Digging Deep: A Journey into Southeast Asia’s Past. Charles Higham. Bangkok: River Books, 2021. 256 pp., 226 photographs. Paperback ฿850, ISBN 97886164510586.

Abstract

Asian Perspectives, Vol. 62, No. 2 © 2023 by the University of Hawai‘i Press. Digging Deep: A Journey into Southeast Asia’s Past. Charles Higham. Bangkok: River Books, 2021. 256 pp., 226 photographs. Paperback ฿850, ISBN 97886164510586. Reviewed by Dougald O’REILLY, Australian National University Autobiographies penned by archaeologists are rare finds indeed and with his book Digging Deep: A Journey into Southeast Asia’s Past, Professor Charles Higham joins the august ranks of Sir Mortimer Wheeler and W. M. Flinders Petrie in penning a reckoning of his distinguished career in the field. Over 14 chapters, Higham takes us through the arc of his life, beginning with a childhood recounted in remarkable detail thanks to the author’s habit of keeping a daily journal throughout his life. The first four chapters of Digging Deep cover Higham’s formative years. Born in 1939, Higham was educated in South London. He developed a passion for archaeology at an early age, due in part to Mortimer Wheeler’s appearance on British television. Higham and his brother first volunteered in the 1955 excavations of the Bronze Age site of Snail Down in Wiltshire before broadening their horizons by working on the digs at Arcy sur Cure in France. Higham studied for two years at the Institute of Archaeology, London University, with a focus on the archaeology of the western Roman provinces. He was privileged to have the opportunity to excavate in the United Kingdom at the Roman-era site of Verulamium and in France at an Iron Age site, Camp du Charlat. In 1959, he took up an offer from Cambridge University, where he studied the European Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages. In Digging Deep, these early years read like a Boy’s Own adventure, including an early trip to excavate in the fabulously named Grotte de L’Hyène in France and being awoken from siesta by Mongolian bagpipes played by the excavation director. A highlight of Higham’s time at Cambridge was being selected for the university’s rugby side and playing before a crowd of nearly 70,000 spectators and later being selected as an England triallist. A rugby career was not to be and Higham embarked on a doctorate focused on the prehistoric economic history of Switzerland and Denmark. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1966. In the late 1960s, antipodean universities were eager to attract academic talent and recruited many Cambridge graduates. Higham was offered a lecturing position at the University of Otago in New Zealand the year he completed his doctorate. He was appointed Foundation Professor of Anthropology only two years later, at the age of 29. An American graduate student, Donn Bayard, later to have a long and distinguished career himself at Otago, introduced Higham to Southeast Asian archaeology. This area of study was largely overlooked at the time, but was brought to prominence by a number of astonishing claims including what was dubbed the ‘WOST’, World’s Oldest Socketed Tool, which was dated at the time to the fourth millennium B.C. (Solheim 1968). Higham’s work with Bayard at the Thai site of Non Nok Tha led to an introduction to another fabled Southeast Asian specialist, Chet Gorman, who Higham was told “was a bit wild [and] a bit too keen on illegal stimulants;” indeed, Higham recounts being offered some “herbacious-looking stuff” that Gorman called ‘Sakhon Nakon crippler’ during one of their digs (p. 91). Gorman and Higham excavated together in remote jungle in northern Thailand chasing the origins of agriculture while listening on the radio to reports of downed B-52 bombers over the not-too-distant north Vietnam. They continued their collaboration at the famed site of Ban Chiang in Northeast Thailand. These early experiences in Thailand convinced Higham of the importance of understanding the arc of human development in Southeast Asia and he struck out on his own, as is detailed in chapter 7. Building on the relationships he had established with Thai researchers, many of whom were to study with him in New Zealand, Higham focused his attention on “a little gem of a site,” Ban Na Di, while Gorman continued research at Ban Chiang (p. 98). It was...