The lowly graduate student's first job for the Ban Chiang Project was to clean the windows, then the room, the shelves, then the tools stored at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology . Then she had to label the stone tools and each little flake of stone from the dig at Ban Chiang.

"I was in heaven," says Joyce White. "It was real archaeology!"

Today, Dr. Joyce C. White, 44, is the director of the Ban Chiang Project, an international effort and arguably the most important archaeological dig in Southeast Asia.

Like many archaeology projects, hers gets along on a shoestring. But the shoestring existence has never clouded White's understanding of the importance of her project. Indeed, the need to publish the findings and to extend the research have become a passion, a white-hot certainty that the knowledge Ban Chiang represents deserves better treatment.

So she imagines finer things--a better way to spread our knowledge of history of civilizations. It is a vision for the future of archaeology, and how it must be conducted, with international and professional cooperation and innovative fund raising.

In the meanwhile, the project's modest offices are in three crowded rooms in the basement of the University Museum. Walls are lined with drawers filled with small stone objects, each individually wrapped and labeled. Site maps, tables covered with archaeological drawings and shelves brimming over with books give the space a sense of academic industry. And deep in the University Museum sub-basement, shelves bearing fragile reconstructed pots of breathtaking beauty get moved every so often to accommodate space needed for other projects.

The dig at Ban Chiang, in northwest Thailand, was a joint project of the Fine Arts Department of Thailand , represented by Pisit Charoenwongsa, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of the Archaeology and Anthropology, represented by the late Dr. Chester F. Gorman. What they found underground turned out to be extraordinary in ways the excavators had never envisioned when they began in 1974.

They found a site of remarkably long, continuous occupation--from about 3,600 B.C. to about 200 A.D. Usually, if a site has long occupation, the occupation is sporadic.

The surprisingly early things they found--iron technology, bronze technology, pottery in several styles, agriculture, and permanent habitation--showed a civilization that developed in a way that challenged some basic assumptions.

Until Ban Chiang, archaeologists had assumed that the hierarchical pattern of civilization that developed in the Middle East and spread through Europe typified all societies, and the need for conquest and class differences spurred technological development.

But at Ban Chiang, the bronze and iron pieces were tools and ornaments, not weapons for conquest. Nor were clear class differences apparent in the burials. The civilization at Ban Chiang appeared to have "another way of getting complex tasks done," White says.

It suggested a whole new trajectory for the development of civilization.

Furthermore, the site gave ballast to theories that prehistoric Southeast Asia was an important center of civilization that eventually sent its agricultural methods and plants, its language, people and pottery to the islands south, southeast and southwest, from Madagascar to Hawaii to New Zealand and Easter Island, a swath of cultural influence that goes almost halfway around the world.

These finds were so remarkable that UNESCO named Ban Chiang a World Heritage Site in December 1992. "Ban Chiang is without question the most important prehistoric settlement so far discovered in Southeast Asia," stated the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. (To date, Ban Chiang is the only prehistoric site in Southeast Asia and the only underground site in the world that UNESCO has recognized.)

But Gorman's death nearly prevented the dissemination and analysis of much of the knowledge of Ban Chiang.

"If a professor dies, there goes the program," says White of how archaeology traditionally has been conducted. In an unusual move, spurred by a University Museum board member who believed in the significance of Ban Chiang, White eventually took over.

While struggling with the Ban Chiang analysis, White learned that funders prefer to donate to excavations, but not all excavations. One funder turned down Ban Chiang, saying "Cemeteries, they're out of vogue."

Money for analysis and publication is much harder to come by. Yet analysis and publication account for 90 percent of the work, says White. For an excavation to have an impact on knowledge, "an accumulation of details, systematically and creatively presented" is essential.

White's situation was not unusual. Many excavations remain unanalyzed and unpublished. But she could not let either death or dearth of money interfere with disseminating the knowledge from such an important project.

That determination has helped transform White into a champion of Ban Chiang. When a lack of money threatened, she took a fund-raising course (at Penn) and learned how to ask for money.

Short $15,000 to resolve a controversy on the dating of some artifacts, she did something unusual. She formed the Friends of Ban Chiang (FOBC). Contributors' names--her Aunt Hilda included--brighten the wall of the dreary corridor outside the project offices. She overcame the embarrassment of asking her staff for money, and, to her surprise, they donated, too. She has an advisory board and she has coordinated all fund-raising efforts with the development staff of the museum and the central development staff of the University. She publishes a small FOBC newsletter. She holds FOBC events.

FOBC, together with the University Museum, shared the costs to send her samples to Oxford, England, for dating. She sought money from Thai sources as well, and received a $52,000 grant from the John F. Kennedy Foundation of Thailand to cover production costs for monographs about Ban Chiang. "Publication grants are hard to come by," she crows.

Because of the lack of clear strata in the soil at Ban Chiang, dating is particularly difficult. That's why White has extended the field research, working with specialists in other areas to confirm her chronology of life at Ban Chiang.

The Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project, an international joint project of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Thai Fine Arts Department, is putting the metal finds at Ban Chiang into a context of ancient metallurgy nearby. And by forming the Thailand Palaeoenvironment Project with another expert, White was able to get core samples from lake bottoms near Ban Chiang to confirm the disputed early dates of agricultural activity in northeast Thailand.

All these experiences--Gorman's death, the struggle for money, the slow process of publication, the importance of working with specialists and experts in collateral fields and across international borders, new competition from foreign universities for talented foreign students and Southeast Asianists--have led her to her vision, an endowed center for Southeast Asian archaeology at the University Museum. White has already written and presented the first round of fund-raising materials.

The center would build on Penn's reputation as the premier U.S. research and publication programs in the archaeology of Southeast Asia. It would attract from around the world post-docs, visiting scholars, graduate students. It would provide artists, photo labs--an infrastructure enabling archaeologists to analyze and publish more efficiently. It would permit teamwork among experts. And if a particularly famous Southeast Asianist were to die or leave Penn, the center would remain and the knowledge would be preserved.

Return to Compass Features for September 3, 1996