Excavating Southeast Asia’s prehistory in the Cold War: American archaeology in neocolonial Thailand

Abstract

The discovery and excavation in the 1960s through to the mid 1970s of several prehistoric sites in north and northeastern Thailand, the best known being the World Heritage site of Ban Chiang, were a major breakthrough in Southeast Asian archaeology. Evidence of an autonomous Bronze Age tradition contradicted colonial scholarship’s view of Southeast Asia as a cultural backwater that owed its advancement to imports from India and China. Subsequently, based on a dating later rejected, Ban Chiang was at the center of an international debate about the beginning of world metallurgy. Focus on chronological and typological issues has obscured the fact that American archaeologists surveyed and excavated sites in Northeast Thailand at the time when the region was thoroughly militarized to provide frontline facilities for the Vietnam War. This article examines the production of American archaeological knowledge on Southeast Asian prehistory in relation to the Cold War politics, and more specifically of Thailand’s neocolonial dependence on the United States.