The Ban Chiang Gang

I began working for the Ban Chiang Project following my retirement in 1992. I had been a partner in a graphic arts company that designed and produced flexographic printing plates for the shipping container industry. Since I had some experience in desktop computers as the company financial officer, Joyce believed I could help out by reviewing previously entered data in the various data bases for any errors, my first Ban Chiang task.

    Later there was a project of entering pottery rim data from three sites in Thailand: Ban Tong, Ban Phak Top, and Don Klang. The data was used to construct "battleship curves" indicating the deposition of various pottery rim sherds by excavation layer. Joyce used the data to write the paper I presented at the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association's conference in 1994 in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

    Because the IPPA holds a conference every four years, volunteer work has given me the opportunity to travel Southeast Asia, meet quite a few archeologists and visit several sites in that part of the world. The 1998 conference in Malaysia included an exciting tour of the Malay Peninsula and a visit to prehistoric sites on the island of Borneo.

    For the past eight years I have been compiling data on pottery rim sherds from a number of sites in the Sakon Nakhon Basin of Northeast Thailand, the area of the Ban Chiang cultural tradition. The information has been entered in a Microsoft Access database including scanned drawings of over 1100 rim profiles plus several hundred illustrations of the whole vessels.

    Working closely with Joyce we have been attempting to standardize terminology pertaining to what is being termed the anatomy of rim forms and whole vessels. Ultimately it is hoped to produce a searchable database of rim forms and pottery of the Sakon Nakhon Basin that can be used by others. This work provided the topic for a paper presented at the September 2002 IPPA conference in Tapei, Taiwan. An expanded version of the paper will be published in the Bulletin of the IPPA (BIPPA).

    Volunteering for the Ban Chiang Project has certainly been a great experience and has opened up new fields of interest that are quite a bit more expansive than working with corrugated box makers.

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