| Abstract: |
Despite the paucity and corroded condition of the Khao Sam Kaeo metallurgical assemblage, it has nevertheless afforded valuable insights into Late Prehistoric life on the Upper Thai-Malay Peninsula. Bringing all of the metallurgical data together it can be seen that the gold, iron/steel, and copper/bronze production and/or consumption assemblages each bring evidence of a slightly different nature and quality. The gold assemblage indicated a wide range of stylistic influences but, relating only to consumption, allows us no technological evidence for the presence of craftspersons at KSK itself, nor of their potential foreign origin. The iron/steel assemblage is rather weak on the typological front due to heavy corrosion, but technological and provenance studies indicate a variety of sources of predominantly bloomery iron, which have been worked using relatively simple smithing techniques. We propose that this may represent the low fidelity transmission of long-established South Asian ferrous technologies by non-specialists. Finally, the copper-base assemblage (including technical ceramics) indicates a wide range of cultural contacts from China, to Vietnam, continental Thailand, and South Asia in their typological, technological, and raw material variability. The production data however point firmly at the latter, South Asia, as a source area for the evidenced crucible-based high-tin bronze cassiterite cementation process, with a medium fidelity transmission from the Northern sub-continent suggested due to the slight shift in use of "nippled" technical ceramics to moulds from crubibles as seen in West Bengal and Rajasthan. Aside from the potential for South Asian high-tin bronze specialists having settled at Khao Sam Kaeo, the evidence for a high-tin bronze industry, thus exploiting the Peninsula's very particular resource base, should be seen as a major component of the fledgling city-state's economy, and a dense, divisible, and desirable medium for exchange for financing its very long range "commercial" networks. Taken together, the archaeometallurgical research conducted by the Khao Sam Kaeo Archaeological Mission has yielded further multi-disciplinary evidence for the prehistoric meeting of South, East, and Southeast Asian social groups, with Khao Sam kaeo itself acting as a major cosmopolitan trans-Asiatic industrial and exchange centre participating in the circulation of skilled technologies and hybridised cultural products.
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