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Introduction The Mun River valley is an important prehistoric archaeological region in Northeast Thailand and represents a rich and long period of occupation spanning two millennia during the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages (Boyd 2008
Boyd and Chang 2010
Higham and Higham 2009). Extensive archaeological investigation provides a rich picture of the day-to-day life of the inhabitants of the many sites scattered throughout the region. Evidence has been found related to past human behaviour and activities, such as rice-based agriculture, farming activities, industrial activities, trading and exchange, and ritual activity (Chang 2002
Domett et al. 2016
Grant and Higham 1991
Higham 2004. 2011
Higham and Rispoli 2014). While it is well established that prehistoric societies in the region were supported, in part, by rice-based agriculture (Castillo 2011
Higham 2002
Higham and Rispoli 2014
Higham et al. 2010
King et al. 2013), little effort has been made to identify the details of the form of that agriculture
archaeology has been content to state that rice was present, but details such as the focus of processing, storage etc. for example, was rice being processed before being brought onto the sites or was such work being done in the settlements? have not been examined previously. Likewise, previous studies have identified that the site sediments are derived from the neighbouring floodplain (Boyd et al. 1999
Habberfield-Short and Boyd 2007
McGrath et al. 2008), but little more detail has been examined. Was, for example, the clay used to build working surfaces and domestic floors brought from nearby ditches and channels or from further afield on the floodplain? Such questions address matters of the daily lives of the prehistoric inhabitants, and provide a human and behavioural richness to the larger agricultural picture (Domett et al. 2016
Gebhardt and Langohr 1999
Karkanas and Moortel 2014
Parkinson et al. 2010
Salisbury et al. 2013).
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