ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades Thailand has been in a development phase of archaeological and bioarchaeological research, with most of the legislation focused on circumventing the looting of cultural heritage and the illicit trading of cultural artefacts. There is no legislation relating specifically to archaeological human remains. National cultural policy in Thailand is designed to give power to and aid professional development of the local researchers in archaeology, such as through the mandatory co-directorship of all foreign research projects with Thai researchers, and the retention of excavated skeletal collections in Thailand. Ethical issues of dealing with human skeletal remains relate to Thai Buddhist beliefs and ritual. The history of physical anthropology is relatively short in Thailand, due to the relatively late
development of archaeology in the region and its sporadic nature (Higham 1989). Although human skeletal remains had been excavated from at least the 1930s (Quaritch Wales 1937, 1964), there was effectively no published research. The history of physical anthropology started relatively recently, with the first published works appearing in the 1960s by a Thai medical doctor, Dr Sood Sangvichien, a graduate from Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. Dr Sood developed an interest in physical anthropology during his undergraduate years and in 1931-33 he was awarded a Rockefeller scholarship to study physical anthropology with Professors T. Wingate Todd and Wilton M. Krogman at Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, in the USA. His first publications were based on a sample of prehistoric human skeletal remains excavated as part of a joint Thai-Danish excavation from the site of Ban Kao, Kanchanburi province, western Thailand, in 1960-62. His primary interest was the origins of the Thai people and he first published two papers on the metric and non-metric affiliation of the Ban Kao skeletons (Sangvichien 1966a, 1966b), and ultimately a monograph on the sample (Sangvichien et al. 1969). Most of his later works on skeletal analysis from other sites were reports in Thai. Western scholars have dominated physical anthropology in Thailand since the 1970s,
when Michael Pietrusewsky, a Canadian physical anthropologist from the University of Hawai’i, worked on skeletal collections from three sites (Pietrusewsky 1974, 1982, 1984, 1988), and Associate Professor Philip Houghton, an anatomist from the University of Otago
in New Zealand, supervised Thai archaeologist Warrachai Wiriyaromp in the 1980s for a Master’s degree on a skeletal collection from a site in north east Thailand (Houghton and Wiriyaromp 1984; Wiriyaromp 1984). Successions of students of both Pietrusewsky (Michele Douglas) and Houghton (Nancy Tayles, Kate Domett, Siân Halcrow and Katharine Cox) have since completed PhDs, and most have established research projects in the country. Praphid Phongmas (previously Choosiri) completed a Master’s degree on non-metric traits
from the prehistoric Thai site of Khok Phanom Di, at the University of Otago in New Zealand in the 1980s, and is now employed at the Fine Arts Department (FAD) in Bangkok. In the intervening years she has produced two books: Introduction to Human Osteology (Choosiri 1991) and A Brief History of the Study of Human Skeletal Remains in Thailand (Choosiri 1992), both in Thai, and has contributed to a monograph on early prehistoric human remains from Southern Thailand (Choosiri 1996). Dr Supaporn Nakbunlung of Chang Mai University gained a PhD at the University of Illinois in 1994 and has published on the dental anthropology of a Thai skeletal sample (Nakbunlung and Wathanawareekool 2004, 2008). Dr Vadhana Subhavan of the Museum of Prehistory, Siriraj University, has completed a PhD at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, on human remains identified as Homo erectus from Lampang province, northern Thailand. Recently, young Thai physical anthropologists are being encouraged by both medically
trained anatomists, such as Dr Sood’s son, Dr Sanjai Sangvichien of the Department of Anatomy at Siriraj Hospital, and Dr Kamoltip Brown of the Faculty of Medicine, Khon Kaen University, and archaeologists such as Dr Rasmi Shoocongdej of Silpakorn University, Bangkok. Silpakorn University graduates Natthamon Pureepatpong and Korakot Boonlop have both completed Master’s degrees on the topic of physical anthropology and have published papers (Boonlop, in press; Boonlop and Bubpha, in press; Pureepatpong 2006). Naruphol Wangthongchaicharoen is currently undertaking a Master’s degree on the topic of physical anthropology and has produced a paper (Wangthongchaicharoen, in press). There are several skeletal reports in the grey literature or in local languages, including Boonlop and Wangthongchaicharoen (2006), Choosiri (1994, 1999) and Pureepatpong (2001).
