| Abstract: |
The present Catalogue of the Pottery of Khok Charoen, although an independent work in its own right, is meant to be a companion volume to the final report of this site entitled Hill of Prosperity: Excavations at Khok Charoen, Thailand
A Burial Site at the Stone-Metal Junction (BAR International Series No 2844). Like with almost every other neolithic or Bronze Age burial site, the largest and in many ways most important category of finds of Khok Charoen is its pottery, be it plain or decorated. However, this situation is difficult to perceive if the more than four hundred pottery vessels found in the three cemeteries making up the site are presented, as they are in the report, embedded in the description of all the finds of a particular burial, one after the other, rather than as an ensemble which has to be analysed independently. The Catalogue is the outcome of the realisation of this desideratum. The excavation, 1965-1970, of the site of Khok Charoen is to be seen in the context of post-war Thailand, the only Southeast Asian country which had not been the colony of a western power and as such the only one where western archaeologists were welcome to begin a detailed study of its prehistory which until then was very little known. After a Danish expedition excavating neolithic sites in western Thailand and an American one in northeastern Thailand excavating sites containing bronze, the Thai-British Archaeological Expedition began in 1965 to prospect North and Central Thailand in search of suitable sites for excavation. This was the more difficult as this expedition had in its brief, in addition to find out where Stone meets Metal, also to look out for signs of early Indian influence. The site selected as the one most likely to fulfil these conditions was Khok Charoen, situated in the northeastern corner of Central Thailand near the Phetchabun Mountain Range which, as it turned out, is the line separating Stone to the west from Bronze to the east. Although no direct proof of Indian influence was found in Khok Charoen itself, there was convincing evidence of it in the only other site selected by the expedition for further excavation, U-Thong, further to the southwest, in the form of potsherds of the Dvaravati style, the earliest "Indianised" Kingdom in what is now Thailand.
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