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I had heard of Earthwatch expeditions for many years, but not until 1997 did I sign up for one - Thailand in the New England winter. A dig! A stop-off in Japan on the return trip. An experienced Principal Investigator, which was reassuring. And a comfortable Inn providing food and lodging. Very much a "soft" adventure!
The Earthwatchers' rendezvous was at the airport at Nakon Ratchisima (Khorat). From there we went to Phi Mai, in the Issan region of Thailand, north of Cambodia. There were ten people from Earthwatch on the dig. We were matched by an equal number of grad students from New Zealand and at least that many Thai workers who would help us at the dig, many of whom were far more skilled than we, or the grad students, were, at digging efficiently and carefully.
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The Earthwatchers were mostly Americans on this team, the third of four in this season, but a varied lot we were. There was Herm, who was in his eighth season of this particular Expedition, and Allen, in his third; Bob, who'd been on several Expeditions elsewhere, and others for whom this was their first Expedition. There were a young woman and a man from Japan; a woman from Australia. Interestingly, there were no couples or friends traveling together. Our ages ranged from early twenties to late seventies; Charles Higham was to make sure that we were all assigned tasks appropriate to our interests and abilities.
We had our first dinner at the dining pavilion at the Phi Mai Inn, by a peaceful, shimmering swimming pool. Air-conditioned rooms were assigned and we were greeted by Charles Higham, who told us to be ready to leave for the dig by 7:30 the next morning. Our accommodations were far more luxurious than we'd expected. I learned terms of cookery from the kitchen workers at the Inn, who quickly understood that I enjoyed spicy food. They would challenge me to share their own fare and then laugh as I almost choked on the hot morsels.
But we were there to work, and work we did. We did, that is, after a long, bumpy, and ultimately dusty ride of 45 minutes in an open bus to the excavation site at Noen u Loke. The bus could go just so far; then we had to trek over dry rice fields (the harvest ended as we arrived) to a couple of tents that announced the site of this year's excavation.
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When we arrived the "dig" looked just as it had in the briefing book (though what we had seen in the book was a different site altogether). We looked down into pits about twelve feet deep, to a burial ground with several skeletons exposed, and funeral pots all around. The burials exposed during that first week of my group's tenure were numbers 42 to 50, so obviously Higham had hit a good spot to dig. As we awkwardly scraped away at the soil, Thai workers hauled the dirt we excavated up to the surface and screened it for potsherds and so on.
One of the Earthwatchers exclaimed, "I told my friends I was going to go play at being an archaeologist. But look, I found a body yesterday, and today a bronze bangle and I'm actually WORKING at being an archaeologist, not just PLAYING!"
As burials were fully uncovered, they were sketched and cleaned and photographed, then carefully removed from the resting place where they'd been for more than 2000 years.
Charles patiently showed us the tiger-tooth bangles on the bronze necklace around one skeleton's neck; Kaek showed us the fish bones she'd recovered from the pots. Nancy Tayles, a medical anthropologist, taught her grad students to brush the teeth in the unearthed skulls and observed the good shape they were in - diets of fish and rice were healthy!
The Principal Investigators, Charles Higham and Rachanie Thosarat, ("Kaek") and the Earthwatchers and grad students under their tutelage, brushed away the last of the ancient dirt clinging to the bones.
I'd always been interested in pottery, had made pots at one point in my life, so I was especially interested in the potsherds and the way the pots had been made in that iron-age time two thousand years ago. I happily accepted the task of cleaning and drying the sherds as they were recovered from the dig!
Self-proclaimed "snailologist" Graham Mason, a "Kiwi" (New Zealander like Higham and company) looked at the contents of the pots as they were excavated and found a great many snails - escargot were standard fare, apparently, in that time long ago.
Working on the surface had its advantages - I was always on hand for tea breaks and the delicious lunches we'd toted out on the bus from the kitchen at the Pahi Mai Inn. After hours working in the heat, the spicy Thai food and fresh fruits were very welcome. I can still taste those spears of fresh pineapple!
The days quickly fell into a rhythm: early breakfast at the dining pavilion, long ride out to the dig, long day working in the heat, take a dip in the marvelous pool on return to the Inn, and then, often, a talk by one of the professionals about some aspect of what we were finding, before a good dinner and an early bedtime. It was amazing how quickly and quietly the food was devoured both at the Inn and at the dig at lunch! A couple of the Earthwatchers had been out with Charles before, and had tales to tell. Others had been on other Earthwatch projects, and we compared notes, made friends.
One day we went out to a "pottery village" to see the way current-day pots are being made - still just as they were made at the time of the burials thousands of years ago.
The newly-made pots, created from clay dug off the banks of the local Mun (Moon) river, and fortified with a "temper" or grog made of rice hulls and baked clay, are formed with a paddle and an "anvil" - a mushroom shaped device jammed into the clay - on the stump of a tree. The potter walks around a pot sitting on a stump instead of turning it on a wheel.
The pots are placed out to dry...and then taken in a cart to the spot where they'll be fired.
They're placed on a bed of dry banana and palm fronds, covered with rice straw. The firing takes about 45 minutes.
And then they're finished, baked hard and red, and ready to use!
On our day off we visited the Phi Mai Prasat, in the nearby town of Phi Mai. This is a temple of the vintage of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. (That famous temple was only 250 kilometers away, but inaccessible except by a circuitous route back to Bangkok and through Phnom Phen.)
PI Charles Higham was our guide and introduced us to Jayavarman, who caused the temple to be built.
The prasat is impressive (though miniscule in comparison with Angkor Wat) and its existence is the roundabout reason that Charles Higham and all are studying the iron age burials in places such as Noen u Loke.
The Angkor civilization is twelve hundred years more recent than the burials we were studying - but there's very little evidence of civilization in the area in those years.Not only are the iron age sites being studied for information about the peoples of that time, they're being looked at to try to find evidence of more RECENT civilizations, between their time and the time of the Indian-influenced Angkor civilization.
In this part of Thailand, more than anywhere I've ever been, I feel a total disjunction between what WAS long ago, and what IS today, and what happened in between.
The study of the Origins of Angkor is an attempt to fill in the gaps in the history of the peoples of that region, with the hope that someday the history can be returned to the Thais as their pots, reconstructed, and the bones from their burials, analyzed and cleaned, will be.
Epilogue
Epilogue
As I'm sure most of us find on our Earthwatch trips, the work we do is an essential ingredient of our trip, but by no means the only one. Learning to live, even briefly, and at a remove, in such a totally foreign culture was a marvelous experience.
Our training in archaeology, though certainly very abbreviated, gave me new skills and new ways to approach problems. The Thai people who worked along side us at the dig or served us at the Inn charmed me, and gave me insights into a culture very different from that I would otherwise encounter during a New England winter.
I returned home to find that the winter I'd set out to miss had been a mild one and that what I'd anticipated to be my ONLY trip to Asia now could be viewed as only the first among what I hope will be many. I felt more physically invigorated and fit than I had in years. I'd learned a lot - and I was ready to cook again, lemon grass, fish sauce, and Thai recipes in hand! To which my Thai friends would give a "thumbs up"!
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