A visit to Ban Chiang, UNESCO-approved historic site

I made a trip by bicycle of slightly more than 100 km to see the pits
of Ban Chiang.

For those who don't know, Ban Chiang is dated to 5,600 years of age
--quite early so far as known evidence of local human inhabitation
goes.

It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and so very well-funded --a lot of
good masonry and gardening.  However, I have been to many, many
museums under the aegis of the Thai Fine Arts Department, and I have
been to quite a few UNESCO World Heritage Sites.  Of them all, this
was the least informative, least impressive, least enjoyable.

One can learn rather less at the new, high-budget, one-room museum (in
the midst of an expansive "campus" of largely useless buildings,
including a stage, etc.) than at Khon Kaen's (old, dusty) branch of
National Museum --and the smattering of Ban Chiang objects to be found
at (seemingly) each and every major Thai museum makes a trip to the
original site (where the collection is fairly unimpressive) even less
worthwhile.

The trouble is (even for those travelling by bus rather than bicycle)
there is nothing about the site that is even as interesting or useful
as reading a single article --and, indeed, it cannot compete even with
the other museums here that treat the same history in passing.

And, as always, there is the terrible question of Thai national
identity inserting itself into ancient history.

The curators apparently thought it safest to simply omit any
discussion of the lingual or ethnic identity of the inhabitants of Ban
Chiang entirely --rather than even review the current range of
theories (hint: none of them identify the inhabitants in any way with
the modern Thais / Tai-Kadai peoples).

And, of course, while a clumsy assertion that this was the original
Thai homeland might seem appealing to an outsider, one must recall
that the official history still remains that 5,000 years ago, the
Thais were still migrating southward from their mountain homeland in
the Mongolian Altai --via their lost kingdom of Nanchao / Nanzhao in
Yunnan.  Of course, this is mere fiction (yes, I can provide citations
for articles reviewing the historiography, if anyone requests this
off-list) --but it is an official fiction with a long shadow.  So:
despite the mere fact that the Ban-Chiang-culture(s) were not Thai
--it is also not especially convenient to pretend that they were Thai.

The curators seem to have opted for vague descriptions of Ban Chiang
as a "Thai prehistoric society and culture" --perhaps leaving it up to
the reader/visitor to decide if this means "a prehistoric society that
happens to be located in what is now modern Thailand", as opposed to,
"the ancient society of the Thais".

To lend force to this pointedly vague message, we are repeatedly told
that Ban Chiang is THE MOST IMPORTANT PRE-HISTORIC SITE IN ALL OF
ASIA.

This claim is made even more absurd by the "narrative" that represents
these people as coming from nowhere and going nowhere; rather than
entertain the possibility of genocide (viz., correlating their
disappearance to other, incoming migrations, at the end of the
period), the museum invites us to believe that "environmental factors
forced them to migrate to places with more suitable surroundings".  No
further explanation.

Thus: we don't know who they were, nor where they came from, nor where
they went.  And any speculation on the point would be... inconvenient.

Thus, the connection to early "Vietic" (proto-Vietnamese) people (cf.
"Hoa-binh" archaeology, etc.) who were settled
(buffalo-walking-distance) east of the sites, in what is now Laos and
Vietnam, is nowhere mentioned --but much is made of a few glass beads
that came as trade-goods from mainland India.

It would indeed be politically inconvenient were the original "Thai
prehistoric culture" proved to be ... Vietnamese.

However, if the involvement of UNESCO does not serve to shed some sort
of objective light on such history as it is presented at these
sites... what good is it?

E.M.