Members of the lay public will have to wait for their chance to visit the recently discovered Ban Muang Bua burial site in Roi Et's Kaset Wisai district.

The archaeological site has been declared off limits indefinitely to visitors after local villagers objected to outsiders trespassing and thereby disturbing the spirits of their ancestors.

People interested in items excavated from the recently discovered burials can opt instead to visit the Roi Et Museum, where many of the finds are now housed.

During excavations in 2003 and 2004, archaeologists found several human remains, mostly those of children, in earthenware jars alongside a wealth of funerary items. After retrieving the historical artefacts and transporting them to the local museum, the archaeologists reburied the remains, said Jareuk Wilaikaew, director of the Roi Et Fine Arts Office.

Yet when the department later resumed plans for exploring the area in greater detail, local villagers began obstructing the work of archaeologists, insisting that further excavations would antagonise the benign spirits of long-dead ancestors, Jareuk said.

Facing mounting protests, the Fine Arts Department placed its excavation on hold indefinitely.

Subsequently Roi Et province reallocated the Bt3-million budget that had been earmarked for further digging at the site with a view to developing it into a tourist attraction. The money now funds another excavation to unearth a 2,000-year-old rock-salt mine in Nong Hee district, explained Saner Pispeng, head of the provincial development-strategy group.

Sukanya Baonoed, an archaeologist who oversaw the excavation of the burial in Ban Muang Bua, still has regrets, however. She laments the termination of further exploration of burials that revealed unusual funerary customs hitherto unknown in the area. Only resumed excavation might shed light on the Northeastern region's historical link to other river-basin civilisations, she insisted.

"It cuts us off from the chance to create another learning source for Thais," said Sukanya, who has conducted extensive research on prehistoric burial rituals in the Thung Kula Rong Hai culture.

It was in 1998 that villagers in Ban Muang Bua reported they had discovered a large ancient earthenware jar containing a human skeleton. Fine Arts Department officials began conducting surveys and preliminary digs at the site before the project had to be suspended for lack of money.

The excavations resumed in 2003 and ran on into 2004, yielding hundreds of large earthenware jars, each containing a human skeleton.

Sukanya said the initial findings had excited scholars and curious laypeople alike as the burial rituals in Ban Muang Bua proved idiosyncratic in the region with the remains of not only children but also adults encased in earthenware jars and buried three layers deep. (Earlier finds elsewhere revealed only children to have been interred in this manner.)

The three burial layers in turn attested to three time periods, with the lowest layer dating back between 2,500 and 3,500 years.

Buried alongside the bodies of young children were funerary items for use in the afterlife. The bodies of adults aged from 15 to 50 were also found to have been squeezed into their respective earthen jars for interment.

The second burial layer, which dates to between 2,500 and 1,500 years ago, revealed that while the jars had remained unchanged in their form, the decorative patterns on them had undergone development.

It transpired that funerary customs had also changed with bones recollected, replaced in a jar and reburied, Sukanya said.

The uppermost layer, dating to between 100 and 500 years ago, showed that bodies had been partially cremated before residual remains (mostly pieces of larger bones) were placed in capsule-like jars.

Some jars were then also tied together at the mouth to form two-metre-long capsules, the archaeologist said. Many of these also contained bronze ornaments, she added.

Sukanya is currently working on a comparative study of the probable social status of the excavated dead. Some jars contained elaborate ornaments while others did not, she explained.

Judging by animal and fish bones, pond-snail shells, and rice grains found at the tomb, the land's former inhabitants eked out a living through fishing and subsistence farming in a swampland, she said.

Before the discoveries at Ban Muang Bua, the practice of burying dead relatives in earthenware jars had been known only in Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, and India.

Jareuk of the Roi Et Fine Arts Office further explained that the tombs at Ban Muang Bua showed marked influences from other cultures. The site attests to a mixture of Buddhist and Brahman influences, the latter passed on through Khmer transmission, arriving in the Northeast region later than elsewhere in Thailand, such as Surin.

Khmer influence took root in the region of Ban Muang Bua in the 15th century (in Surin it had already been dominant for 300 years) and remained influential until the fading of the Khmer kingdom's power.

Subsequently the area seems to have been deserted until another group of people settled in a village during the dying days of the Ayutthaya Kingdom. Probably enticing the new group of arrivals was the area's richness in minerals, iron, and rock salt, of which the area has the largest known deposits in Southeast Asia.

The Fine Arts Department is just creating a comprehensive database of archaeological sites in the Northeastern region's Sakhon Nakhon and Korat basins, where an estimated 405 such sites are already on record.

Numerous sites, both excavated and untouched, are to be found in Roi Et, Maha Sarakham, Surin, Yasothon, and Si Sa Ket provinces, with Roi Et having the largest share of sites at 190.

Department officials are currently formulating a 20-year plan to survey all these sites and make them available for both study by experts and visits by interested laypeople, Jareuk said.

Chularat Saengpassa

The Nation