Once celebrated for decorated pottery and allegedly precocious metallurgy, making it the centre of disagreements about chronology, Ban Chiang is now used by White and Hamilton to argue that real discrepancies in data and interpretations demand a paradigm shift in the understanding of cultural evolution. What they highlight is the necessity of developing an approach recognising that (a) village-level metallurgical skills must (b) be integrated into the continental-scale diffusion of ideas, while (c) conceding the necessity of distinguishing social and technological history, because (d) their evidence undermines the validity of assumptions implicit in the evolutionary framework inherent in the ‘Three-Age-System’—as they demonstrate that advanced technical capacity does not necessarily correspond to social transformation. The application of universalist, linear, rational, technical and normative approaches contributes to the persistence in the archaeological literature of a misleading technical paradigm of social history. The gradual spread and irregular use of the potter's wheel, for example, should have awakened archaeologists to these problems long ago.
This volume is exceptional as the theses advanced are critically examined, logically presented and evidence-driven. The presentation necessarily stresses the archaeology of early Southeast Asian metallurgy, and this narrow focus makes their argument clear—yet the theoretical significance goes far beyond this specific field.
On chronology, White confirms that Bayesian modelling “cannot correct inherently flawed data” (p. 40). The problem is deeper: calibration and Bayesian modelling rely on potentially erroneous assumptions, statistical and archaeological; chronology cannot work on probability alone, as it demands precision—as does excavation. If sherds from occupation layers and small finds from burials are well excavated, they can be assigned to specific stratigraphic and excavation units and compared with finds from other sites, allowing the analysis of chronological, typological and social features. But only if the stratigraphy and chronology is fully understood for all the excavations concerned; claims about chronology often conceal disagreement about social issues, and deserve critical attention.
Nevertheless, radiocarbon overturned Childe's specific diffusionist scheme because he erroneously postulated a westward technical movement linked to, and pushed by, social developments in the east; it transpired that Childe's approach obscured technical advances in the socially under-developed Balkans—innovations recently enhanced by the discovery of the Neolithic tin-bronze from Pločnik—dating to before the emergence of the Bronze Age Near East. This Balkan metallurgy was eventually incorporated into the Bronze Age civilisations emerging centuries later in the Near East and China. Now, through critical analysis, Ban Chiang presents a radically different challenge, as advanced metallurgy was introduced into a village without major social change.
Proponents of multiple spontaneous and simultaneous independent inventions fail to recognise that materials and knowledge are generally transferred, and that the Near Eastern Bronze Age civilisations did not invent metallurgy; their superiority was in sophisticated ‘information technology’: writing, weighing, administration, craftsmanship and the like—which was not easily diffused. These urban civilisations incorporated foreign elements into their cultural systems, as the Cretan palaces reveal Near Eastern-style clay tablets and weighing systems; cultural transmission, information technology and social development went hand in hand.
Mycenaean tablets confirm that village smiths were not rare, but also that states and civilisations were rare and fragile. Bronze Age information technology did not travel farther north, was forgotten in Greece and was irrelevant to Ban Chiang; technological transfer alone does not entail uniform social developments. Diffusion brought Balkan metallurgy and the metals to China and the Near East, where a social change took place independently of the metallurgy. Ban Chiang had easy access to the metals, but only imported technology allowed the realisation of value—yet imported technology did not entail social change.
This book stresses metallurgy alone, but Bronze Age Near Eastern pyrotechnologies offer more, as prices confirm the low market value of artificial glass and faience, distinguishing them from real stones such as lapis lazuli; bronze was nice, but not as valuable as gold—but adornment was popular and people appreciated both the real thing and imitations. Through fiscal policies financing urban civilisation, Mesopotamia, Egypt and China created the wealth that enabled the purchase of foreign goods, driving cultural progress while creating interregional markets. China and the Near East mobilised cheap labour to (a) export ‘low-tech’ textiles to fund imports and (b) to produce imitations of the imports. Wealth attracted metals, metallurgy and merchants—integrating the periphery into a system whereby prices had an interregional impact; wealth and information—not technical superiority—are attributes of civilisation. Tin and copper will have been cheap in Ban Chiang, where abundant supplies of both were locally available (p. 153)—but while imported technology gave the metals value, social development failed, revealing the seeming anomaly stressed by the authors: many societies have mastered metallurgy without civilisation (pp. 137–203). This is important, yet like many who constructively tear down archaeological social theory, the authors halt before Polanyi's framework (pp. 131–32), assuming its validity and failing to realise that Polanyi's anti-market stance blocks access to market prices as an analytical tool. Prices illuminate, but culture counts; the authors argue (p. 58) that ‘ornamentation’ played a role in metallurgy worldwide, and that functionality should not be given precedence—confirming that theories are out of sync with research, thereby demanding change.
It would be novel if an archaeological paradigm shift was pushed by growing evidence, thus leading to changing interpretations. Archaeological theory hitherto has not been based on interpreting evidence, so much as forcing agendas. Previously, pseudo-paradigms endorsed by would-be authorities have been dogmatically diffused by followers; New Archaeology began as a research agenda assuming that progress and universalism could be usefully applied to prehistoric societies—but it neither worked nor failed. An evidence-based paradigm shift in social analysis—taking account of stratigraphy, typology, chronology, geology, distribution, technology, culture, diffusion, power, markets and history—would constitute a real accomplishment and a transformation in archaeological thought.
Social history cannot be written by anachronistically projecting concepts back to an age before urban wealth and political power emerged. The world of the villagers in second-millennium BC Ban Chiang had been socially and cognitively formed by changes taking place elsewhere and earlier; changes that brought metallurgy without bringing Ban Chiang into the Bronze Age.
The legitimacy of archaeological hypotheses cannot be based on anything except material evidence. The prevailing models are the problem, not an alleged lack of evidence. This book puts material at the forefront, recognising what it could mean, identifying inadequate speculation to be discarded and offering sensible thoughts to be debated and adapted.
