Nok Tha deposits, thus resulting in the loss of much valuable microfaunal information (aside from that recovered from funerary vessels). Fortunately, such procedures were carried out subsequently at Ban Chiang and Ban Na Di, sites with clearly related economic patterns, allowing some degree of extrapolation to Non Nok Tha. Nonetheless, as Higham has observed to me (personal communication), the presentation of a faunal spectrum chart based on percentages for Non Nok Tha would be misleading, as less than half of the faunal remains recovered came from nonburial contexts (90 out of 189) and—-with the probable exception of MP 5—-the site never saw any significant long-term occupational use. Even in the Late Period, no clearly defined midden deposits were present.

Nonetheless, the remains recovered and analyzed from the site allow a number of relatively confident statements about the economic adaptations of the early inhabitants of the Phu Wiang area. Table 9-1 presents a summary of the faunal remains recovered from both burial

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and nonburial contexts for the Early Period, early, middle and late Middle Period, and Late Period. It is apparent from Higham’s comparative analysis of the bovine bones in particular that the earliest inhabitants of the site were food producing, at least to the extent that they possessed domestic cattle and pigs: “The cattle bones are demonstrably smaller than the modern, indigenous wild cattle of Thailand, and the shape of pigs’ crania is distinct from the wild form. Both, it is felt, come from domestic animals” (Higham and Kijngam 1982:21; see also Higham and Leach 1971; Higham 1975a, b).

This would certainly seem to be indicated by the ratio of pigs and cattle recovered in mortuary contexts as opposed to other animal remains; cattle and pigs were obviously at hand at the time of burial (unlike deer to civets). Analyses of the canid remains from Non Nok Tha, along with a larger group of specimens form the Ban Chiang sites, also strongly suggest that the remains are those of domestic dogs rather than jackals or wolves (the nearest wolves are in any case to be found in western China or India, hence posing something of a mystery as to the origin of prehistoric dogs in Thailand; Higham et al. 1980:150, 160-161).

In marked contrast to cattle, only four bones of water buffalo were recovered from the excavation, and only one of these was in a burial context. While Higham’s analyses (1975a, b) indicate that all but one of the bones are small enough to put comfortably inside the range of modern domestic animals, it seems likely from their scarcity in the Early and Middle Periods that they were not yet domesticated, particularly when the evidence from Ban Chiang suggesting domestication only in the mid-first millennium B.C. is taken into account (see below). As the few bird bones recovered from the site were fragmentary, it cannot be said that domestic fowl were present during the prehistoric period, but given their presence in Early Period Ban Chiang and evidence from North China suggesting domestic fowl by 5000-6500 B.C. (Chang 1986:93), it seems quite likely that they were present at Non Nok Tha as well.

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We are in considerably weaker ground when it comes to determining the vegetable portion of the prehistoric diet. We can be confident that rice was utilized, based on the occurrence of rice chaff as a tempering agent in a small minority of sherds from the site from EP 1 onward (see Chapter 6). But did this chaff originate from cultivated rice, or was it only a by-product of the gathering of naturally occurring wild rice? This is not easy to answer, and authorities who have examined the material are sharply divided. H. Kihara felt that the material was indeed Oryza sativa (Solheim 1972:34); Ohtsuka (1972) and Vishnu-Mittre (1975) also agree that the remains are those of O. sativa but do not feel it is possible to decide between wild and cultivated forms of the species. However, T. T. Chang, examining one of the specimens analyzed by Ohtsuka, described it as “an Oryza form ‘intermediate between a wild race and the weed race’” (1976, as quoted in Yen 1982:52). Yen’s 1982 review of the similar evidence of husks in pottery from Ban Chiang provides the reader with an excellent example of the complexity of the question and the difficulties involved in identification. His conclusions on the Ban Chiang specimens obviously apply to the Non Nok Tha rice remains as well: “Indeed, T. T. Chang’s identification of the Non Nok Tha material as intermediate between a wild race (presumably sativa, a further complication) and a weed race may be as serviceable (and noncommittal) an identification as we can apply to our study material” (Yen 1982:63).

Hence the strictly botanical evidence is equivocal. Some less direct arguments strongly suggest, however, that rice was in fact cultivated in the Ban Chiang and Non Nok Tha areas.

First, it seems unlikely that, in an area marginal for rice cultivation today, wild rice would have been collected in such abundance as to make the use of rice chaff alone a standard tempering agent in pottery. White’s ethnobotanical research in the immediate Ban Chiang catchment area indicates that “wild rice may have been present during prehistoric times, but was unlikely to have grown naturally in prodigious quantities” (1982b:30). Secondly, as Yen points out, “the paucity of evidence for plant genera other than Oryza in the Ban Chiang pottery reflects not only the deliberate nature of its inclusion, but also the careful nature of grain harvesting which excluded contaminants such as weed species at the milling stage” (1982:57). Thirdly, experiments such as those carried out by Oka and Morishima (1971) have demonstrated the apparent ease by which the very act of cultivation alone can effect marked phenotypic changes in wild species such as O. perennis to the point that—-after only five generations-—they more closely resemble O. sativa than their wild ancestors. Finally, as Yen continues, “To this writer, it would be incredible for [the Ban Chiang] civilization to have been founded and maintained for over 3,000 years on a grain gathering economy” (1982:63).

Although I would prefer to avoid the term civilization, surely a similar argument could be advanced for Non Nok Tha. The evidence for animal husbandry and the degree of technological sophistication and social ranking evidenced by the funerary pottery and burials (Chapters 6, 8) from the very onset of the Early Period, as well as the metallurgical technology of the Middle Period, seem very unlikely products of an economy relying on the harvesting of wild grain. Hence, although it remains to be demonstrated, I think it highly likely that rice in some form was cultivated in the Phu Wiang region from the beginning of the Early Period onward.

But this leads us to another even more difficult question: the nature of the presumed cultivation system during General Periods A and B. Chapter 2 discussed in some detail the possible use of a system based on broadcast swidden cultivation of naturally flooded stream

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margins, cleared either by fire or by weeding and perhaps augmented by rudimentary bunding of perennial or seasonal streams. Although plausible, we have no firm evidence at all supporting the hypothesis, save that the dispersed settlement pattern and presumed low population density during GP A and B (see below) accord well with the requirements of such an extensive system. As discussed in Chapter 2, White (1995) has suggested that cultivation may have taken place in relatively permanent rather than regularly rotated swamp plots and feels that “swamp rice” rather than “wet swidden” may better describe it. Further research may provide some more definitive evidence, but it is difficult to envision the discovery of clear archaeological evidence for any such cultivation system, particularly in view of the extensive transformation of the environment by more than two millennia of bunded wet-rice cultivation.

While rice was thus very likely cultivated, it would not be safe to assume that it dominated the GP A and B diet to the extent it does that of the present population in the area. White’s eighteen-month ethnoecological study of the modern Ban Chiang community (1982b, 1984, 1989, 1995) suggests that other crops (yams in particular) may have been as important as rice: “Given the broad spectrum of prehistoric animal exploitation, and the diverse species of both wild and cultivated plants systematically exploited in the region today, a broad spectrum plant exploitation strategy would seem the most reasonable hypothesis for prehistory” (1984:31). Yams also offer the advantage of a long and flexible harvest season relative to rice; they can be dug up over a period of weeks or months (depending on the variety), whereas stands of wild rice must be harvested within a day or two at most before the seeds disperse (White 1989:157).

Domesticated varieties do have less critical thresholds, but as we have seen we still know little about the rice varieties cultivated at Ban Chiang and Non Nok Tha. My own observations during more than two years’ residence in Northeast Thailand agree closely with White’s; the complexity of local resource exploitation in the Phu Wiang region has already been discussed in Chapter 2. Also, as White points out (1982b:29; 1984:31; 1995), the undependable rainfall and less domesticated nature of prehistoric rice varieties would very likely have made rice less of a staple than it is at present.

The bulk of the evidence, plus ethnoecological parallels and-— hopefully—-informed speculation, thus strongly suggest that the diet of the GP A and B inhabitants of the Phu Wiang region was a broad-spectrum one lying somewhere along the continuum extending from the wide-ranging gathering patterns of the late Pleistocene Hoabinhian (Gorman 1971) to the rice-dominated but still startlingly broad-based cultivating and collecting strategies of contemporary farmers in the area. Rice and yams, however cultivated, were quite likely important starch staples, supplemented by a wide range of cultivated and wild fruits and vegetables. Then as now, fish were probably the chief protein staple. As the Non Nok Tha deposits could not be screened, few fish bones were recovered, but the importance of fish is clearly documented by the abundant microfaunal evidence recovered by screening at Ban Chiang (Higham and Kijngam 1982a:20-21) and Ban Na Di (Higham and Kijngam 1984:387). The antiquity of fermentation preservation in the form of pla ra-pa daek is also hinted at by the large number of burial vessels at non Nok Tha containing tiny fish bones (Chapter 6, Table 6-19).

Domestic cattle and pigs were other important but probably less common sources of protein likely reserved for special occasions (judging from the rarity of beef and pork in the modern

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diet). The greater occurrence of dog remains in nonburial contexts at Non Nok Tha suggests that they were a source of meat as well, as has been documented for the canid remains from Ban Chiang (Higham et al. 1980:159). As at other Northeast Thai sites of this period, a wide range of large, medium, and small game was also utilized, as indeed is still the case (see Phithaksin in the projected volume of specialist reports), although the variety has been reduced by local extinctions of many of the larger mammals. Differential exploitation of the various microenvironmental zones in the Phu Wiang region was doubtless even more basic to the prehistoric economy than it is today (Chapter 2), although the distribution and relative size of the various zones was probably significantly different prior to the introduction of intensive paddy cultivation; major differences were obviously a much greater area of the upland zone covering present rice paddy areas and probably a somewhat greater area of river bottom land, although this is of course speculative.

How successful was the prehistoric economy? Judging from analyses of skeletal material from Non Nok Tha and other sites (Chapter 8), the population was relatively healthy, well fed, and long lived by prehistoric standards; there is some suggestion that living standards improved slightly from the Early to the Middle Period at Non Nok Tha. As Higham and Kijngam concluded for the very similar economy in evidence at Ban Na Di:

This multi-faceted economy is flexible and generalized, a situation which would have been adaptive in an environment where the climate was unpredictably variable. It was also a successful one, in that the human skeletal remains reveal strong bone development and robust musculature compatible with a good diet. Indeed, the passage of time at Ban Na Di saw a decrease in child mortality and a life table consistent with a rising population (1984:712).

But was the economy then perhaps too successful, leading to population growth and ultimately population pressure? Higham and Kijngam carry on from the above to postulate population pressure as a possible factor in agricultural intensification and growth of regional centers during the first millennium B.C., but both Welch (1984, 1985) and I (1992) have argued that population pressure was probably not a significant factor in either transition (see Chapter 2). The settlement pattern for GP A and B in the Phu Wiang area (see below) provides no evidence for the communities of 350 people that Higham and Kijngam view as a critical threshold for village-level autonomy; Welch’s research also suggests that agricultural intensification was more likely an adaptation to undependable environmental factors rather than a response to population pressure. Indeed, population pressure in Thailand would appear to be a phenomenon confined to the twentieth century, particularly the years since World War II (Bayard 1992).

Social Structure and Regional Interaction at Non Nok Tha

Origins

Before addressing the questions of the nature of social organization at Non Nok Tha during General Periods A and B, we must first discuss the equally difficult question of the origins of the GP A population at Non Nok Tha (EP 1-2). Ban Chiang (Early Period I-II), and the handful of other sites of apparently similar age. Earlier on most of us assumed that the food-producing economy of GP A had its roots in the widespread and long-enduring Hoabhinian collecting

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economy; after all, what other antecedent tradition was present in the region to supply an ancestor (Bayard 1971a:230-236), Gorman 1971, Higham 1972, 1979)? Although Gorman’s finds of plant macrofossils at Spirit Cave provided no definite evidence for domestication, they did reveal an intimate acquaintance with a wide variety of wild species, and most of us working in the region found a scenario resembling that presented by Harris (1972) at least plausible. This involved the initial domestication of rice and/or root crops by Hoabhinian gatherers living along marshy streambeds in the piedmont ecotone separating mountain and rolling lowland zones, take, for example, Gorman’s three-stage model: “(1) an initial Hoabhinian stage, whose beginnings are dated from several sites to roughly 16,000 to 14,000 B.P.; (2) a period of initial domestication of palustrian species (taro and rice), probably centered in a piedmont zone; and (3) the spread of rice agriculture out onto the central areas of the lower-lying plains” (Gorman 1977:338).

But, difficulties with this scenario began to appear when further surveys of the Phetchabun piedmont areas in the Loei region (Bayard 1980c, Penny 1982) revealed no traces of transitional sites; instead the first agricultural sites found in the area dated from the first millennium B.C. at the earliest, and much later in the case of the northern Loei valley. A similar pattern appears to be the case in Northern Thailand (Bayard 1980c:130). This is not to say, of course, that such sites do not exist; but if present, they would probably be of low archaeological visibility and detectable only by intensive on-foot quadrat sampling of the type employed by Hutterer and Macdonald in the Philippines Bais Project (1982). In any case, no site with evidence for an economy transitional between Hoabhinian “advanced gathering” and the obvious reliance on a considerable degree of food production characteristic of GP A has yet been found in the piedmont.

Higham has more recently put forth the interesting and more plausible alternative that agriculture had its beginnings in the coastal regions of Mainland Southeast Asia rather than the mountain-lowland ecotone (1989:85-87). Following this scenario, rice agriculture was first developed by coastal gatherers, with subsequent population growth and pressure leading to movements of people inland up the river valleys whose seasonally flooded margins were used for cultivation. Such a movement would explain the existence of what appear to be developed trade links between Northeast Thailand and the seacoast from GP A onward, as evidence by shell disk beads (if in fact these are of marine rather than freshwater shell) and occasional finds in burials of other marine shells.

Yet this assumption was originally formulated when Higham was still tentatively dating the beginning of his Khok Phanom Di sequence to about 4000 B.C. (Higham et al. 1986-1987:155). A subsequent series of highly consistent dates from the site has led him to revise his estimate of initial occupation of Khok Phanom Di forward to 2000 B.C., although dated pollen cores from the vicinity of the site strongly suggest earlier human settlement possibly associated with rice as early as the late fifth millennium B.C. (Higham 1989:66-69; 1994, cf. White 1996). While such a scenario is highly plausible, documentation of the actual trade evidence for actual sites remains to be demonstrated, as does evidence for actual movements of people rather than just coastal-inland trade, which is of course a worldwide phenomenon (e.g. Melanesia and Hopwellian North America). Recent intriguing hypothesis linking the spread of rice agriculture with the spread of early Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian languages (summarized in Higham 1996:309-310 and Bayard 1996:81-82) also require much more evidence prior to validation.

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In fact, then, we have no firm knowledge of the immediate antecedents of the initial GP A occupants of Non Nok Tha, Ban Chiang, Ban Phak Top, and other early Northeast Thai sites. Solheim postulated earlier on 1970b:146-147) a “pioneer” (i.e., EP) vs. “adapted” (MP) division of the Non Nok Tha sequence, but the economy evidenced by the EP levels at the site appears as fully “adapted” to the Phu Wiang region as the later MP. Few if any clear differences between EP and MP levels are apparent in the mammalian faunal remains (see Table 9-1) or in the contents of funerary vessels (See Table 6-19); sporadic occurrences of rice chaff in pottery are present in the EP as well as MP. Hence it appears that the initial occupiers (or better “users”) of non Nok Tha were as “adapted” to the Phu Wiang environment as their descendants. If the speculations about GP A and B settlement patterns that follow prove to be generally correct, the question of even immediate origins will be answered only by survey tactics designed to discover sites having quite a small area and low to very low archaeological visibility.

Settlement Pattern and Social Organization

These questions are almost as knotty and difficult to address positively as the immediate or more distant origins of the first food-producing occupants of the Phu Wiang region. The difficulty is compounded in my case by considerable personal skepticism about the validity of many of the general sociocultural “models” of prehistoric sociopolitical organization currently applied to prehistoric data by contemporary archaeologists-—in particular the archaeological definition of abstract entities such as tribes, chiefdoms, and states. As I put it in a paper presented in 1985:

The use of Fried’s and Service’s social typologies has become commonplace in modern archaeology, but I think it is important to remember that these are ideal typologies, and are often difficult to apply to concrete archaeological data. As Whallon said [in a critique of such models], there “is an apparent tendency to reify the levels of organizational complexity identified by Service, Sahlins, and Fried, and to treat them as some sort of universal ethnographic description which provides definitive ‘model types’ or universal analogues for all societies, past and present” (Whallon 1982:156). As an example of the ambiguities often encountered in practice, one only has to consider the debate over the nature of Hawaiian political organization at the time of European contact (e.g., Cordy 1981) to appreciated the difficulties in applying such a typology to pre-Indianized (or Indianized) Southeast Asia (Bayard 1992:16).

Nonetheless, given these cautions it is obviously possible to say something about the settlement pattern and social organization of the GP A and B populations in the Phu Wiang region, tentative though our conclusions must be in view of our still quite limited database.

The question of settlement pattern is of very direct relevance to a recent critique of the Non Nok Tha chronology and burial analysis put forth by Higham (1996-1997). As an ancillary potion of his argument that the limited number of bronze-associated dates in the region prior to 1500 B.C. implies a very rapid spread of bronze technology only after that date, Higham has postulated that the EP 3-MP 8 burials at Non Nok Tha span only one or two centuries rather than the much longer time period I envision in Chapters 5 and 8 of this volume. I have

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presented detailed rebuttal of some of Higham’s arguments in Chapter 8, but other more general points concern the presumed settlement pattern and population density of GP A and B and the length of time it would have taken to fill not only the 1966 and 1968 areas of the site but most of the remaining 97% of the mound with burials; we know from the burials encountered and the depth of cultural deposits in Green’s test pits that burials occur over the vast majority of the site (see Chapter 1). While it is true that the excavated area (plus test pits) contains less than 5% of the total area of the site, I believe that it is a more comprehensive and representative sample than any available from other such sites yet published from Thailand (cf. Khok Phanom Di: < 0.5% of total site area, including earlier test pits; or Ban Na Di [Higham 1989:112]). Based on this sample, I think it is plausible to conclude that Non Nok Tha as a whole contains between five and ten thousand burials. Given this, as I said in a 1988 paper on the topic:

As a result of what is now a sizeable body of work carried out on Northeast Thai skeletal material from General Period A and B sites, we can also state with some confidence that the mean life expectancy of these people was in the vicinity of 25 years. As the death rate per year equals the reciprocal of the mean life expectancy (Philip Houghton, pers. comm.), we can again conclude that about four deaths per year would have occurred in a community of 100 people, or 400 per century. If Higham’s assumptions about the brevity of the mortuary phase at the site are correct, we would have to have a community the size of the modern village of Ban Na Di near the site supplying its burials. This village has population of 800-1,000 people and occupies 25 ha; at prehistoric death rates it would have taken about 200 years to supply the necessary burials [to fill the Non Nok Tha cemetery]. The population density of contemporary Khon Kaen province is, however, about 70/km2 (United Nations 1968:88), and the population of Thailand has undergone the greatest expansion in its history since World War II (Bayard 1996-1997).

Siam (including what is now Laos) in the nineteenth century had a population of some six to nine million (Bayard 1992-22); today it is approaching sixty million. Population density during General Period D (Indianized kingdoms) was probably in the vicinity of 8-10/km2; it was probably somewhat less during General Period C, following the development of wet-rice agriculture in the latter half of the first millennium B.C. GP A and B villages of the size necessary to fill the Non Nok Tha cemetery in the relatively short period envisioned by Higham have not been located, despite intensive surveys by Higham and others in the area (see below); nor have any GP A or B sites that could be called primarily occupational rather than mortuary yet been located in the Phi Wiang area. If the following assumptions about General Period A and B settlement patterns are even approximately correct, the population density of the Phu Wiang region during the mortuary use of Non Nok Tha would have approximated that of modern hill swiddeners: about 2/km2 (Leach 1964:234; Izikowitz 1979:38, 40). Full details of both general and specific arguments may be found in my reply to Higham (Bayard 1996-1997).

In my 1984 paper on the presumed social structure of the prehistoric Non Nok Tha population, I dealt only marginally with the question of settlement pattern in the Phu Wiang region during General Periods A and B. Since then Wilen (1986-1987, 1989) has resurveyed the area around Non Nok Tha, in addition to surveying some 300 km2 on the western side of Phu Wiang Mountain. The results of his survey, combined with Solheim and Gorman’s original

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survey (1966), surveys carried out be Parker and myself in 1966, Watson and Loofs in 1967, Schauffler’s brief survey and test excavation at Don Klang (1976), and Higham and Parker’s coverage of the area inside the Phu Wiang ringwall (1970), have given us a relatively compete picture of site location and typology in the Phu Wiang region. These have been supplemented by surveys in the adjacent Wang Saphung and Phu Kradu’ng areas of Loei Province by Bayard (1980c) and Penny (1982), and Rutnin also included southern Loei and western Khon Kaen Provinces in her 1983 survey program (Rutnin 1988:61-64). Although no intensive surveys of the sort by Hutterer and Macdonald (1982) in the Philippines have been carried out, the results seem to indicate that of the handful of General Period A and B sites located to date, almost all are mortuary sites with little or no occupational evidence, although of course some have deposits form General Period C and D occupations stratified above them (Non Pa Kluai, Don Klang). Wilen has summed it up as follows:

Site density in General Period C, based on surveys in the Huay Sai Khao basin and inside Phu Wiang. . . appears to have been fairly high. Furthermore, we find that during this time sites were located in areas which are marginal for inundated agriculture. Site density during General Period B, on the other hand, appears to have been much lower, and all the sites are in relatively favorable agricultural zones. Of the 13 sites tested within the entire [Phu Wiang-Phu Kao] piedmont area, at best only six have produced General Period B remains. At nearly all General Period B sites the deposits appear to be dominated by mortuary remains. Non Nong Chik is the sole exception. This suggests that these locations represent social centers and not habitation sites. (Wilen 1986-1987:113-114).

In this model, mortuary sites, such as Non Pa Kluay and Non Nok Tha, function as ritual centers for dispersed population. Thus, actual habitation would have occurred in small, extended family “homesteads” scattered in the agricultural areas surrounding these centers. These homesteads would have been located to provide access to work activities in the fields and may have been associated with periodic movement within a swiddening cycle. The mortuary centers serve as a social focal point unifying the dispersed population and engender cohesiveness of the material tradition (Wilen 1989:153).

Wilen goes on to point out the possible reflection of this system in the extensive use of the field shelters (thiang nai) by contemporary villagers for residence during the growing season; as he says, “It is not hard to imagine a time with such a field houses were the main residence with only occasional gathering at a central location” (1989:154). He also correctly points out that such dispersed homestead sites would be very difficult to locate. More importantly for the discussion here, they imply a low population density and the use of cemeteries like Non Nok Tha by several such dispersed homesteads rather than a single, large nucleated village: “Social centers may have then served rather large territories producing a low density of major mortuary type sites. The six sites known at present may thus represent local social groups organized within specific sub-basin habitats, and inter-related within a larger piedmont social network” (153).

This scenario is admittedly speculative, but it would appear to fit well with the affiliative groups hypothesized in the previous chapter, which—-if they existed-—clearly spanned more than a single subbasin drainage area. I should mention that one reader of this manuscript in draft form found the concept of regional ceremonial centers “positively weird,” as no evidence of

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such dispersed habitation has been found. But as Wilen says, “today all contemporary agriculturalists in Southeast Asia live in nucleated villages, and so culture historians have assumed that this was the settlement pattern in the past” (1989:loc. cit.). There is certainly an abundance of evidence for nucleated villages, including burials, from General Period C, but as outlined above, the Phu Wiang region has now been surveyed by nine teams and must be considered one of the best-surveyed regions in Southeast Asia. Aside from some evidence for sporadic occupational use at Non Nong Chik and during Non Nok Tha MP 5, no mainly occupational sites dating from GP A or B have been found in the Phu Wiang region. Such sites may still be awaiting discovery, but if so they are providing to be quite elusive. At present I can think of no better alternative based on available evidence than that put forth by Wilen and suggested by the Non Nok Tha data as well.

In this scenario centralized burial sites like Non Nok Tha were used for mortuary purposes by dispersed homesteads or hamlets of one or two extended families. The pattern may thus have resembled that of the modern Lamet: a small communities of thirty to fifty persons in hamlets of a few houses occupying an area of less than a hectare (Izikowitz 1979:44-46). Given that no sites of even this size have been discovered to date, the hamlet/homesteads may well have been even smaller, consisting of two or three houses on a site of less than half a hectare.

Sites like Non Nok Tha could “have served as the socio-cultural link between the dispersed settlements” (Wilen 1986-1987:114), presumably functioning primarily for funerary and memorial rites. Judging from the presence of nonlocal stone adzes and bangle fragments and marine shell in GP A and B deposits at Non Nok Tha and nonlocal stone artifacts at Non Nong Chik (Higham and Parker 1970) and Non Pa Kluai (Wilen 1989) as well, it seems quite likely that some degree of regional exchange and interaction existed between and within the various complexes of small villagers or hamlets. I would speculate that his trade network was probably incorporated into a regional social/ceremonial network, possibly kin based, if the affiliative arguments advanced in Chapter 8 prove to have any validity. Certainly C type vessels have a distribution extending over much of the Phu Wiang region; they were recovered by Schauffler (1976) at Don Klang, on the east side of Phi Wiang’s sister monadnock of Phu Kai, and have been recovered by villagers from Non Pa Kluai to the west of Phu Wiang (Wilen, personal communication). Other obvious parallels in ceramics also exist between Non Nok Tha, Non Nong Chik, and Non Pa Kluai (Wilen 1989). “Weird” this may be, but on present evidence I find it to be the most plausible scenario.

Attempting to outline the structure of the societies inhabiting the Phu Wiang region during GP A and GP B is of course also a highly subjective undertaking. The mortuary evidence for prehistoric social organization at Non Nok Tha has already been discussed in detail in Chapter 8. Given the cautions as to the limitations of such data for the discovery of “social reality” set out in that chapter, it does seem fairly evident from the mortuary evidence that social organization at Non Nok Tha involved ranking from the outset. As already mentioned, this is not surprising for a semi- or fully sedentary society relying to at least some extent on food production. Note here that by semisedentary I do not wish to imply seminomadic, but rather a system of dispersed hamlets, perhaps in some cases shifting every few years if required by the agricultural system: a version of the dampa system practiced by the Iban but without the central longhouse (see Chapter 2). The differential wealth accorded burial of both adults and children in the Non Nok Tha Early Period strongly suggests a fair degree of ranking of

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whatever kin groups were present, which in turn would imply some amount of differential access to desired resources, in some cases nonlocal (fine-grained metamorphic and igneous stone for adzes and bangles, marine shells). The presence of nonlocal stone artifacts and (possibly) the strings of small shell disk beads hints at the existence of established trade networks of some sort in the region from the very beginning of the use of the site (Bayard 1971a, Kennedy 1977, Higham 1984a), although these remain to be documented through analysis of stone and ceramic sources.

I am doubtful that we will ever know the specific details of prehistoric social organization at Non Nok Tha; hence my use of the term affiliative group rather than clan, lineage, other terms in Chapter 8. Nor we can be certain that the ranking expressed in the Non Nok Tha burials was in all cases ascribed rather than achieved (except perhaps in the case of rich child or adolescent burials). Modern hill tribes, all with generally similar economies (aside from the obvious difference of reliance on upland swidden), cover a wide gamut of social structures ranging from simple unranked clans embodying a degree of achieved rather than ascribed status (e.g., the Lamet) through to groups that are both ranked and stratified (e.g., the Northern Chin [Lehman 1963:106 ff.], although the complexity in this case is probably due to contact with Burman civilization). As stated in Chapter 8, there are not clear badges or markers of affiliation in the Non Nok Tha EP burials, although it seems highly likely that the elaborately decorated and finely made type 1B vessels were markers of status.

But, the situation changed rapidly with the appearance of bronze and obvious contact with whatever groups were responsible introducing the technology at the end of the Early Period. Of particular interest here is the exotic pottery (rouletted and red-on white ringfooted vessels) and the precursors of C and L type vessels discussed in Chapter 6. As mentioned there, the rouletted decoration of some of these exotic vessels seems to have its closest parallels with the incised and rouletted vessels recovered from Early Period II contexts at Ban Chiang, which White (1986:279) proposes dates somewhere between 3000 and 1900 B.C. The latter half of this range accords well with the TL dates on EP 2 and MP 1 sherds and suggests a late third millennium date for the appearance of bronze in the region. But as mentioned above, Higham in the most recent of a series of re-revisions of the dating of bronze (1996-1997; cf. Higham 1989:130; Higham and Bannanurag 1992) believes that there is no reliable evidence for bronze prior to 1500 B.C. and that the Non Nok Tha EP 3-MP 8 sequence must therefore be compressed into a few centuries falling somewhere between 1400 and 600 B.C. To my mind that would imply the compression of the whole of Ban Chiang Early Period I-V into some three or four centuries before the beginning of Higham’s Phase 1 burials at Ban Na Di at 1200/1300 B.C. (Higham 1984d), particularly if we recall the evidence-—inconclusive though it is—-for bronze in Ban Chiang EP II and Non Nok Tha EP 1/2 discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. On present evidence—-including marked changes in ceramic and burial typology at both sites—-I find this unlikely, although some shortening of the sequences at both sites may well be called for as more evidence comes to hand.

Whatever the dating, these new vessel types appear to be reflections of rapid social changes taking place, changes that were responsible for the EP/MP boundary so clearly demarcated in the funerary record. As outlined in Chapter 8, two (or more?) fairly distinct and unequally ranked affiliative groups—-be they lineages, clan segments, or whatever—-seem to have appeared relatively quickly; although it is possibly that the groups existed prior to the EP/MP break, no reflection of this in durable grave goods is present. We can say with some

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confidence that the two groups appear to have been well-established in the area by MP 1-2 times. Readers are again directed, however, to Higham’s recent alternative interpretation of the Non Nok Tha mortuary data (1996-1997) and my reply (Bayard 1996-1997).

While we will of course never know the precise mortuary rites of these two phases as represented at Non Nok Tha, it is tempting to seek parallels in the funerary rites practiced by the Lamet and other similar contemporary hill tribe groups. While these vary widely, even within the same general ethnic group (e.g., Northern vs. Southern Chin; Lehman 1963:186-194), a general pattern may be said to be present: burial usually away from village, in forest or cemetery; accompanying grave goods (weapons, prestige items such as gongs, clothing, etc.); animal sacrifices (buffalo or cattle sacrifices appear to be fairly common); and memorial/commemorative feasts or monuments to the dead. Although we must view this with caution, these elements appear to be present in burials at Non Nok Tha and other GP A and B sites in Northeast Thailand, and a reading of Izikowitz’ account of burial and grave layout among the Lamet (1979:104-108) produces a haunting sense that this may have been—-in general—-“the way it was.”

As discussed in Chapter 8, MP 1 burials involved a fairly wide range of practices: rich primary burials covered with mounds containing offerings: poor burials, also primary, with few or no goods; secondary burials containing some or most of a disarticulated skeleton with a variable number of accompanying offerings; and what I have termed “funerary features,” perhaps reflecting some type of commemorative offering. It is tempting to view the apparently lessening variation (generally shallower graves, disappearance of mounds) in burial patterns in MP 2 and 3 (albeit as seen only through our less-than-adequate 1966 sample) as a continuing process leading to the highly standardized burials of MP 4, perhaps reflecting some sort of “settling down” of the social system; but this is of course highly speculative and impressionistic.

It is perhaps a bit less speculative to postulate that MP 4-MP 6 represents a period of relative stability with little variation in generally highly standardized burial practice, although some amount of chronological variation seems to be present (see Chapter 8).

MP 4 has the highest mean for total number of grave goods for any of the eight MP levels (Fig. 8-30), but this has been influenced by the presence of a few rich C burials (e.g., B. 33 and 39) in the 1968 area. In the two ensuing levels, overall wealth declined sharply with C and L graves containing approximately equal amounts of goods. Even with the relatively large number of burials in the Non Nok Tha database, however, sampling error cannot be ruled out.

In terms of political organization, as I said in 1971, “During the entire early and middle periods we have no evidence for any social grouping larger than a village. . . . The presumed low population density and lack of large-scale political organization seem to have continued on in the area long after the development of bronze technology” (Bayard 1971b:40-41). Higham would agree that this period was one of autonomous villages (1984a:248) made up of “unequally ranked social groups” (Higham 1989:187) and tied together by long-standing trade links. In my view these links may have involved ceremonial and wife-exchange networks as well as what Higham—-following Dalton (1977)-—terms “primitive valuables”: bronze, marine shell, and the like. As Higham observes, information exchange was also doubtless a feature of these networks.

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It should be noted that prior to the availability of detailed burial data from Non Nok Tha and White’s revision of the Ban Chiang sequence, Macdonald (1980:222-223) attempted to make a case for a complex settlement hierarchy (and hence possibly “chiefdoms”) in the Phu Wiang region as early as 1500 B.C. with sites such as the modern village of Ban Na Di and Don Khok Pho (NP 6) representing larger centers. Yet, these larger sites are known to contain General Period C and D cultural deposits, and if Wilen’s and my arguments above are correct, the areas occupied by GP B deposits (if any are in fact present) would be considerably smaller. On the basis of his own analyses of the Non Nok Tha sherds (employing criteria in some cases quite different from my own; see Chapter 6), Macdonald also concluded that LP 1 and 2 should be grouped with the later MP rather than the parahistoric LP; he then interpreted the apparent evidence for warfare (a burned house and unburied corpse) in 1966 LP 2 as a sign of the instability occasioned by the absorption of an unstable chiefdom at Non Nok Tha into a state-level society, which he believed was coming into being somewhere in the region of Phimai as early as 1000 B.C. (1980:226-231, 265). Both Higham (Higham and Kijngam 1984:713) and I (Chapter 6 of this volume) find Macdonald’s arguments unconvincing. I think most authorities would now agree that during the whole of GP A and B, sociopolitical organization throughout the areas of Northeast Thailand investigated to date was at a level no higher than the hamlet or small village, although clearly connected by supraregional trade (and quite likely ceremonial) networks that tied these autonomous entities together.

Finally, if trade and possibly other networks tended to tie these small sociopolitical units together, we might ask if organized warfare existed to provide a contrary effect. White, in her catalog for the Smithsonian exhibition of Ban Chiang materials, postulated a village-level “peaceful Bronze Age” in a “nonurban, non-military context” (1982a:45, 48). This has since been sharply criticized by Higham (1984e; Higham and Kijngam 1984:722), both because of the presence of arrow-heads and spearheads in the inventory of recovered bronzes and because of “the need to explain the origins of metallurgy and its durability in simple village contexts” (Higham 1984a:238). White (1986:290) and I both feel that even if Higham’s shortened chronology (1984a, 1994) ultimately proves to be correct, we still have about a millennium of “durability” to explain (i.e., 1500-500 B.C.). On the other hand, I tend to side with Higham in his criticism of the period as wholly peaceful. While the bimetallic spearheads and halberds he mentions (Higham and Kijngam 1984, loc. cit.) are almost certainly GP C rather than B in date (and the halberds unprovenienced), the bronze spearheads and arrowheads were as likely to be employed in conflict as in hunting, it not more so. In White’s defense, however, it is clear that she is contrasting General Period B (village autonomy and an emphasis on the manufacture of bronze ornaments and utilitarian items) with the stratified, centralized, and militaristic Bronze Age societies of Mesopotamia (White 1982a:47-48); nowhere does she claim that GP B societies were “wholly peaceful.” I would agree with White that we have no clear signs of organized warfare in Northeast Thailand in GP B times, nor as yet in the GP C period. Some possible evidence has begun to appear in the Khao Wong Prachan Valley-—a mold for multiple casting of very small copper “points” and some of the points themselves at Nil Kham Haeng in an early (700-500) B.C. GP C context (Pigott and Natapintu 1996-1997)-—although the exact function of these remains to be determined. But I consider it quite unlikely that the earlier autonomous hamlets and small villages of GP A and B lived in total peace and friendship, any more than most hill tribes in the ethnographic present; the evidence of decapitated burials discussed in Chapter 8 is suggestive (but perhaps no more) of the presence of some degree of raiding, albeit not fully organized warfare.

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Regional Complexity and Local Decline: The Takeoff

The Rise of Social Complexity in Northeast Thailand

If archaeological research in Northeast Thailand over the past decades has provided us with any hard conclusion at all, it is that the mid-first millennium B.C. was a period of rapid and significant socioeconomic change. The extensive research of Higham and his students, Charoenwongsa’s excavation at Non Chai, Vallibhotama and Suchitta’s and Moore’s surveys of moated sites, Welch’s Phimai program, and Wilen’s work described above are all in general agreement that his period saw the rise of larger centers, more complex social entities encompassing regions rather than villages and their hitherlands, regional ceramic traditions, and a marked intensification both in rice agriculture and in apparently large scale trade (doubtless elaborating exotic goods exchange networks already in existence since General Period A times): in other words, the transition to General Period C, which saw the end of village autonomy, the rise of larger communities probably exerting some measure of control over subordinate villages, and the probably replacement of ranking within villages by some sort of social stratification.

I have referred to these new entities in Chapter 2 as mu’ang, a Thai term that has no single equivalent in English (“town/country/nation”), but that conveniently refers to a widespread form of social organization in historic Southeast Asia: an internally autonomous regional entity exerting control over the villages it contained, “governed from a central hua mu’ang [head of the mu’ang] by a chao or ‘lord’ aided by a small group of ministers and assistants” (Bayard 1992:18). Leach’s translation of möng, the Shan cognate, as “domain” is perhaps the most apt English equivalent: as he describes it for Highland Burma, “Government of the domain (möng) is in the hands of an hereditary prince (saopha [chao fa or ‘sky lord’ in Thai]) and his court of appointed officials (amat)” (1964:215).

The use of the term is I think of some value in that it avoids the connotations of terms such as chiefdom and stratified society drawn from the ideal social typologists discussed earlier in this chapter. It goes without saying that I do not wish to make any claims for precise historical continuity between General Period C society and the middle tiers of the Indianized states that I have called General Period D.

In short, the mid-first millennium B.C. saw the onset of the what I have referred to in teaching for some years as an economic and social “takeoff” in at least two areas of Mainland Southeast Asia: Northeast Thailand and northern Viet Nam. The term “takeoff” is of course borrowed from the economist Rostow but is used in a different sense that he intended: “The term ‘takeoff’ is here used to describe the transition of a society from a preponderantly agricultural to an industrialized basis, or, more generally, a sustained rate of increase in output per capita” (Rostow 1952:19fn.). Nor is my application of the term to events in prehistory original; Renfrew used it years ago in his now classic examination of the rise of Aegean civilization. As he says in borrowing the term:

The analogy is not, of course, a complete one, since none of the early civilizations which we have in mind move beyond Rostow’s traditional stage. Yet there are interesting and suggestive parallels between the process of growth from traditional to industrial civilization, and that from subsistence economy to early civilization, the

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transformation which we are seeking to explain. Rostow’s approach is basically one of common sense: its originality lies in a willingness to consider a multiplicity of long-term factors, and above all in the attempt ‘to treat changes in the rate of growth as determined by the workings of the fundamental variables in the system rather than as the consequences of exogenous forces’ (Remfrew 1972:32).

While there is thus widespread agreement that such a takeoff took place in Northeast Thailand sometime during the period 600-20 B.C., there is neither sufficient data nor agreement among scholars to establish with any confidence exactly what factors were involved and which of these were most significant in the transition; as Higham says, “When turning to the transition from autonomy to centralization, we encounter a most intractable period of Southeast Asian prehistory wherein answers to specific questions are not yet available” (1989:190). I think all authorities would agree, however, that a number of factors were involved. Higham (Higham and Kijngam 1984:713-730, Higham 1989) has discussed a number of these variables and their possible interaction in the transition. They include:

• Technological innovation, such as iron tools and intensified agricultural methods;• Population pressure leading to the growth of villages beyond the maximum limit for

effective autonomy; • Intensified trade resulting in selective acquisition of control over luxury goods by certain

lineages leading to increased stratification; • Warfare and competition between groups leading to larger, more powerful groups

swallowing smaller ones; • The effects of external stimulus by Indian and Chinese civilization.

Because the impact of this takeoff on Non Nok Tha was negative rather than positive and because insufficient data exist at present from Northeast Thailand to provide grounds for a thorough evaluation of each of these possible factors, they will not be considered in great detail here. More if not all appear on present evidence to have played a part, but our data are still in such a preliminary and incomplete stage that—-as I have said elsewhere (1992)-—we cannot properly consider such factors as discrete, well-defined variables into which precise values from our actual data may be inserted to test our hypotheses; rather, we are dealing with scenarios of varying degrees of plausibility.

Briefly speaking, I think we can rule out population pressure as major factor in the takeoff. Agricultural intensification may have led to some population growth; be it by plow cultivation utilizing buffalo (also apparently domesticated at about this date) and iron-tipped plows or-—as Higham has more recently postulated to account for the continuing absence of metal plowshares in Northeast Thailand—-by ratoon cultivation of floating rice varieties (Higham and Kijngam 1984: 722). Certainly we have evidence at about this date of an expansion westward from the Phu Wiang area into the southern Loei Valley by iron-using agriculturalists representing what I have called the Na Ngua phase (Bayard 1980c, 1984b; Penny 1982). But, Welch’s careful evaluation of land and population in the Phimai region (1984, 1985) has made what I think is a convincing case against population pressure per se as a factor of importance in the takeoff. As I have said above, I do not believe that population pressure was a significant social influence in Thailand (or for that matter in Laos, Cambodia, or Burma) until the present century (Bayard 1992).

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Trade may also have been a significant factor, although I have doubts about the utility of Higham’s application of a “prestige foods exchange model” (Higham and Kijngam 1984:253) that portrays local lineages or groups as acquiring economic and political power through control over access to luxury goods from an impinging civilization. The problem here is that we have no clear-cut signs of contact with Indian civilization dating as early as the onset of the takeoff although as Higham correctly notes, the glass beads commonly found in GP C sites and even iron technology itself may have resulted from contact with Indian civilization on the coasts of central and southern Thailand at a date considerable earlier than evidenced at present (Higham 1989:190). The postulation of warfare as one of contributory factors similarly suffers from a lack of concrete documentation; while I feel with Higham that it may well have been one element, no clear archaeological evidence of organized warfare has been recovered in the Northeast. In fact, no concrete dated evidence supporting the existence of socially stratified GP C societies has yet been recovered there, although I think the clear signs of both well-organized warfare and social stratification at Dong Son sites make their presence in Northeast Thailand at the same or a slightly later date highly likely.

In any case, most if not all of these factors may have been influential in the transition to centralized sociopolitical entities during the takeoff period. A more accurate delineation of the causes and their effects will result only through the excavation of several of the moated sites that are presumed to have served as regional centers beginning at about this period. Moore, in her valuable description and classification of the “moated mu’ang” of the Mun Basin, considers these sites to have been occupied by “chiefdoms” during GP B as well as GP C: “In other words, they were simply but clearly ranked, metal-using, wet rice cultivating settlements” (1986:232; but cf. her published version, where “chiefdom” is implicitly limited to the GP C; Moore 1988:153). Still, while sites that were to become mu’ang may well have been inhabited in GP B (e.g., Ban Chiang Hian; Higham and Kijngam 1983:576-590), the actual date at which the moats were constructed and the social organization of the population constructing them remain to be determined. The only area excavation of one of these large GP C sites (Non Chai; Bayard, Charoenwongsa, and Rutnin 1982-1983) has provided data suggesting the intensification of trade and the beginnings of large-scale manufacture of goods involved in such trade; but unfortunately, no GP C burials were encountered at the site. The discovery and excavation of a GP C cemetery at one of these sites will doubtless tell us much about the social organization and hopefully the causal factors resulting in their rise. But it is necessary now to turn to the impact of General Period C on Non Nok Tha itself.

The Takeoff and Non Nok Tha

Although our evidence for the terminal Middle Period at Non Nok Tha is based almost wholly on layers 13 and 15 in the 1966 area and the relatively small number of burials that were cut from these layers, it seems likely that the takeoff brought few benefits to the population of the immediate area. Other sites that clearly bracket the GP B/GP C transition, such as Ban Chiang, Ban Na Di, Ban Chiang Hian, and even Non Pa Kluai appear to have flourished, although we cannot be sure that the GP C population at these sites was directly descended from the terminal GP B population. In fact at Ban Na Di, marked changes in ceramic fabric following the GP B/GP C transition suggest massive technological influence and perhaps even migration of people from the Chi Basin north into the Sakon Nakhon Basin (Vincent 1987:188-192; 1988).

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At Non Nok Tha, however, the gradual decline in grave wealth and burial furnishing from MP 4 to MP 6 appears to have accelerated during the last two levels of the Middle Period, which probably date from the mid- and late first millennium B.C. Bronze-—never a common burial inclusion-—becomes limited in these levels to a single piece held in the hand of MP 8 B. 40. With the exception of a bovine limb fragment in MP 8 B. 47, offerings of portions of animals disappear. Despite the provisional and very tentative dating of these two levels, iron is conspicuous by its absence, although we are fairly certain that it was present in the greater Phu Wiang region by the later first millennium. Nor do any of the burials contain the glass beads so common at Non Pa Kluai (Wilen 1986-1987:103), Non Chai (Bayard et al. 1982-1983:50), and also occurring in the GP C levels of Ban Chiang.

The only glass bead recovered from Non Nok Tha was from an LP 2 context. Only six of the thirteen MP 7 and 8 burials contain pots at all, and only two burials had the distinctive C and L vessels so common in the earlier MP levels (see Table 8-9). If the C and L vessels were perhaps a manifestation of presumed regional ceremonial/exchange network that appears to have extended at least from Don Klang in the east to Non Pa Kluai in the west. I find it tempting to speculate (and I emphasize it is only speculation) that the network and the social institutions on which it was based were undergoing some sort of breakdown.

The reasons for this presumed breakdown are unknown, but I suspect its occurrence at the time of the GP B/GP C transition is not coincidental. It is again tempting to correlate the decline with the rise of larger supravillage entities to the east and possibly south (but not the “Phimai state” postulated by Macdonald [1980:265]). It seems apparent that some amount of contact and exchange between the Phu Wiang region and the Chi and Pao Basins to the east was present during the first millennium B.C. Vincent mentions the presence of two vessels apparently manufactured in the Phu Wiang region in burials of Mortuary Phase 1B and 1C at Ban Na Di (1987:182), and a handful of clearly exotic sherds (plus one doubtful sherd) were in turn recovered from Non Nok Tha, mainly in late MP contexts. These have been petrographically examined by Vincent and in most cases proved to have fabrics consistent with origins in the Upper or Middle Chi areas (see his report to appear in the projected volume of specialist reports). However, more specific proof of contact or influence-—such as Vincent has established between GP C as manifested at Ban Na Di (layer 5) and the Chi Basin to the south (1987:190-191; 1988)-—remains to be established for the Phu Wiang area through far more extensive petrographic analyses. The same holds true for the southern Loei sites of the Na Ngua phase (Bayard 1980c, 1984b; Penny 1982); although it seems reasonable to speculate that they resulted from a movement westward from the Phu Wiang area at or shortly after the GP B/GP C transition (Na Ngua burials contain iron tools and glass beads). Vincent’s analyses of a few representative sherds suggest local origins of the pottery in the Loei area (1987:182; 1988).

It is possible that the rise of larger centers like Non Chai and Ban Chiang Hian broke long-established trade links to the east in commodities such as marine shell and bronze ornaments; similarly, the spread of the Na Ngua population on the other side of the Phetchabun/Khorat ecotone (Chapter 2) may have served sources of fine-grained stone and copper ingots (Natapintu 1991:155) for bangle and axe manufacture. Whatever the case, the onset of GP C appears to have had a negative influence on the population in the immediate vicinity of Non Nok Tha, if the increased poverty of the few graves at the site that beat witness to the late MP is any guide. There is also some very tentative evidence for the introduction of

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new funerary behavior in the form of the six pot nests encountered in the 1968 excavation (Table 8-9). The crushed vessels found in these nests-—apparently shallow pits in the subsequently eroded surface of 1968 layer-—are of a size and in many cases decorative style and fabric totally different from the vessels employed in the presumably commemorative “funerary features” of earlier levels (including the pot groups placed on top of MP 4 graves).

Was the population of the Non Nok Tha area then absorbed peacefully into one of the supravillage mu’ang-type entities we assume were developing at this time? There are no signs of obvious warfare. Was the cemetery (and the site) abandoned because of a change in ideology and burial practice or because of the departure of the local population? Present evidence simply does not allow even speculative answers to these questions. We can at least say that the region as a whole was not depopulated. On the contrary: As in areas to the east, GP C sites are far more abundant in the Phu Wiang region than those of GP B and encompass both occupational and mortuary remains (Wilen 1986-1987:113-114; 1089:152; see above). My own intuitive guess is that the transition from dispersed hamlets to nucleated villages and more intensive wet-rice agriculture was accompanied by a change in mortuary practice that saw the abandonment of centralized burial sites like Non Nok Tha in favor of smaller village-oriented cemeteries. Whatever the causes, Non Nok Tha was apparently almost completely abandoned sometime during the few centuries bracketing the transition to the present era.

Parahistoric Reoccupation

The reasons for the absence of any intensive human activity at the site for most if not all of the first millennium A.D. are unknown. Certainly with the transition to nucleated villages in GP C, Non Nok Tha would not have been a good site for such a village. It is too small in size (1.5 ha s compared to the 20 to 30+ ha area of contemporary villages) and-—at least at present-—lacks a dry-season water supply; during the dry season the adjacent Huai Nyai watercourse is reduced to a series of muddy ponds suitable only for buffalo wallows and watering vegetables. On the other hand, the site saw at least sporadic occupational use, perhaps ranging from a hamlet of a half-dozen households down to only three or four field shelters (as at present) during most of the present millennium; hence there is no obvious reason why it could not have been reoccupied earlier.

For whatever reason, the site began to be used again in the first two or three centuries of this millennium, judging from the celadon and crude porcelain sherds recovered from early LP layers (Chapter 6). The population appears to have been quite similar to the GP D villagers of the region during the first half of this century. (We should parenthetically note that since about 1960-1965, Isan villagers have been undergoing a rapid transition to what we might call “GP E”: full participation in the cash economy of a modern nation-state. This transition is as radical and momentous in its implications as that from GP B to C.)

The evidence from faunal remains and posthole alignments suggests an economy and settlement pattern quite similar to modern villages. Hunting and collecting seem to have continued to supplement food production, as of course they do today; house sizes approximate fairly closely the smaller of the two styles predominating in the region in the ethnographic present (see Chapters 2 and 4).

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Cremation had obviously replaced inhumation as the usual method of disposing of the dead, and it seems quite safe to say that the LP occupants of the site practice an Indic faith, presumably some variant of Buddhism. Yet, the site and its earlier GP B burials also seem to have been held in some degree of sanctity, as the LP inhabitants apparently “mined” the burials to obtain cinerary vessels that were then reburied (see Chapter 3). This custom continued through LP 4 but has since been replaced by interment of the ashes of the deceased in a small stucco chedi or simply a glass jar within the wat compound.

As discussed in Chapter 3, the hamlet present at that time appears to have been sacked and burned at the end of LP 3, following a period of fairly intensive occupational and industrial use; this seems to have been chiefly bronze casting, judging from the large amounts of casting spillage in LP 2 levels in particular (Bayard 1981). Sporadic occupation continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the final abandonment taking place at some considerable time before the area was reoccupied by the present inhabitants of Ban Na Di in 1894. The final abandonment at the end of LP 5 may have been a consequence of Chao Anu’s disastrous revolt against Rama III in 1926-1827 and the mass resettlement of many Isan villagers that followed it (Chapter 2).

Non Nok Tha and Mainland Southeast Asia in Perspective

Non Nok Tha and Southeast Asia in the Light of Contemporary Archaeological Theory

In addition to stimulating further research by providing the first equivocal evidence for a discrete bronze period in Southeast Asia, I think one of the major contributions of Non Nok Tha and subsequently excavated sites has been to conclusively refute the older concepts of monocasuality and diffusion as major explanatory devices in Southeast Asian prehistory. These had dominated our understanding of the region up through the 1960s and even into the early 1970s: Sørensen’s 1967 advancement of a “Lungshanoid migration” to account for Ban Kao Pottery and Clark’s view in the first two editions of World Prehistory (1961, 1971) of Southeast Asia’s importance only as “funnel” to channel peoples into the Pacific (1961:201) are just two examples. Our rapidly changing and ever-increasing knowledge of the region’s prehistory provides no support at all for this view; whatever the ultimate antiquity of rice cultivation and bronze working proves to be, it is no longer possible to claim that these and other developments were the result of direct diffusion from the more advanced centers of China and India. I think it is safe to say that-—with the exception of a few very conservative workers-—the concepts of direct diffusion and mass migrations of people as explanatory frameworks are dead.

Nevertheless, I think it is worthwhile to follow Santayana’s dictum and briefly mention the reasons for these earlier views. The major one to my mind is summed up in Coedés’ oft-quoted (by myself, Gorman, Charoenwongsa, etc.) remark: “It is interesting to note that even in prehistoric times the autochthonus peoples of Indo-China seem to have been lacking in creative genius and showed little progress without stimulus from outside” (1969:13 emphasis added). Hence we see the extension into prehistory of Western recognition of the massive impact of India and China on “Indochina” or “Further India,” coupled with the colonial status of the entire region aside from Thailand. Chinese historical accounts of black, frizzy-haired, half-naked barbarians did little to dispel the prejudices of the European (or “Further Mesopotamian”?) prehistorians working in the region. But I have already discussed this

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question at some length elsewhere (1980a). It is sufficient to say that this era is happily past, doubtless aided by the Vietnamese military defeat of two of the West’s most powerful nations.

In place of these views we are not confronted with a completely different theoretical framework: the plethora of new and often exciting explanatory frameworks or models resulting from two decades of Kuhnian revolution in archaeological theory. These are drawn from sources as diverse as cybernetics, economics, topology, and cultural geography-—but my own conservative view, as indicated at the beginning of this chapter, is that they are of highly variable utility and application. If used carelessly and hastily, a scramble through the “cookbooks” of the “new archaeology” and its successor cuisines can produce half-baked and unsavory results. If applied carefully and thoroughly, with relatively precise definition and quantification of variables (see Bayard 1992 for full discussion), the results can be very tasty. For example, I consider that Welch (1986) has made a contribution of considerable utility in providing a strong case against population pressure as a causal factor in the agricultural intensification that apparently accompanied the GP B/GP C transition.

Ethnographic and archaeological analogies are also of considerable utility, if they are carefully selected to fit the data at hand or offered as “just-so” stories to stimulate further debate. Higham’s account (1989:309-311) of the relationships between the Yao of East Africa ad coastal Swahili and Arab traders as a possible analogy for early Indian-Southeast Asian contacts is an excellent example of a stimulating parallel. But his attempt to draw analogies between British Iron Age tribes and the encroaching Roman Empire on the one hand and Dong Son and pre-Han China during the period 415-220 B.C. on the other (1984a:253) is to my mind far less satisfying (Bayard 1984a). My feeling is that Southeast Asian prehistory at present still has more to gain from the application of new methods and analytical techniques than it does from being forced into a variety of new models where, as usual, the fit is often not a very comfortable one (D.T. Bayard 1969:379).

Non Nok Tha and Causal Factors in Prehistoric Change

Have Non Nok Tha and related sites provided us with any profound answers to general questions of causality in prehistory? Can we in fact expect any such answers to eventuate quickly and conclusively? Given my own conservative bias, I doubt it. Despite their fame (some would say notoriety!) in the popular and semipopular press, Non Nok Tha and Ban Chiang have provided little more than negative evidence arguing against the simplistic explanatory frameworks discussed above. As a result, I do not share the views often expressed by the media of these sites as “revolutionary” and so on (Chapter 5); they merely exhibit an ability for largely indigenous technological and social development found in other parts of the world.

But these sites-—and others like them-—have as yet provided little in the way pf positive evidence. How were rice and cattle domesticated? How did first social ranking and even stratification develop from presumably egalitarian roots? How did such a relatively uniform bronze technology develop, largely indigenously, and spread over such a wide area? How did supravillage social units (call them mu’ang, chiefdoms, protostates, or what you will) come into existence? How were Indian sociopolitical concepts like the devaraja internalized in the minds of ordinary Southeast Asians?

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Future Prospects

Given the experience of the past twenty years, answers to these questions will not come quickly if the continuing debate (e.g., Higham 1996-1997, Bayard 1996-1997) over as mundane but necessary a matter as chronology is any guide; as I said in a paper presented in 1985, “I find it rather depressing that after twenty years as an archaeologist (with an eighth of this time spent working in Thailand) I still lack definite answers to basic questions of chronology and regional sequence” (1992:31). Hence both Solheim and I believe that the gathering and evaluation of more data will be considerably more helpful than any number of fashionable models. Obviously, explanatory frameworks of some sort must be employed in ordering and presenting the data-—Taylor’s “historiography” versus mere “chronicle” (1964)-—but I believe that we gain little by talking about the coevolution of “peer polities” or “modes” of social organization, for example, until we have some idea of what these polities were like and how they interacted; I doubt they were “isometric” with those of the Aegean (Bayard 1986-1987:130-131). Nor, as discussed in Chapter 8, is an ad hoc definition of “exotic” goods or “primitive valuables” in a “prestige goods exchange network” able to tell us much more than simply talking about trade in nonlocal materials; exoticism is in the eye of the long-dead beholder. Much of the speculation about features of social structure at Non Nok Tha and other sites in Mainland Southeast Asia will of necessity remain just that: pure speculation. Barring the development of time travel, we will never know the precise kinship terminology or actual ritual at the time of burial of the EP and MP inhabitants of Non Nok Tha any better than we currently understand those of the builders of Stonehenge.

It is for this reason that the preset volume has concentrated on presenting the Non Nok Tha data themselves rather than a “Grand Synthesis” (Flannery 1976) of Southeast Asian prehistory (already very well done by Higham [1989]); but it provides what we hope is a fairly exhaustive quantity of tables as well as offering a selection of possible scenarios and analogies. We present the data fully in the hope that others may be stimulated to perform their own analyses and arrive at their own conclusions, as two already have (Macdonald 1980, Higham 1996-1997; see Chapters 6 and 8); our interpretations are obviously not to be taken as gospel.

Rather than the postulation of overarching theoretical models to explain out still vastly inadequate data from Mainland Southeast Asia, we would prefer to see a massive increase in the database itself. Despite all of the valuable work of the past thirty years in Thailand and the even more massive contributions of Vietnamese archaeologists to their own prehistory (most of it still unavailable in any Western language; Bayard 1984d:303), as I pointed out in Chapter 5 our data lags far behind that which has become available from China over the same period of time.

As well as probably new discoveries, a massive increase in our database will permit considerably more confidence in our scenarios. Rather than constructing prehistoric social systems on the basis of only a handful of more or less complete burials (e.g., eighty-seven at Non Nok Tha and eighteen at Ban Na Di), what is needed are large regional samples. As I pointed out in Chapter 8, even an objective reexcavation of Non Nok Tha would be highly desirable in that it could employ techniques and specialists not available to us in 1965-1968; over 95% of the site is still unexcavated and to the best of my knowledge looting has been minimal since 1968.

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For discovering the “whys” of increasing social complexity in Northeast Thailand during the takeoff to General Period C, a considerably greater effort will be required, involving area excavations of 4,000-6,000m2 including occupation areas, middens, moats, and cemeteries on sites like Ban Chiang Hian that span the GP B/GP C transition. Progress will be neither cheap nor quick, but hopefully some fairly convincing answers will begin to appear by the first decades of the 21st century, when our knowledge of the region may begin to approach what we know about the Near East and Mesoamerica.

Even so, Non Nok Tha seems marginal to these wider questions of the origins of complex societies. It is a single small site in a still relatively isolated area, excavated more by sheer luck and innate curiosity than by any carefully planned, problem-solving, a priori hypotheses in the minds of its excavators. Despite this, it was in itself enough to stimulate considerable interest in the prehistory of the region “as one which fully illustrates the human capacity for adaptation, innovation, and change” (Higham 1989:362). As such, we think it merits at least some of the attention focused on it in the past, and we further hope that this volume will answer some-—if by no means all-—of the questions our colleagues have raised about it.

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489

REFERENCESABREVIATIONS

A Antiquity

AA American Anthropologist

AAN American Antiquity

AP Asian Perspectives

BEFEO Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême Orient

BIPPA Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association

BUMA The Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys: Papers from the Second International

Conference on the Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys, Zhengzhou, China,

21-26 October 1986, ed. Robert Maddin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988.

CA Current Anthropology

ESEA Early South East Asia, eds. W. Watson and R.B. Smith. London: Oxford University

Press, 1979.

EXP Expedition

JAS Journal of Archaeological Science

JSEAS Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

JSS Journal of the Siam Society

KCH Khao Co Hoc [Viet Nam]

MQR Modern Quaternary Research In Southeast Asia

PEFEO Publications de l'École Française d'Extrême Orient

R Radiocarbon

S Science

SAE Saeculum [German]

SEAPSC Southeast Asian Archaeology at the XV Pacific Science Congress, ed. D.T. Bayard.

University of Otago Studies in Prehistoric Anthropology 16, Dunedin, 1984.

SEASNL South-East Asian Studies Newsletter

UOSPA University of Otago Studies in Prehistoric Anthropology, Dunedin.

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