Lisa: The above is not really a digression from the subject of Ban Chiang. Chansen is going to turn out to be very important in our future negotiations with the Thais.
During Bill Kohler’s visit in Bangkok, the Thai Fine Arts Department had done a small excavation at Ban Chiang under the direction of Vidya Intakosai. Bill took three sherds from there back to MASCA for TL testing. said to be from the bottom layers. We knew there was a large quantity of metal at the site, but I found the few reports we could get very vague on the precise distribution of bronze and iron. Still, at the time I was writing the annual report on Archaeology for the Encyclopedia Britannica and had been following the work of Solheim and others in Thailand. I knew there were indications of early metal at Non Nok Tha and probable very early plant domestication at Spirit Cave. Also, I remembered that a few years ago Carl Sauer (1952) had argued that Southeast Asia was the source of some of the most ancient domesticated plants and animals—rice, pigs, chickens, etc. All this added up to the possibility that the region might be an area of innovation in very ancient times. We reported the dates to the Fine Arts Department in Bangkok, and asked for more information on stratigraphy.