The lithe young woman rotates her wrists and hips, slowly and elegantly moving across the stage to the music of a traditional Cambodian orchestra. She seems the very embodiment of an apsara, the beautiful supernatural being that dances for the pleasure of Indian gods and heroes in their heavenly palaces. Reliefs of such creatures dot the nearby temples of Angkor Wat, where graceful poses have been frozen in stone for eight centuries by sculptors of the Khmer Empire.
This real-life apsara is dancing for tourists, but it is the plain white bangles on her wrists that catch my eye. I'd seen similar ones just a few days earlier, not far from this steamy Cambodian lowland, at an archaeological site in northeastern Thailand. They'd circled the arm bones of a woman who had died 2,000 years before the Khmer artisans first made stone sing at Angkor.
The bangles hint at something archaeologists have only lately grasped about Indochina, a region seen as an exotic but late-blooming hybrid of Indian and Chinese civilizations: long before these two neighboring behemoths cast their shadows in the first centuries A.D., Angkor's unnamed predecessors had forged their own sophisticated styles, along with complex irrigation systems, moated villages, long-distance trade and graves rich in beads and bronze artifacts. Indian and Chinese flavors only enriched this mix, producing the grandeur that today draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to central Cambodia each year.
More than 150 miles from Angkor Wat is a Thai village called Ban Non Wat. Standing on the edge of a vast 13- by 66-foot trench that he and local laborers have excavated, Charles Higham holds up a trowel for me to inspect; the steel tool is worn nearly to a nub. For the past 40 years, Higham, an archaeologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has labored in Thailand's dense jungles and rich rice fields to understand what took place here before the Khmer Empire rose to prominence, starting in the ninth century A.D. It's not easy. No written documents survive (only hints of an earlier culture in Chinese chronicles), and decades of war and genocide—not to mention leftover land mines—put much of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia off limits to researchers.
Although scholars had dismissed Angkor's ancestors as isolated tribes living in small settlements, peacefully growing rice as they awaited enlightenment from Indian Buddhist missionaries and Chinese traders, Higham and a few other archaeologists are describing a vigorous and innovative people who merely grafted outside influences onto an already vibrant way of life. Higham believes that about 4,000 years ago, rice farmers from southern China made their way down river valleys and joined sparse bands of hunter-gatherers who lived off the heavily forested land. Clearing the jungle for fields, the newcomers domesticated cattle, pigs and dogs and supplemented their diet with fish, shellfish and wild game.
Centuries later, these settlers had uncovered large deposits of tin and copper in the highlands of what is now Laos and Thailand. By 1000 B.C., they were extracting these metals, turning them into ingots and trading them to villages hundreds of miles away. Five centuries later, Southeast Asians were smelting iron—a technology they likely borrowed from India or China—and building substantial towns. Non Muang Kao, now an archaeological site in eastern Thailand, encompassed more than 120 acres and housed as many as 2,500 people.
Higham says the ancient 30-acre settlement at Ban Non Wat is an "extraordinary find." Thanks to the highly alkaline soil in this area, which leaves bone intact, he has uncovered a well-preserved cemetery that spans a thousand years—from Neolithic times (1750 to 1100 B.C.) through the Bronze Age (1000 to 420 B.C.) and Iron Age (420 B.C. to A.D. 500). The graves are yielding rare insights into the pre-Angkor life of mainland Southeast Asia.
Higham's trench has several levels, each containing burials from a particular era. We climb down a ladder to the bottom of a rectangular pit, where two women using trowels and brushes painstakingly expose a skeleton; a long-haired young man sketches another in his notebook. On the opposite side of the trench, other women are digging pits looking for additional graves, and men use pulleys to bring baskets of earth up to be dumped and then sieved for missed artifacts.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Digs-Bodies-of-Evidence.html
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