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Digging turns up clues
early Southeast Asia man
to
WASHINGTON Archeologists
know that when they reach what
they think is the bottom of a site
they are excavating, it is a good
idea to dig just to see what turns
up.
Douglas D. Anderson, chairman
of the anthropology department at
Brown University, did that in a
cave in southwestern Thailand
where he was working last sum
mer, and what turned up was a
major suprise: a layer of dirt
containing evidence that man had
been present in the cave some
27,000 years ago.
That date, far older than any
other layer indicating human
presence in the cave, was provided
by the radiocarbon dating process.
It is one of the oldest confirmed
radiocarbon dates for cultural
artifacts ever found on the
southeast Asian mainland, and
may be the oldest.
Tools, Bones, and
Charcoal
The artifacts discovered at the
27,000-year-old level include flakes
from stone tools, the remains of
animals, and charcoal. The date
has significance because experts
in southeast Asian prehistory have
called this time period, the
beginning of the Upper
Pleistocene, “very much a blank.”
Anderson was not even looking
for evidence of early man when he
began digging in Tham Lang
Rongrien (School Rock Shelter)
last summer. He had found the
cave, one of many in a series of
limestone cliffs in Thailand's
Krabi Province, during
preliminary trips looking for sites
where he could study the early
development of cities and Asian
trade routes about 2,500 years ago.
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Arriving in Thailand last August
with financial support from the
National Geographic Society,
Anderson and his co-workers,
including Pomchai Suchatta, a
lecturere in anthropology at
Thailand’s Silpakorn University,
began to dig, hoping to find pot
tery, burial sites, and anything
else that would shed light on those
questions. They did.
“We could see that sometime in
the remote past this whole area
had been dug up before, and there
had been burials,” Anderson
remembers. “We found four
burials altogether; two were in
tact, and two just had traces of
scattered bones.”
Buried with Possessions
Burials are important, Anderson
says, because in early southeast
Asian societies, people often were
buried with some of their
possessions. Therefore, ar
cheologists have a chance to find
objects that were culturally
significant.
“We found a fair number of pots,
in a style that was very widespread
in the Far East from around 4,000
years ago,” he says. “These were
complete clay pots, about 8 to 10
inches in diameter, with round
bottoms and about 5 to 6 inches
high. Some had been decorated by
impressing a twisted corn into the
wet clay to make a design.”
Eventually, the excavation team
hit a layer of limestone rock that
seemed to be the bottom of the site.
They kept digging a little more.
Because the rock was “rotten,”
they could use their picks without
much trouble.
“To our surprise, when we got
down about 3 feet, we started
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