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When, in 1966, American amateur archaeologist Steve Young
was  travelling
through the Korat Plateau in the Northeast of Thailand, he
came across fragments of pottery and beads in the flat farmlands
of Ban Chiang. His discovery excited him enough to take his
finds to the Fine Arts Department of the Thai government.
Steve had stumbled across remnants of a civilization thousands
of years old. Remnants indicating that Ban Chiang had been
a prosperous, dynamic settlement and, for its time, one of
the most advanced communities the world has ever known.
Today, over 18 tons of artifacts, including fine pottery,
jewelery and ceramics, have been unearthed from around the
small hamlet, 60km from Udon Thani - some dating back to between
seven and eight thousand years ago. But the most exciting
finds came during excavations at the site in 1974 and 1975,
when researchers from Silpakorn University, Bangkok, and University
of Pennsylvania, carbon-dated some of the Bronze-age relics.
The teams discovered that, as early as 3600 BC, Ban Chiang
had developed an agrarian, bronze-casting, society that predated
the earliest settlements of its kind, in Mesopotamia and China,
by a full six hundred years. That Bronze-age Ban Chiang developed
rice farming, domesticated work animals and produced intricate
art and pottery earlier than any other community of the time,
has forced archaeologists to re-examine their previous understanding,
not only of the development of Southeast Asian prehistory,
but the development of civilization as a whole.
The findings of the research teams are now on
display at two museums in the sleepy hamlet, and excavation
sites at nearby Wat Pho Si Nai reveal to what extent the settlement
had developed. However, a mystery still exists about this
cradle of modern civilization. The settlers of Bronze-age
Ban Chiang abandoned their home in about 250 BC. As yet no
one has been able to ascertain either the reason why they
left or, more importantly, where they went.
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