7. JOYCE WHITE, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, USA and LISA KEALHOFER, Department of Anthropology, College of William and Mary, Williamsberg, USA.
Thailand Palaeoenvironment Project
The National Geographic Society funded the first highly successful field season of the Thailand Palaeoenvironment Project (TPP). Team members included Joyce White and Lisa Kealhofer, co-directors of the project, and collaborators Bernard Maloney and Mauro Cremaschi. This season focused on the west-central Sakon Nakon Basin in order to examine the palaeoenvironment in the region of the Ban Chiang Cultural Tradition sites.
The research took place in to phases. In December 1993 we extracted 5 sediment cores from 3 lakes including the large Lake Kumphawapi. During the second phase in February 1994, White and Cremaschi undertook ethnoecological and geomorphological reconnaissance to assess vegetation and landuse distribution, and landscape evolution. The field program also collected modern reference material from field and herbarium collections.
During the current analytical phase of the research, we anticipate deriving a vegetation sequence from the sediment cores dating from the terminal Pleistocene based on a basal date from on of the Khumpawapi cores of older than 12,000 BP. Lisa Kealhofer is undertaking phytolith analysis of the cores, Bernard Maloney is in charge of the pollen analysis. Danny Penny from Monash University has joined the analytical team and will be presenting preliminary results of the research at the forthcoming meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in May 1995.
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