Ban Lum Khao is an early Angkor civilization site, located in the Mun River valley of northeast Thailand. The site was settled during the late Neolithic, but used throughout the Iron Age (ca 2500 BC-AD 400). One important element of the site is a Bronze Age cemetery, begun ~1050 BC. The cemetery includes at least 110 graves, with very few differentiation in grave goods, suggesting an egalitarian community, despite its location 20 km from the sharply socially divided and similarly dated site of Ban Non Wat.
Cemetery at Ban Lum Khao
The cemetery included 110 individual burials, men, women, children and infants laid out in rows typical of Bronze Age Thailand, primarily extended burials with the heads pointed to the southeast. Infants were placed in jar burials, found almost universally near the head of the extended burial of an adult. Most adult burials included pottery, generally cord-marked, red-slipped and burnished pots with broadly flaring rims.
Grave offerings included marine shell bangles, stone adzes, cord-marked clay cylinders, shell disc beads, animals bones (shellfish, pig and fish), sandstone abraders and bone tools. Isotope analysis of the skeletal materials indicated that some of the women buried in the cemetery came from outside the Mun Valley, which suggests marriage patterns where women moved to the homes of the men (a patrilocal marriage system). A subtle isotope differentiation between men and women suggest that men had better access to fish; but by and large there is very limited difference in the grave goods or burial types between anyone buried at Ban Lum Khao.
The egalitarian flavor of the burials at Ban Lum Khao is in clear opposition to the similarly dated site of Ban Non Wat, located only 20 kilometers west of Ban Lum Khao, which included sharply differentiated burials indicating a clearly defined social ranking structure. Certainly, the earliest roots of social structure which eventually led to the Angkor civilization were not universal.
Ban Lum Khao was discovered and excavated in the mid-1990s as part of the Origins of Angkor Archaeological Project, led by Charles Higham at the University of Otago.
Sources
This glossary entry is a part of the About.com guide to the Angkor Civilization and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Bentley RA, Cox K, Tayles N, Higham C, Macpherson C, Nowell G, Cooper M, and Hayes TEF. 2009. Community Diversity at Ban Lum Khao, Thailand: Isotopic Evidence from the Skeletons. Asian Perspectives 48(1):79-97.
