Thailand: Ban Chiang
A short flight and I am in the Thai province of Udon Thani in the northeast corner of the country. Here, the main attraction is the UNESCO-listed archaeological site of Ban Chiang. The site consists of a preserved archaeological pit with ancient pottery and a vast museum displaying all the thousands of vases that have been dug up here. It all seems somewhat ordinary until you realize all this belongs to the most ancient civilization in Asia and most of the pottery is from the Bronze Age, 3-5 thousand years old! This was all randomly discovered in 1966, when a local student brought a piece of a jar he found to Bangkok and it was then sent to the USA and carbon dated…. Voila – it’s was around 4600BC! Since then, thousands and thousands of jars were discovered at Ban Chiang (I guess without TV and internet, the ancient Ban Chiang people had nothing else to do then produce jars and pots and paint them).
