via The Past, 13 May 2023: Prof. Charles Higham discusses the excavation of infant burials in North-east Thailand from over 1,600 years ago and explores the burial rituals and cultural practices of the time, including the interment of infants in pottery vessels, the use of copper as a symbol of status, and the significance of bivalve shells in graves.
One of the great rewards of writing this column is that it allows my imagination the freedom to explore aspects of the past that interest me. One example concerns a sad set of circumstances: about 1,600 years ago at Non Ban Jak, an Iron Age community in North-east Thailand, a woman suffered a miscarriage after carrying her baby for about 28 weeks. The tiny corpse, which measured about 15cm, was interred in a small pottery vessel and placed in a cemetery where the infant was not alone. A staggering 75% of all graves contained infants, including three others that either miscarried or were still-born. That was clearly a hard time for the community.
Part of our excavation routine was to subject samples of cultural material to flotation, in order to retrieve plant remains. Cristina Castillo found that they contained weed seeds adapted to permanent wet fields. We also recovered two heavy iron ploughshares and evidence for reservoirs to feed water into the surrounding rice fields. This innovation, an adaptation to a drying climate, might have produced more regular rice crops, but it was not good for the people who waded through wet rice fields: a natural harbour for malarial mosquitoes. On top of that, the shellfish and fish that invaded the new swampy fields contained lethal pathogens unless very thoroughly cooked. And basic hygiene in a densely occupied town would not have been conducive to good health. This combination of factors hit the women particularly hard, hence the dreadfully high death-rate among infants.
