Jewellery
Some find it difficult to believe that prehistoric people cared just as much about their looks as people as people do nowadays. They also collected as many types of body ornament as people do today.
Both men and women wore earrings, neck rings, and small bangles and “sleeve” bracelets that came up to their elbows, and some had small bronze bells attached all around creating tinkly sounds. There were also leg sleeves made from good quality bronze, delicately worked to extreme thinness and beautifully patterned.
Early bracelets at Ban Chiang look like those found in contemporary Vietnam and Cambodia, that is, all were inspired by the stone and shell bracelets of an earlier age. Some bracelets were ivory, while others were made from seashells like the giant clam shell, which indicates contact and trading with coastal communities located several hundred kilometres away.
Later period bracelets were amazingly more complex, partly because bronzesmiths had developed a copper-tin-lead ratio whose quality was more suitable for making jewellery.
Some animal bones with pleasing shapes would be made into pendants, like the tiger fang that seemed also to have protective charm powers.
Beads were made from variously coloured and sized glass, oval-shapes terracotta, and valuable stone like carnelian, which was obtained from elsewhere, perhaps from the Chao Praya River basin in the central region, or from China or India.
It is often asked whether Ban Chiang people actually used such jewellery in their daily life or only for burials. Achaeologists give two reasons as evidence of regular wearing of such jewellery. The first makes use of photographs of some tribes in Laos who still foraged and hunted for subsistence until the last century. Every kind of jewellery that those Kamu wore every day was like that Ban Chiang. The second is that aside from being discovered in graves, achaeologists found well-made and beautiful jewellery in the regular earth strata for living, including in the garbage pits.