by Ardeth Anderson Abrams

A couple of months ago, I attended an evening talk at the Penn Museum where movies of the Ban Chiang Project’s first director, Chester Gorman, were part of the speaker’s PowerPoint presentation. As I watched the grainy images of Chester (a. k. a. Chet) Gorman excavating at Ban Chiang, I thought about people in the audience who knew Chet. I wondered, was this the first time since his death that they had seen him “animated”? It can be an interesting experience observing a moving image of someone who has been gone so long—alive again, even if it is only an image on a screen.

Exactly thirty years have passed since Chet died. He is unmistakable in his photographs, with his blazing red beard, his florid Hawaiian shirts, and his big cigar cocked at a jaunty angle (see slideshow below), the image of a pioneering and romantic archaeologist. Shortly after Chet’s death in 1981, his co-director Pisit Charoenwongsa (Fine Arts Department of Thailand) described him as, “…larger than life. A man of immense charisma, energy, charm, and humor, he formed lasting friendships with incredible ease. He was at home under any circumstances, from a bamboo shelter in the jungle to a Philadelphia cocktail party.”

Chet was born in Oakland, California. He grew up on his parent’s dairy farm in Elk Grove, California. His undergraduate degree in Anthropology came from Sacramento State College in 1961 and his Ph.D. from the University of Hawai’i under the guidance of Dr. William Solheim. Chet was sent to Thailand by Solheim for the first time in 1963-4. During this time, Chet discovered the site of Non Nok Tha. In 1965-6, Chet was in Thailand for his doctoral research but his focus shifted from the plains to the Thai hills along the Burmese border where he found Spirit Cave (see map). The professionalism and sensitivity with which Chet conducted the Spirit Cave excavation earned him international renown among archaeologists as well as respect from the Thai archaeological community. His ability to speak Thai also won him friends there; he was fluent enough to give public lectures and participate in debates in Thailand. He also gave interviews to Thai reporters in their own language.

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Map showing Ban Chiang and nearby prehistoric sites in Southeast Asia.

A map of Thailand showing sites discovered and/or excavated by Chester Gorman.

In early 1973, during a break in the excavations of Spirit Cave, Chet made a contact that would prove to be a major turning point in his career. Fro Rainey, then director of the Penn Museum, recruited him to be the Museum’s representative for a large-scale investigation at the site of Ban Chiang in northern northeast Thailand.

Many aspects of the excavations at Ban Chiang were cutting edge for the time. As described in the Ban Chiang UpDATE article “Archaeocomputing” by long-time Museum volunteer John Hastings: “Back in 1973, Chet had tremendous foresight regarding the role that computers would be playing in archaeological research. He designed the excavation and artifact recording system from the beginning to be computerized, one of the first excavations probably in the world with this objective. The bag log and small find log numbering and recording systems were very computer-friendly. Moreover, Chet had all the materials recovered from the dig lent to the University Museum for analysis so that detailed measurements and observations could be systematically recorded and preserved in computer databases. In those days the data were fed into a mainframe computer on IBM punch cards and recorded on rolls of magnetic tape, and the programming was also done with punch cards.”

Please see slideshow below and click on image for caption. Story continued below slideshow.

Dr. Joyce White, director of the Ban Chiang Project since 1981, recalls that when she was a first year graduate student at Penn, she walked into Chet’s office to declare her intention to become a Southeast Asian archaeologist, and to ask Chet to be her advisor. The response he gave is hard to believe 37 years later, “I don’t want any female graduate students,” was his answer. But she persevered and became one of Chet’s only female students. In Joyce’s words, “Chet’s students were more apprentices than advisees. Our education consisted less of being lectured at in a classroom, and more of the opportunity not only to observe, but to participate in the life of a scholar. We were instructed in how to be professional anthropologists.”

Joyce’s travels in Thailand would overlap with Chet twice during her time as his student. Once during the summer of 1978 and again the following year in October, he visited Joyce during her two-year stay at in the village of Ban Chiang. He was there as Joyce’s advisor in her PhD studies (she was investigating how local people identified and used native plants) as well as a font of practical advice, such as where she could take his Land Rover for service in the provincial capital of Udorn.

I personally never met Chet; I began my time here as a work-study student in 1990. My first assignment was to draw the pots of Ban Chiang. Although he was gone, Chet’s memory was kept alive here at the lab with stories and anecdotes told by those who knew him well. Joyce White, John Hastings, and various other visitors (including some ex-girlfriends) had many vivid descriptions of Chet’s personality. If Chet became the subject of a conversation, it was sure to lead to a colorful story.

One such story involved Chet, a woman named Carobel, and a distinctively shaped Ban Chiang pot. It ends in a way that could only be Chet. In 1977, Chet was giving a talk to a Ceramics Society in Hong Kong where he was showing slides of Ban Chiang pottery. As he was going through all the different pottery types—a beaker, a globular cord-marked, a white carinated—he came upon a particular pot in the slideshow which hadn’t been assigned a name yet. A woman named Carobel, whom he had met briefly before, inquired from the audience, “Chet, what’s the name of that pot?” To which Chet responded, “Why, it’s a Carobel pot.” And the woman asked, “Oh! Why is it a Carobel pot?” To which Chet replied, “Because it has a nice round bottom just like Carobel.” Chet recounted the story to Joyce when he returned to Philadelphia. Years later in 1982 when Joyce was writing the catalogue for the Smithsonian’s travelling exhibition Ban Chiang: Discovery of a Lost Bronze Age, she had to give a name to the pot, which appears on page 69. Not knowing the spelling of Carobel’s name, Joyce termed it a “Carabel Type” pot. Years later in the 1990s, Joyce met Carobel (for the first time) and a mutual friend for lunch in Manhattan and the story was retold. Far from being offended by Chet’s comment, Carobel thought it was one of the highlights of her life and she wanted the story to be told at her funeral.

Chet’s life ended tragically on June 7th, 1981 when he died after a long bout with melanoma.

At a tribute to Chet shortly after his death, Pisit Charoenwongsa said, “The tragedy of his death was that all this was cut short. But he did at least leave behind him a solid body of academic achievement, the respect and admiration of the Thai people, and a legacy of memories in the minds of his hundreds of friends that will not disappear. It was a life to be proud of. Chet never talked about an epitaph, but one he would have liked is based on J. P. Donleavy’s character, one of Chet’s favorites: God’s mercy on the wild Ginger Man.”

Ardeth Anderson Abrams
University of Pennsylvania Museum
3260 South Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6324
ardeth@sas.upenn.edu

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Read the Luce Report for more Year of Ceramics information.

Note: please click on main activity for more information.

Coursework and Staff Appointment

The University of Pennsylvania has funded the one-year appointment of a visiting post-doctoral scholar, Marie-Claude Boileau, (Canada). Together with Dr. Joyce White (Penn Museum) and Professor Tom Tartaron (standing Penn faculty, Dept. of Classical Studies), Dr. Boileau is co-teaching Introduction to Archaeological Ceramics a two-semester course that focuses on Ban Chiang ceramics. Dr. Boileau is also designing, conducting, and overseeing multi-disciplinary study of the Ban Chiang ceramics collection while she is at Penn.
Please see slideshow below and click on image for caption.

International Ceramic Workshop in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, PA

In early November 2010, Penn lent support to an international four-day conference on Southeast Asian Ceramics. More than thirty invited specialists in Southeast Asian ceramics participated in sessions at the Smithsonian and Penn Museum. The workshop offered a first-time opportunity for these scholars to gather in one place to focus on the current state of the field and to plan future directions. The workshop was held in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s Freer & Sackler Galleries. Read press release for more details…

Please see slideshow below and click on image for caption.

Ceramics Lab at the Penn Museum

By constructing an archaeological ceramics laboratory in the Museum’s newly renovated West Wing, the Penn Museum is fulfilling its pledge to the Luce Foundation to develop facilities to support the Year of Ceramics. The lab opened in January 2011. Students taking Introduction to Archaeological Ceramics are able to do petrographic and other analyses to learn how and where pottery was made, how widely it was traded, and how production was organized. This ceramics lab will be a permanent part of the Penn Museum and will be available for future research and coursework. Read the blog entry on the Penn Museum’s website: There’s a New Lab in Town by Ardeth Abrams

Photo caption: Before, during, and after photos of our “flipped lab”.

Two Visiting Asian Archaeologists

The Henry Luce Foundation, as part of its commitment to international collaboration in Asian archaeology and the training of new scholars, is supporting two new interns in the Ban Chiang Project. From September 2010-May 2011, Bounheuang Bouasisengpaseuth, a Deputy Director of the Lao National Museum in Vientiane, Laos, and Sureeratana Bubpha of Thammasat University, Bangkok, are studying Ban Chiang ceramics under the supervision of Dr. White, Dr. Boileau, and Professor Tartaron. They are focusing specifically on the more than 500 reconstructible vessels excavated by the University of Pennsylvania at Ban Chiang.

Please see slideshow below and click on image for caption.

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“It was a real honor and a privilege for me to be at the opening of this important new national museum, and a joy to be back in the wonderful, and rather extraordinary village of Ban Chiang,” noted Dr. White, Director of the Penn Museum’s Ban Chiang Project since 1982. Read more…

The Ban Chiang Digital Image Archive Project was instituted in order to organize, preserve, and describe the thousands of slides, prints, and negatives that record the Ban Chiang excavations, artifacts, and related research. Slides and negatives retrieved from scores of dusty boxes and dilapidated binders have been cleaned, scanned, and inserted into archival storage. Information about each image is being painstakingly entered into a database, along with a small copy of the image. All the fields in the database are searchable, so for the first time we can easily pull together the complete photographic record for any excavation feature or artifact. We are planning to put the database online so that scholars and other interested people can access the extensive visual record of not only Ban Chiang, but several other sites in the region that were investigated by University of Pennsylvania researchers.

As of September 2009, our workers have scanned and entered data for almost 5400 images. The Archive Project was funded in part by the gifts of our wonderful Friends of Ban Chiang, who enabled us to buy a slide scanner, higher capacity computer, a backup system, and archival supplies.
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From Expedition magazine Volume 37, Number 2 Summer 1995
Art and Artists of the Ban Chiang Project

Making sense of the remains of daily life is a particular challenge for a site like Ban Chiang. No intact houses were excavated, almost no activity areas were found. Instead, the remains of daily life consisted mostly of holes–probably for houses built on stilts. Spreads of small pottery sherds, animal bone, and other discarded artifacts were probably refuse “kicked around” on the ground.

Artifacts from daily living were most likely used on the raised house floors. Refuse was swept off the porches onto the ground below while chickens and pigs wandered about under the houses. Pottery might also have reached the ground by accidently falling off the raised floor (hence our “Splatt” Theory). Once on the ground, the artifacts may have been further kicked about by humans and animals, coming to rest in a chaotic pattern.
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Expedition Volume 43, Number 2 Summer 2001
Bronze from Ban Chiang, Thailand: A View from the Laboratory
by Elizabeth Hamilton, Post-Doctoral Research Assistant

An American college student’s famous stumble over a tree root that led to the discovery of the Bronze Age culture of Ban Chiang also led to a complete revision of then-current ideas about the technological sophistication of prehistoric Southeast Asians. Before the 1970s, the prevailing scholarly opinion held that the earliest metal use in Southeast Asia was no older than ca. 500 BC. Southeast Asia was considered rather a technological backwater.

Excavations at Ban Chiang were conducted by the late Chet Gorman of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Pisit Charoenwongsa of the Thai Department of Fine Arts. This work, plus survey and excavation at sites such as Non Nok Tha, Ban Pak Top, Ban Tong, and Don Klang, have demonstrated that Southeast Asia had a sophisticated metallurgical industry as early as the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. This is over a thousand years earlier than was previously suspected and long before traces of any societies more complex than simple egalitarian villages show up in the archaeological record of the area.
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