Turning the Clock Back

Historians have long accepted the notion that the Bronze Age began between 3500 and 3000 B.C. in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia. It was during this period that man is believed to have developed advanced writing techniques, built the first true cities and brought metallurgy to the stage necessary to produce bronze. Now there is evidence to suggest that a cultural flowering may have occurred earlier--and thousands of miles farther east. Archaeologists excavating sites at Ban Chiang, a small farming village in northeastern Thailand, have found sophisticated bronze artifacts dating back to about 3600 B.C.

Thai archaeologists knew as long ago as the early '60s that unusual and ancient pottery had been found in Ban Chiang. But it was not until 1968, when a visitor brought some of the shards to the University of Pennsylvania's University Museum for testing, that scientists began to take the site seriously. Two types of dating methods indicated that the pottery was fired around 3600 B.C. That discovery led to a long-term archaeological investigation of the area by an expedition headed by Pennsylvania Archaeologist Chester Gorman and Pisit Charoenwongsa (called Dr. Pisit), curator of the National Museum in Bangkok.

In the past two years, excavations around Ban Chiang have yielded 18 tons of artifacts, including sophisticated clay pottery. But the most remarkable finds are the bronze spearheads, anklets and bracelets that predate the Middle East's Bronze Age by 600 years and the Bronze Age in China by about 1,000 years. "To make bronze in 3600 B.C. means that these people had an understanding of metallurgy that seems to have been unparalleled in any other area in the world at that time," says Gorman.

Peaceful Life. While there is no evidence that the ancient inhabitants of Thailand built cities that could compare to those of Bronze Age Mesopotamia, their sophisticated implements suggest that they had a high standard of living. Artifacts unearthed at the dig show that the early settlers grew rice, raised animals such as pigs and chickens" and probably believed in an afterlife. The findings also suggest that Ban Chiang's residents lived a peaceful existence. The archaeologists found few weapons of war --and no arrow points in any of the 126 intact skeletons unearthed so far.

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