January 31, 2006 The Cough That Went to Thailand
My winter cough, which had begun as an unintended side-effect of a blood-pressure prescription, became markedly worse once we reached the dig site in the midst (literally) of the village of Ban Non Wat in northeastern Thailand, and actually got down into the pit to dig. The pit, dug into the ground beside one of the village houses and surrounded by small buildings, chickens, and people going about their daily business, is referred to as "the square".
It is in fact a square some 9 X 9 meters on a side, 15 so feet or so deep, and going rapidly deeper (the professional crew had been on site all of December, taking the bottom down to the Iron Age levels being worked when we arrived). It’s the site of a succession of cemeteries, the site having been continuously occupied from about 2100 BC through the entire prehistoric period.
We got into the square by climbing down one of the black wooden ladders rather blithely propped against the wall-edges (some of the Thai workers skinned down them facing forward, like sailors using a hatchway ladder; I longed to follow suit, but hadn't the nerve). Once there we were assigned the work which would limit the damage we might do as much as possible. Despite the dozen or so Iron Age skeletons exposed in six inch deep burial cuts -- brown skeletons overlain with a layer of more or less broken large red pottery — what we new arrivals were set to doing was "taking down" the old packed-earth floors still standing between these exposed burials.
No bones for us! Who knows, we might take a fit and gnaw on them or something. Actually, the boss wanted to see how clumsy we were at the work before letting any of us near his precious, and fragile, burials.
“Taking down” a floor in this case did not mean scraping soil away a millimeter at a time, but hacking away with the sharp shoulders of your trowel to get a good two inches broken loose from the next reasonably intact surface down and disposed of (dumped in plastic buckets which other staff would come fetch, to send them up by a rope and pulley system for the contents to be screened pitside for finds).
The soil itself was fine-grained and cool; we worked under an enormous white canopy stretched on a high aluminum frame so we wouldn’t cook to death in the sun, though it could get stifling down there in the afternoons. But so dry; although the water table was high, the village was built on a mound which rose well above ground level and we were in the middle of not just the dry season but a drought, so — there was dust.
Steve had thoughtfully brought along two of those filter-masks that gardeners wear while spraying plants (one of the dig archaeologists also wore one regularly when in the square); I put one on. It helped — a little — but the stuffiness and the interference with breathing was as bad as the damned cough itself.
My coughing got worse anyway, even after I quit working down there to get away from the dust. Our Principal Investigator, Charles Higham, was in a tearing rush to get down to the Bronze Age levels in time for a big bash late in February in honor of the Thai King's 60th year on the throne, during which a presentation would be made at Ban Non Wat. Charles was determined to have something spectacular to present — which meant getting down into the Bronze Age layers, where he had found very rich and interesting grave goods on previous digs at nearby locations.
The time-pressure meant that the square was always densely crowded with people digging like Hell. The space was very difficult to negotiate with all those arms and legs and bent backs everywhere. Given the speed of the work, a lot of dust was raised in the square: not good for The Cough.
So, came the first night off — Saturday, end of the first week — and after the usual bone-crunching drive down narrow rural lanes from the dig to the Phimai Hotel, I phoned Nigel (Assistant to the Boss) and said I'd like to see a doctor. He called up Mr. Nim on his cell phone to get us a lift into the center of town. Mr. Nim was a local man long associated with the dig as its quartermaster and driver. Mr. Nim had a neat little pickup truck with a rail-sided, roofed bed lined with benches on both sides into which the younger diggers jammed for the daily trip to and from the dig, some of them hanging out of the back with cheerful aplomb.
That evening Mr. Nim took Nigel and me and Steve to a clinic, a ground-floor commercial space in a two-story cement building with about a half dozen people sitting in the rows of plastic waiting room chairs. Along the left wall was a pharmacy counter with two chatty young women behind it. To our right lay the open doorway to the examining room, into which, after about 45 minutes or so, I went with Nigel as my interpreter. I sat down beside the desk where the young and solemn-faced doctor (in white short-sleeved shirt and dark slacks) sat. Nigel took the chair across the desk from him and translated into nasal and sometimes halting Thai, the nature and history of my complaint as I described it.
The doctor listened in grave silence, then applied his stethoscope to my chest and back — the Thai command to "breathe deeply" has fled my memory — and looked into my ears and mouth. He asked several questions of Nigel. Then he sat thinking for a few minutes. At length, he wrote out four prescriptions. Goodbye and thank you, next please.
At the pharmacy counter I was given four little plastic self-sealing envelopes, each with ten pills in it and each neatly labeled on one side in Thai and on the other in English: "for cough", "for sleep", "antibiotic", and "for allergy", all of them little white pills that were very bitter to swallow except for the sleeping tablet, which was violet and, apparently, coated. All this came at a cost of a couple of dollars and some time waiting in a comfortably air-conditioned room (Ban Non Wat is hot most afternoons and evenings in January).
On the way back to the Phimai Hotel we were invited by Nigel to join him and some of the other diggers — students from the New Zealand University that sponsors the dig — at a roadside restaurant. This was a kitchen in another building farther up the road bank, and, for us, a roadside wooden table under a thatched roof where food was cooking on rounded metal domes over iron collars full of red-hot charcoal.
We newbies fell for the invitation to sit at one end of the table by one of these grills, where it became our duty to plaster new strips meat onto the perforated metal cook-dome and drop hands full of cut vegetables into the moat around the bottom of the dome where they boiled in a mixture of water and the fat and meat juices running down from the dome (a chunk of salt pork was perched on the apex of the dome to provide lubrication and flavor).
Water from a kettle on the table was used to keep the moat topped up. Everybody speared cooked meat off the dome and ate it with their rice, and at the end the "desert" would be the soup from the moat. The meat was, I think, mostly pork strips and maybe chicken. An abundance of liver was also provided, but nobody wanted that; it looked a bit too liver-ish, really. Fresh.
More dishes of cut meat and veg were brought down from the little open-faced kitchen shed alongside which an elephant with a red tail light, literally tied to its tail, stood quietly with its rear to us (the elephants we saw were very dark, almost black, so nighttime visibility in traffic would be a serious concern). I assume that its human companion was eating inside the little eating-house itself; possibly the elephant was eating as well. I could only see its brake-light-bedecked back end.
Sitting on a hot evening by a busy roadside over a sizzling furnace by the light of heat-producing lamps (or was it candles? Yellow flame light, anyway) was something of an ordeal. Before long we declared ourselves ready to abandon the sweat-glazed faces of our friends, who kept sitting further and further back from the table with its two hot grills (when one cooled — or so somebody must have thought — our hosts kindly hauled out a whole new, blazing collared bowl of bright red coals to replace the cooled one). Nigel called Mr. Nim on his cell phone and we were driven the mere five minutes back to the hotel, where we watched weird cartoons mixing fairy tales together (Prince charming climbs the beanstalk), to narration, according to the credits, "by Spike Milligan". Right; in Thai.
And then to sleep, in a big bed in a big room with a bare tiled floor and very efficient air conditioning. I had to spread towels on the floor to be able to do some stretching exercises at night, but on the whole accommodation was perfectly comfortable.
| In The Square |
So you totter cautiously down this long black wooden ladder to the floor of the excavation itself. There you find about thirty-odd people at work. The Thai workers, village people who are surviving their 8th year of drought largely on dig income, squat comfortably for hours at a time; the rest of us mostly kneel, on pads or just knees, or rein in our big-bodied sprawl as best we can. A few supervisory figures stand over us, staring down at the shallow trenches in the ground in which lie skeletons, brown frames laid out straight and supine, heads dropped back and jaws gaping.
One of the standing people is Charles Higham, the Prof. whose plum this dig is: stocky, a bit hunched over in the shoulders under his floppy-brimmed cloth hat, hands on hips as he surveys his kingdom. The others are his team, archaeologists and grad students, and something is found for each volunteer or paid worker to do under their supervision. This leaves Charles free to roam about, sharp-eyed to pounce on anything really interesting that turns up.
He's told us at the start, at a pitside lecture on day one, that some volunteers never go down into the square at all, and that's fine — plenty of jobs for them up top. Sure enough, some people take one look at those ladders, those bones, and volunteer for the potsherd-sorting table topside.
In fact, the square is a difficult, even dangerous place to be. It's divided up into smaller 1 m squares by pegged strings on which you either sit just when someone else is using them to record the position of a burial, or you trip over the damned things. Moreover, different parts of the floor are at different levels, just different enough to catch your unwary step and wrench your ankle. Here and there bits of sherd or rim have been left sticking up out of the dirt (to be excavated later — they probably mark the positions of more graves) with long wooden toothpicks stuck into the ground next to them. This is supposed to alert you to their presence just before you lurch in their direction because you've caught your foot on someone else's extended leg. AND there's somebody wandering around with a big drawing board tucked against her stomach, mapping the finds on sectioned graph paper.
It's surprisingly noisy down there, too, in the morning — lots of thoughtful mumbling over this or that tricky bit of work plus people chatting as they dig together, and a great deal of robust joking among the Thai crew, who call holler back and forth to each other or call to others up top, working the transfer of excavated dirt to the sifting and washing-of-finds part of the process.
In addition, there are some special rules which come with being in Thailand. First, you must never sit in such a manner as to present the soles of your feet to another person (it's disrespectful, or worse). Second, *you must not on any account step OVER a person sitting below you* (which means that the people who come around to empty your filled dirt buckets for you have a hell of a time winding their way among the whole crouching, squatting, even lying-down-full-length lot of us without stepping over somebody at some point; we're asked to try to keep a path clear for them to move around and do their job without having to step over anyone).
Third, you must not touch the top of a Thai person's head, which is the seat of some form of spiritual well-being. This would not be a problem except that there are so many people hunkered down right where you're likely to stumble into or onto them, which may be why they all are wearing straw sun-hats even down here in the blessed shade of the big canopy. Oh, and fourth, no woman must ever touch a Buddhist monk; luckily we didn't have any (although there is a small temple in the village, and we often see men draped in saffron robes heading for it of a morning while we’re on our way to the dig).
So, you get pointed to your patch ("Just take that down right there, no more than an inch or so from the wall over to here, and keep your eyes open for pieces of charcoal; we can only use them for radiocarbon dating if you haven't *touched* them, so don't"), and you scrunch yourself into the smallest possible area you can and start scraping away hoping not to inadvertently wreck anything irretrievably.
Somewhere in the first week, though, you realize the meaning of the soft mutterings of "Oops! . . . Oh well," followed by smothered giggles from others nearby.
This is the only reasonable response to the fact that you *do* have to step somewhere, sit or squat somewhere, and make your way around without falling over the damn strings or touching anybody's head. Sooner or later you are going to hear something go *crunch* under you or, if you're up top at the sorting table, you'll hear a sherd drop into the dirt which means it can no longer be used for analysis even if you do retrieve what you think is it because you can't be sure you haven’t snagged another sherd that someone else dropped from the contents of a different bag from a different part of the square; etcetera, etcetera, and so forth.
So you glance around to see whether any of the staff people noticed, mutter, "Oops! Oh well," and get on with it.
You grub around, sifting through dirt with your fingers before it goes into the bucket just in case there's, oh, a bone or a bit of shell in there, which you'd rather have the pleasure of finding than passing that little jolt of excitement along to somebody doing another sifting later on. "Um," you say, rearing back and squinting at something between your fingers. With false casualness you ask the nearest person-in-charge, "Bone, you think?" "No," she says, "just burned pottery." Right; another damn pot sherd.
Things you do find that are of unusual interest may be set aside to be put into plastic bags, labeled in indelible marker to show which part of your sub-square they came from, at which level, on what day of the dig.
How in the Hell did they ever do archaeology at all before plastic?
The sweat starts rolling down your neck and your cheeks, and somebody over there is telling good jokes because there's a lot of laughter (but I'm over here, drat it), and up topside a couple of dogs are fighting loudly and without letup. There are quite a few dogs in the village, all small to medium size and much of a muchness in form, since clearly nobody bothers neutering them around here for selective breeding or any other purpose. Roosters, also strutting at liberty, crow constantly all day long. Thankfully, there are no radios although now and then a little truck rolls through the village blasting Thai ads for whatever's being sold by the driver-peddler, or political adverts re the next election, from a loudspeaker cranked up to earsplitting volume to make sure nobody misses it.
A bell rings at about 10 a.m., tea time. Under the verandah of a village house that's been rented for the project's use (several have) we find two long wooden tables and lots of bright plastic chairs, into which we collapse with our mugs of tea. The tea is stewed, been there a while next to the foil-covered pans of what will later turn out to be hot (or anyway warm) lunch. You pour some tea into the mug you're supposed to have marked your name on (or any mug nobody else has marked, if you can't find your own) and then add a dilution of hot water from a kettle nearby.
On the tables are a couple of bowls of fruit — rose apples, which look like weird, long apples made of wax and taste like slightly sour cucumbers — sometimes bananas or oranges. People browse at the little snack stands that the villagers have set up next to the dig.
For a nickel or less you can buy biscuits (mostly rice crackers, but some wheaten things too) or peanuts in the shell, or tamarinds, which are like lumpy brown pea pods but contain shiny black seeds embedded in a stringy, fruity paste that has a sweet, tangy taste. A little goes a long way (if your local Indian restaurant serves a tamarind chutney you'll get the idea, minus the sticky, dark meat itself). These are passed around the table the buyer sits at for all to share.
Bell rings, down you go, and it gets quieter; you fall into the trance of close, repetitive work, and the time is suddenly gone. The bell rings for lunch, and you line up at the food table under the verandah roof. Mr. Nim hands you a plate and spoon and you dip up some rice and whichever of the two gravy-loaded stewed dishes has the fewest bright red chili peppers in it, and maybe some hard-baked bits of spare rib or tepid pieces of fried chicken. All this was prepared in the hotel kitchen (which has no side walls so you can look into in the mornings as you head out for the drive to the site). It's mostly delicious: not too spicy, but filling and reviving. There was one delectable green squash curry — or was it eggplant? Mouthwatering.
There's some chat, more quiet. It's getting hot. Charles lounges loosely in a chair and talks quietly to his staff people, who cluster around him to eat; or he eats with the volunteers and tells stories of previous digs.
People who forgot to wash up before go rinse their hands at the barrels of water beside a cinderblock outhouse right behind the snack stands. Mr. Nim is there, lying in a hammock under someone else's verandah and playing a game on a hand-held computer, off-duty again.
The dogs appear, still growling and yelping at each other. A villager runs up and kicks at them, trying to break it up (they just move it elsewhere). A particularly scraggly looking chicken comes pecking around our feet for scraps. Pat, who does wild animal shelter and rescue work at home in Australia, coos to it and throws it food; David, a retired finance officer of a big investment outfit, remarks on its boldness and energy and names it "Henrietta". Everybody else says "Ew," and moves their feet away.
I mean, this is a Night-of-the-Living-Dead type chicken, with bare patches on its neck and elsewhere. David says, "Don't look under her wings, it's really gross there — sort of moldy looking." One shudders to think how he knows.
Then down the ladders again (there's the bell), and now you've got this jumble of pot-bits and the odd bone neatly picked out at last. You sit back on your heels, glowing with satisfaction, and along comes one of the staff and says, "Mmm, that's nice; now just clean it up a bit, and we'll draw it and then take a picture."
Clean it up a bit? That's what you just did! No, they want all crumbles of dirt removed, to leave clear planes and edges for the camera; but don't brush too much because that can smear things instead of making them look crisp. Of course that hard bit of dirt that you've been leaning your elbow on needs a quick scrape across the top to give it brightness or texture for the camera to catch, but then the dust and crumbs from the scraping get down into the hollows of the little clutch of stuff to be photographed, so you have to clean it up again.
Bell for afternoon tea, which people tend to ignore — you do become absorbed in the work and reluctant to interrupt its dreamlike momentum — but the staff are insistent: hydration, when you're sweating so hard, is important.
After tea, down the ladders again for the last leg, which tends to be even quieter. People are tired, or concentrating hard, mostly both. Then it's time to quit: last bell. There's some slow-motion bustling around, the cautious ascent of the ladders by us newbies while a few hang back to take some pictures of the day’s work (more skeletons revealed). We mill around a bit, pick up the pouches and backpacks we dropped off on a pitside table in the morning (our supplies of tissues, water bottles, cameras, and so on). We've already sorted ourselves into the rowdy bunch who crowd into Mr. Nim's truck bed for the homeward trip, and the more sedate lot who ride in an air-conditioned van. That's it for the day.
You've never been so dirty in your life: dirt in every crease of your wrists and fingers, sifted into your shoes (old running shoes, though many wear sandals or go barefoot in the square) and down your collar, and in your hair and ears. Feels good, though; honestly earned and worn with satisfaction, at least until you can stagger into the shower and wash it all off.
| Pots and Puzzles |
Once it became obvious that I must stay out of the Square because of The Cough, other work was found; Charles let no one’s time go to waste. I spent a day up above in the shade of another canopy, sifting through bags of potsherds for shell, bone, metal, and "special bits", meaning anything of extraordinary interest — like some shiny pieces of modern blue and white ware that had somehow got mixed up with the old stuff, or the three sharp little teeth in a scrap of jawbone that Charles identified for me as the teeth of a baby muntjack (a small deer native to the area).
Unfortunately, the way you start sorting potsherds is that someone lugs over a big plastic sack full of bits which the Thai sorters have winnowed out of the excavated dirt and washed — only the thoroughness of the washing varies quite a bit, so as the sherds are shaken out of the bag along the table for the volunteers to work with, often great puffs of dust billow up. Worse, the potsherd table is the site of lively conversation and the telling of jokes, and here's me trying not to talk or laugh for fear of setting off The Cough; not an ideal situation, much as I enjoyed it.
Trina, in charge of the potsherd sorting that day, is a solid young woman with a fuzzy scalp, having relieved her head of a weight of long hair in anticipation of lots and sweat and dust here at Ban Non Wat. Barefoot, she walks with me to the "small finds" house (each sherd-sorter gets to visit and see what's been found so far), and casually reveals that she's gotten permission from the monks at the local temple to be a nun there for a few months after the end of the dig season.
I was surprised to find that several of the women from Otago U. are family people with small kids at home (like the one who showed up later to deal specifically with shell ornaments, and she was quite unhappy and homesick, apparently finding the dig very different from whatever she had expected). They are very adventurous, these women; I guess that if you live tucked down toward the bottom of the world like the Ozzies and the Kiwis, you become more than ready to travel far to get anywhere that’s "else". Geographically, Asia is their obvious destination of choice, and many of the team have traveled extensively in this region.
Trina leaves me to poke around in shadowy little dirt-floored room that houses the small finds cache. She says, "Two rules: put everything you look at back in the same box you took it from, and don't slip anything into your pockets." I pull up a plastic crate and sit down in front of shelving loaded with boxes labeled "Teeth", "bone", "slag" (from iron smelting), "beads", "bangles", etc.
This dig is so rich in goodies that everybody's fully occupied in the Square or sorting things up topside, so the careful labeling lettered onto each individual find that I saw at South Shields, say, is left for later. The digging season is limited by rain in the Fall and blazing heat in the later spring, so the crew is committed to digging down as fast as they can and still keep everything straight. Nancy, the skeleton specialist, has to leave early this year, but will come back after the dig is closed again to work with the bones. She will probably spend the rest of her career working on the processing, analysis, and study of these bones. Charles says she wanted 500 skeletons to study, and they're up to 400 + already and going strong, always under the gun of the sometimes quixotic rule of licensing from the Thai government.
Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of bones, from which an expert like Nancy can tell (roughly) the age, sex, and health of each individual, sometimes cause of death, and — from traces left in the bones by dietary changes — some idea of whether they were natives of the area or incomers from elsewhere.
By the second week I am permanently topside, assigned now to the pottery table (not the same as the sherds table) in the shade of a tin verandah roof. Here teams sit across from each other, poring over trays that hold pieces of entire pots that have been lifted out of the ground all at once in relatively large pieces and kept together in individual plastic bags. The job here is to try to piece them together.
These are mostly the sizable red pots found laid out along the skeletons, from breastbone to feet, and they’ve all been broken either as part of the funeral rites or by the pressure of earth lying meters deep over the graves for 2000 years.
In order to glue edges of matching pieces together along a break, you must first brush both edges with a dry toothbrush to get all possible dust off so that the glue will bind the pottery. Quiet conversation goes on here: "This goes here, don't you think?" "I'm not sure — look, the curve it makes doesn't look right." “Oh, I’m sure I saw a piece that would fit here — what did I do with it?”
"Tape, please." This last a reference to the fact that it's really a two person job: you squeeze out a white worm of glue onto each of the matching edges, let it dry 'til it's just tacky so that it will grip, and then press the two sherds together to close the seam as tightly as you can while a co-worker wipes off the extruded excess with a fingertip and then puts strips of masking tape across the mend to help hold the pieces together while the glue dries. Lastly, small, plastic-tipped clothes pins are set right on the edges of the taped break, and the reassembled bit of pot is put down carefully in a cardboard box to dry overnight.
A great deal of patience is required, since each gluing takes this overnight delay before the next bit can be similarly attached (assuming you've found the next bit). For some reason that I can't explain, I — normally a horribly impatient person — find this deliberate pace extremely pleasant. It's amazing how long you can sit bent over a tray of fragments, picking them up and turning them this way and that and trying every possible combination, in a sort of trance of calm concentration.
When suddenly two pieces you've been fiddling with for half an hour come together clean and neat and obvious as all get out — now that you see it — the feeling of satisfaction is ridiculously huge and validates the entire morning. Your fingertips get roughened from handling the dry fragments, you're stiff and a bit achy when you stand up for a stretch, but the slow work of assemblage seems to release endorphins of a special potency.
"Oh, oh, this isn't right; we'll have to break it down again," says Bev, a teacher from a suburb of Melbourne who travels with her colleague Avril (their husbands stay at home). "You have to do the smaller pieces first, or else when you come to fit them in, they won't go, the gap's always just a hair wrong." She's talented at this, absorbed in the task at hand and confidently giving instruction to newcomers like me in how best to do it.
As we are preparing to leave at the end of our second week, an American woman arrives who's been coming for years just to piece pots together — an amateur, like all of us but the staff and grad students — and I can well understand why. The satisfaction is powerful, and the task itself is an addictive puzzle.
Today during the afternoon tea break the ice-cream man arrives: yep, an ice-cream truck that visits the village most afternoons and is mobbed by local kids, adults, and all of us. The ice cream is cheap, delicious, and the occasion for much gestural joking (I buy two cones, one for me and one for Steve, and mime gobbling up both of them before he spots me and comes to get his, which gets a great laugh).
Then Mr. Nim takes some volunteers on a little local sightseeing tour in his truck, and I ride in it for the first time, jammed in on one of the side benches in the back and clinging to the metal rails that make up the side-walls and hold up the tin roof. We bounce wildly along, raising dust and flashing past the long-eared white cattle that are herded up this road every afternoon. We visit several neat little mini-museums built next to pits from earlier digs which have been left open with a few skeletons and artifacts down there so visitors can see how they looked in situ. Explanations are in Thai and, sometimes, English, and there's a little shop next to each site where you can buy souvenirs and crafts — sun hats, lengths of patterned cloth, carvings and amulets, all of this right in the midst of one or another of the local villages.
On the way home we make a stop at the small water-park around an enormous banyan tree, which is really a cluster of main trunks and an extended, dense canopy supported by other trunks, some of which turn out to be artfully formed and colored concrete pillars. The banyan itself is bedecked with colored ribbons, garlands, and small votive images in ceramic, metal, or painted wood, to honor the indwelling spirits of the grove. In fact, everywhere we go we see shrines and also the "spirit houses" (carved or cast and painted models of spiky traditional houses perched on pillars) for the spirit of a regular house or special place to live in.
Another afternoon’s jaunt with Mr. Nim takes us to the “historical park” in the center of Phimai, which contains a large Khmer complex — five tall, dark-stained sandstone prangs in the (very phallic) form of lotus blossoms, linked by long corridors lined with niches occupied by the remains of vandalized statues. These ruins, with the roofs mostly open and the floors worn into treacherous ripples and hollows, are surrounded by grassy lawns pulsing with squads of school kids in colorful uniforms. There’s a tiny museum and a small admission price, and everywhere you go you stumble into people backing up to take pictures.
I managed to lose my footing on the steep, narrow steps up to a small temple chamber with a seated Buddha figure in it which had not had its head chopped off by looters; banged myself up a bit, but survived all right.
The younger volunteers take pride in riding rough with Mr. Nim regularly, to and from the dig site. Kate, an Englishwoman who lives in Canada and travels all over with a backpack sleeping in hostels (although she's got to be a good bit older than I am), says she loves riding in the truck because you're closer to everything than in the closed, air-conditioned van. What I get closer to is, of course, the dust that feeds The Cough, so — no more long trips in the open sided truck for me.
Kate, small and frail-looking with wispy white hair, is what you'd call an "old hippie", veteran of concerts and communes and general bumming around — anywhere you mention, she's been there — seeing the world. Now she travels on her half of the proceeds of the farm that she and her husband sold when they split up. To me, she's of the line of Mary Kingsley, Edith Durham, and other doughty British women of the 19th and early 20th C who persisted in exploring across Africa, Asia, and everywhere else on their own, just to see what there was to see.
Back at the hotel for the night, it’s shower and change and downstairs for dinner on the verandah. After dinner at a long table on the verandah, we repair to the interior room of the restaurant (which on weekend nights serves as a karaoke bar) and sit on rows of folding chairs to watch a movie, the first of several.
This one is a taped show made for the Discovery Channel, about Angkor Wat. While other Earthwatch digs that Steve and I have been on have featured academic lectures in the evenings about various aspects of local archaeology, here we most often get the Charles Higham Show. As archaeological boss of this particular patch of the ancient world, he is often called upon by TV people to participate in documentary films about the Southeast Asian past: our boss is an effective TV presenter.
We do also get a lecture from Nancy about bones; one from Nigel (Charles' First Mate in charge of logistics) about the jewelry found in the burials and what it tells him about trade routes at the time; and one from our metallurgy specialist on smelting methods used in this area to get iron out of the laterite soils.
But mostly it's Charles showing the camera around his previous dig of Bronze Age burials nearby, or discussing the layout of Angkor, and, most effectively, serving as guide in a film about temples near Angkor that have just now been made accessible as the land mines which various armies have seeded around them during recent wars are cleared — but this cleanup also makes these unexplored sites accessible to looters, who are already making off with the best of the sculpture which is hacked from the walls before the archaeologists ever see it.
The films also make clear the point of the excavations: to present evidence that the local prehistoric people were not a bunch of happy primitives with a fairly peaceful, egalitarian society, who were simply rolled over and assimilated by the complex civilization of India. The differences here among wealth of grave goods and treatment of bodies at the Bronze Age level are proof, Charles says, that the local society had already begun to evolve class differentiations and metallurgy of their own. This argues for a more sophisticated culture that was already on an energetic developmental course so that it could take what its members wanted from the cultural elements that came in on the trade with India and who were in fact eager to adopt and adapt the ways of the invaders.
As so often with archaeology, it’s largely about the self-esteem of the home team; and it doesn’t hurt a bit that when Charles submits an application for an extension of his digging permit (this is his fifth year on this site), it’s clear that he’s digging for — and finding — evidence of the vigor, creativity and wealth of the pre-Angkor population (as in, "No, we didn’t need the Indians to civilize us; we were already civilizing ourselves, thank you very much").
After the evening's educational entertainment some volunteers linger at the open air bar next to the hotel’s vast blue swimming pool, drinking beer and gossiping. The staff and graduate students are usually to be found out in the lobby, in an area set aside for internet connections, chatting about the day's progress and plans for tomorrow. Steve and I, weary and avoiding mosquitoes, wander upstairs (there’s no elevator, and we’re on the third floor) to watch TV in our room.
This is a lot more interesting than it sounds. We can have German news, or French movies (in French, with French subtitles — don't ask) about pretty people swept away by unaccountable passions for unsuitable mates, which passion then goes inexplicably wrong and dumps them high and dry in the land of Tristesse. We can have Muay Thai, the kickboxing sport of the nation, or "King TV" — a channel that appears to be devoted entirely to news clips of His Majesty the King of Thailand and his Queen going about their royal duties at demonstration farms, technical colleges, grade schools, and temples, always with a calm, male, Thai voice-over. The voice of the King himself is never heard; a young tour guide later in Ayuttuya told us, "To Thai people, he is a God," and I guess gods don't chat or even orate, not on the public media at any rate.
Best of all is the Australian channel, which offers soccer and sometimes even rugby (now, *that's* football!), and, joy of joys, the news. Not our news; their news. What matters here is what goes on around the Pacific Rim; Europe and America are peripheral venues from which faint cries and whispers are occasionally heard. The real news is bird flu, ructions in the primarily Muslim south of Thailand, and a reshuffle in the Australian cabinet.
The Ozzie guy in charge has a press conference at which he talks, succinctly, off the cuff (no teleprompters, no written speech), and with easy humor about what's happening and answers questions like an adult. We are impressed and envious. When the announcer comments that although Mr. X and Mrs. Y have been assigned posts in the remade cabinet, "party hopefuls Mr. Abbot and Mr. Costello are not being moved up", we collapse into giggles: the Australians know better than to give serious responsibilities to Abbot and Costello, which is more than can be said, lately, of the U.S. ( “Heck of a job, Brownie!”).
Too bad that our current American leadership is roughly equivalent to the cast of villains in a super hero comic book. At least in Thailand we don't have to look at their smug, dumb faces or listen to their pompous voices, because here in Thailand, they — good God, can it be? Yes! — just don’t seem to matter very much.
In this blessed absence of Imperialist wind, fog, smoke and mirrors, we find a perfect end to more than one fine day, that I can look back on from half a year later with fervent appreciation for the good fortune that has permitted me to participate. Not enough of us get to engage in unusual activities that are part of the advancement of knowledge in our own time. It’s just what the doctor ordered, to offset some of the frantic, obsessive concentration on self and one’s own immediate concerns that makes us, as a species, such lousy stewards of our home planet.
And, for a little unexpected bonus, this month’s Archaeology Magazine (July/August 2006, pp.44+) features a story on Prof. Charles Higham and his decades worth of excavations in the area of exploration he leaped into forty years ago and made his own: Southeast Asian prehistory.
Hey, I know that guy — I’ve worked for that guy! And those bones in the trench in the picture, of the guy with the huge shell ornaments on his forearms — I know them too!
If it wasn’t for The Cough — which turns out to be in part an allergic reaction to two forms of mold I encountered on the dig — and the endless flight to get there, I’d go again in a New York minute, and so would Steve; in fact some of the Earthwatch volunteers we met there were on their second tour with Charles Higham. Wish we could do that too, but it looks as if I’ll have to choose my archaeological sites in drier, cooler places from now on — thanks to The Cough.
But I got in one round, by gum, on one of the richest prehistoric digs in the world, and it was wonderful.
--SMC
June, 2006
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