2009, Adventure #1!

We took off on a road trip this weekend to Si Satchanalai Historic Park, a 13th century ruined city of the Sukhothai Period, famous for its pottery kilns. This is a fantastic spot if you're into history, archaeology, adventure, and ruins. You can ride around the park on your own through trees and hills, stopping at the various walls, gates, and temples that used to make up this city (the park's too large to walk but you can rent bikes at the entrance). It's very similar to Sukhothai but, in my opinion, nicer because it has very few tourists and it is not as "manicured" I guess, as the grounds of Sukhothai are.

You can go to Si Satchanalai on a day trip from Sukhothai or, as in our case, from Uttaradit. It was a 2 hour motorbike ride straight on highway 102, past the Lotus supermarket. The only trouble we had was as we neared the destination, when we accidentally followed signs for Si Satchanalai National Park--- not the Historical Park. Don't make the same mistake as you can end up going pretty far in the wrong direction.

Anyway, we packed a picnic lunch and took off at around noon, as we had slept in pretty late. It was a wonderful drive. It's sort of autumn here, which is strange, I always thought of Thailand as being perpetually steamy and hot. It's dry now and cool, even cold. Leaves are falling from many of the trees and if you squint your eyes the scenery passing by could almost be upstate New York. Let everything come into focus though and you realize it's all completely different-- the red and brown trees are varieties of bamboo and other monsoon forest species (we are not far enough south for rain forests), the cows are not the hefty black and white dairy cows but the gaunt Brahman cattle of Southeast Asia, and the smell of a wood fire is coming from a stilt home along a muddy river. It's these days-- not when I'm plodding along at my office or sitting at home all day waiting for my internet to get fixed, that I'm really glad I chose this lifestyle.

We passed signs (in English) for more historical sites and a museum which we plan to visit next time. There will definitely be a next time since we only had an hour and a half at the park before we had to turn back to beat the sunset.

Below are some of my favorite pics-- enjoy!

Wat Chedi Chet Thae

Al, Wat Chedi Chet Thae

Wat Chang Lom (back)

Wat Chang Lom (front) The animal statues were elephants, but most of the identifying features have eroded.

Mongolia-- the work!

OK, this was a pretty exciting project! If you want a lot of details go to the official website here.

Our volunteer team excavated two burials; first a Xiongnu grave, then a slab burial.

The Xiongnu people are the guys the Chinese built the Great Wall to defend against and they're believed to be the precursors to the Huns (and are sometimes just called the Huns). The grave was roughly 2,000 years old. Bill and Amara (the directors) have been working in this area for six summers, so these graves had already been located and mapped. There are hundreds in the area and only a small sample are excavated. They are easy to recognize as they were always covered with a large number of rocks, which is pretty distinctive on the landscape. Our grave, like most from this period, had been looted so the skeleton was in a jumble. There were still interesting artifacts interred with him though, including parts of his bow and horse bones.

The second feature we excavated was a slab burial which dates even earlier than the Xiongnu-- up to 3,000 years old. The graves are quite spectacular looking but unfortunately ours no longer held anything.

We also had the opportunity to try other tasks such as survey, and lab work. Survey is basically walking around and noting any possible cultural features that might be examined later. Of course, where you walk and how you record things are systematic. It's fun, but I was too out of shape for going up and down the mountains! Flat land for me this summer, but next summer I'll try harder. There are a variety of things you can do in the lab but I was most interested in working with the skeletal material. I haven't had any experience with it since I left grad school and had forgotten so much! It was nice to freshen up my memory again.

In addition, various staff members gave us tutorials on what they specialized in and sometimes let us help out a bit. Through these guys I got to try my hand at sawing human bone for DNA samples, aging a goat by its teeth, measuring the landscape for topographic maps and more-- all new, fun stuff.

Overall, great experience-- wish it went longer!



Xiongnu grave.



Slab burial.



One of our survey areas.