The Ban Chiang Project began in the late 1960s when Dr. Froelich Rainey was Director of The University Museum, and without his interest and support, particularly in the early days, the Museum would not have been involved in this important excavation, Since I had been in and out of Thailand tong before the Museum entered the scene, Dr. Rainey asked me to write a brief explanation of the situation prior to our participation.
I had gone to Thailand in 1955 as a Fine Arts Consultant for two years under the Department of State Specialist Program, and I returned several times after that for various periods of time. Sometime in 1960, I vaguely remember being shown a handful of sherds that were unlike any Thai pottery known at that time. They came from an obscure village in the Northeast, that we now realize was Ban Chiang, but they were too small to show the distinctive designs, and we all considered them unimportant.
Probably that ignorance was fortunate because, at the time, the Thais had little interest in the prehistoric, or pre-Buddhist period, and had no experience with the special demands of a prehistoric excavation. That came in the next couple of years with the Thai/Danish expedition at Ban Kao and other sites in Kanchanaburi be yond the River Kwai, and with the arrival of Bill Solheim and his two students from the University of Hawaii, the first Americans to specialize in Southeast Asian archaeology. Thus, in 1966 when Steve Young, then a sociology student, brought to Bangkok the fragments of the now famous Ban Chiang painted pottery we were ready to pay attention, and when a three-week excavation of the Fine Arts Department discovered that the Ban Chiang site contained also stone tools and bronze, we realized it was most probably important.
In early 1967, a number of small finds—seals, figurines, ornaments—that seemed to be related to early Funan material of the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. turned up at Chansen, about seventy miles northwest of Bangkok. Bill Kohler, Philadelphia lawyer, superb photographer and friend of the Museum, was visiting Bangkok at that time and he offered to take a report on Chansen along with some Ban Chiang sherds back to Philadelphia. Here, Fro enters the story.
Fro: For some time, I had realized that there would be increasing problems in working in the Near East and that we should investigate the possibilities in either South America or Asia. When Bill Kohler returned from a visit to Bangkok in 1967 and reported on the friendly atmosphere in Thailand and said that Lisa would probably be able to help in any negotiations, I cabled George Dales to stop in Bangkok on his way back from Afghanistan and look at the scene. He reported favorably on the Chansen site and the attitude of the Thai officials and we worked out a project for two seasons’ excavations, 1968 and 1969. George Dales and Bennet Bronson directed this excavation and were even able to take some of our graduate students with them, thanks to the Ford Foundation Training Grant.