Fiorella Rispoli

The emergence of iron metallurgy in Mainland Southeast Asia (~fifth century BC) marks a major breakthrough rather cohesive, although strongly regionalized cultural traditions rooted in the southward, long- haul agricultural dispersal originating from south-central China. With the establishment of the centralized states of the Qin (221–206 BC) and Western Han (206 BC–AD 23) dynasties, the northern belt of Mainland Southeast Asia (Lingnan region, Yunnan lacustrine plains, and Song Hong River valley) attracted the expansionist policies of the Chinese empire. The southern regions of Southeast Asia, including central Thailand, followed a different path leading to interactive contacts with the Indian subcontinent and to increased regional trade networks. Iron tools, surplus management, population expansion, and a progressive localization of exotics cultural traits drove the elites of central Thailand toward a step-by-step growth in cultural complexity with the emergence of medium-complex social systems/chiefdom analogues.

In East Asia similar late-Pleistocenic adaptive processes prompted groups of hunter-gathers to make baked clay containers to process certain dietary components, including nutritious wild cereals (e.g., rice and millet). In the long run (~8000–4000 BC) human manipulation changed the natural morphology and characters of these cereals (domestication). The southward dispersal of rice out of its mid-low Yangtze domestication center (~5000–4500 BC) was associated with ceramic vessels decorated with a characteristic “incising and impressing” technique. The finding of actual rice grains and of this “I&I” technique archaeologically marks the dispersal of rice-growers and highlights the interactive processes between the incomers and the hunter-gatherers of subtropical modern South China adapted to its diverse ecosystems. From southern China (~2200–2000 BC) locally interbred agriculturists dispersed toward the plains of Mainland Southeast Asia facing local Early Neolithic nonagriculturists, new landscapes, and environments. As for millet in Neolithic Southeast Asia, some assumption has been proposed, but the data are too sparse and more research is required, with a degree of flexibility in considering whether a homogeneous, worldwide, all-inclusive “Neolithic package,” comprehensively consisting of fixed technological and ideological innovations, ever existed.

A bout ten years ago a collector of ancient Indonesian art contacted my husband and me to ask our opinion on a group of masks cast in an odd green metal in his possession. Some of these masks, he said, had been recovered from an underground temple in a remote site called Gua Made, north of the Brantas River in East Java. I was immediately sceptical, and became steadily more so when the collector announced that 'the masks are more than 3,000 years UNMASKING A MYSTERY UNMASKING A MYSTERY The curious case of the Gua Made green masks Sensational discoveries of metal masks in a subterranean temple have led to calls for Javanese history to be rewritten. Fiorella Rispoli investigates. ABOVE LEFT Moment of discovery. One of the masks emerges from the earth in the subterranean complex. JAVA old'. This date was based on thermolumines-cence analysis of a terracotta brick from the 'underground temple'. Assuming a temporal association between the masks and temple, the collector w...

In East Asia similar late-Pleistocenic adaptive processes prompted groups of hunter-gathers to make baked clay containers to process certain dietary components, including nutritious wild cereals (e.g., rice and millet). In the long run (~8000–4000 BC) human manipulation changed the natural morphology and characters of these cereals (domestication). The southward dispersal of rice out of its mid-low Yangtze domestication center (~5000–4500 BC) was associated with ceramic vessels decorated with a characteristic “incising and impressing” technique. The finding of actual rice grains and of this “I&I” technique archaeologically marks the dispersal of rice-growers and highlights the interactive processes between the incomers and the hunter-gatherers of subtropical modern South China adapted to its diverse ecosystems. From southern China (~2200–2000 BC) locally interbred agriculturists dispersed toward the plains of Mainland Southeast Asia facing local Early Neolithic nonagriculturists, ne...

The emergence of iron metallurgy in Mainland Southeast Asia (~fifth century BC) marks a major breakthrough rather cohesive, although strongly regionalized cultural traditions rooted in the southward, long- haul agricultural dispersal originating from south-central China. With the establishment of the centralized states of the Qin (221–206 BC) and Western Han (206 BC–AD 23) dynasties, the northern belt of Mainland Southeast Asia (Lingnan region, Yunnan lacustrine plains, and Song Hong River valley) attracted the expansionist policies of the Chinese empire. The southern regions of Southeast Asia, including central Thailand, followed a different path leading to interactive contacts with the Indian subcontinent and to increased regional trade networks. Iron tools, surplus management, population expansion, and a progressive localization of exotics cultural traits drove the elites of central Thailand toward a step-by-step growth in cultural complexity with the emergence of medium-complex ...

Abstract Ceramic samples representative of >500 kgs of diagnostic sherds and mortuary vessels which the Thai-American ‘Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project’ excavated in 1986 in the Khao Wong Prachan Valley at the pre and protohistoric site of Non Pa Wai (Lopburi Province, Central Thailand) are the subject of this study. Samples were submitted to petrographic, chemical and granulometric analyses for a preliminary investigation of their production technology and raw materials provenance. The statistical analysis of the data highlighted three different sherd-groups each corresponding to a distinct chronological period. Both sherds' chemical composition and petrography evidenced the use of local clays, tempered with sand from different deposits. The data analysed also suggest the possible use of crushed animal bones or bone ash as a fluxing agent in copper smelting processes during the local Iron Age/Protohistoric period.

This paper reports on the cooperative work of the Department of Radiology of the Catholic University, Rome, and of the Italian Institute for Middle and Far East. The study was aimed at using xeroradiography and digital luminescence radiography for the archeometric evaluation of ancient ceramics and at assessing the imaging potentials of the two techniques. Some manufacturing techniques are reported which were used in the ancient world and societies for pottery making--i.e., coil building (the superimposition of clay rings), paddle and anvil beating and throwing of the wheel. Such techniques leave, on the vessel's wall, clear traces which can be detected by X-ray imaging. After discussing the main semiologic features, we present 4 case studies from the project archive. Each vase underwent xeroradiography and digital luminescence radiography. The former technique was useful in detailing minor phase transitions--e.g., pores and inclusions--while the latter, thanks to both its wide ...

This paper compares the later prehistory in two regions of Thailand. The Mun Valley lies on the eastern side of the Phetchabun Range, the Lopburi Region (LR) to the west. They are linked by a major pass. While the Lopburi area is rich in copper ore, the Mun Valley has none. Quality salt is abundantly available in the Mun Valley but less so in the LR. This study explores the inter-relationships between the areas over a period of 2300 years which sharpens our understanding of both, and presents explanations and possibilities in the context of cultural transmission theories. Neolithic farmers with ultimate origins in China, arrived in the first half of the second millennium BC. Widespread exchange in prestige goods was a factor in the adoption of copper-base metallurgy in the late 11th century BC, when the LR became a producer, the Mun Valley an importer. With the Iron Age, (from about 500 BC), sites grew in size. During the course of this period, gold, silver, agate, carnelian and gla...

Investigates the forming techniques of some protohistoric ceramics by means of different radiographic techniques. The ceramics come from recent excavations in central Thailand and previous Italian excavations in eastern Iran. These two assemblages were selected as together they represent a wide range of manufacturing techniques, from coil-building to molding and various forms of wheelthrowing. The authors discuss the use of xeroradiography and digital radiography with photostimulable phosphor receptors, as well as some implications of these techniques for the archaeological reconstruction of ancient ceramic technologies.

Abstract The Khao Wong Prachan Valley of central Thailand is one of four known prehistoric loci of copper mining, smelting and casting in Southeast Asia. Many radiocarbon determinations from bronze-consumption sites in north-east Thailand date the earliest copper-base metallurgy there in the late second millennium BC. By applying kernel density estimation analysis to approximately 100 new AMS radiocarbon dates, the authors conclude that the valley's first Neolithic millet farmers had settled there by c. 2000 BC, and initial copper mining and rudimentary smelting began in the late second millennium BC. This overlaps with the established dates for Southeast Asian metal-consumption sites, and provides an important new insight into the development of metallurgy in central Thailand and beyond.

This study comprises the first archaeologically-defined chronological and cultural sequence for central Thailand. Based on collaborative research between the Thai–Italian Lopburi Regional Archaeological Project and the Thai–American Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project, the results of excavations at seven pre- and protohistoric sites that witnessed three millennia of local cultural development, from the early second millennium BC onward, are synthesized herein. This study fills a significant gap in Thailand’s prehistory, also identifying important cultural interactions ranging into southern China and Vietnam that led to the formation during the second millennium BC of a ‘Southeast Asian Interaction Sphere’. This interaction sphere, at the close of the second millennium BC, facilitated the transmission of the knowledge of copper-base metallurgy from southern China into Thailand, where it reached the communities of the Lopburi Region who took advantage of their ore-rich environment. At the end of the first millennium BC, strong South Asian contacts emerge in Southeast Asia. Among this study’s salient contributions is the characterization of these critical prehistoric antecedents, which culminated in a process of localization of exogenous elements, usually termed ‘Indianization’. The impact of this dynamic process was initially felt in central Thailand in the late first millennium BC, leading over time to the rise there, by the mid first millennium AD, of one of Southeast Asia’s first ‘state-like’ entities.