CHAPTER ONE THE GEOGRAPHIC, PREHISTORIC, AND ETHNOGRAPHIC SETTING Culture cannot be derived from a map, and to understand how great a barrier a mountain may be it is necessary to know how people feel about crossing over it. A map of the drainage and river systems of Thailand (map 1) may not coincide with a map of cultural regions, yet it does provide suggestive evidence of how such a map might be drawn. The focus of any study of the art of Thailand must be the great cities of the lower Chao Phraya basin—Bangkok, and its predeces- sors Ayutthaya, Lopburi, and (west of the Tha Chin River) the ancient Dvàravatì city today called Nakhon Pathom. The culture of the first millennium, commonly known as Dvàravatì, seems to have extended no further north than the province of Nakhon Sawan, where the Ping River branches. Much less is known about the inhab- itants living further north, in the upper plain, either at that time or earlier. Yet it was this upper plain that with the flowering of Sukhothai in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries became a region of crucial importance. To follow the Yom and other rivers of the north-central region northward is to enter yet a different realm, that of Lan Na, “the million paddy fields.”1 The Ping River leads to Lamphun, or Haripuñjaya, which was a Mon center of the eleventh–thirteenth centuries, and then to Chiang Mai, the capital in subsequent cen- turies of an independent Lan Na. Within the Chao Phraya drainage basin there is one other sub- region, that along the middle and upper reaches of the Pa Sak River—a kind of direct artery, north to south, that is isolated by hills to the east and west.2 This situation accounts in part for the 1 Penth, “The Orthography of the Toponym Làn Nà” (1980). 2 For some indication of the geographical importance of the Pa Sak River in the nineteenth century, Kennedy, “An Indigenous Early Nineteenth Century Map of Central and Northeast Thailand” (1970). 2 chapter one special position of the city of Si Thep, particularly important in the seventh and eighth centuries. Eastern Thailand, corresponding primarily to Prachinburi province, was another stepping stone between east and west, with a drainage system consisting of the Bang Pakong River and its tributaries. The chief site in ancient times was Muang Si Mahosot. The eastern boundary of this region does not not coincide with the modern Cambodian border. There is a separate area along the border, com- prising Aranyaprathet and other districts, in which the rivers flow east rather than west, and where the ties to Cambodia were espe- cially strong. The region even further south—the southeast coast— is one that has not played much of a role in art—or in other history—save for the appearance in the seventh century of lintels in Cambodian style. The map divides the entire Northeast into two great sections, one comprising the Mun-Chi basin, the other smaller tributaries that flow northward or eastward into the Mekong. In the Sakon Nakhon basin created by one of these tribuaries, the Songkhram, the prehistoric Ban Chiang culture flourished. A different ceramic sequence char- acterizes another important prehistoric site, Non Nok Tha, one hun- dred thirty kilometers to the southwest, in the Phong watershed, within the upper reaches of the Mun-Chi basin. It also seems to be the case that the Buddhist-boundary-stone culture of the first mil- lennium A. D. was somewhat less established in the northern area draining directly into the Mekong than it was along the Chi and its tributaries—at sites extending from the river’s very sources almost to the point where it joins the Mun. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the accessibility of the Mekong gave to the far Northeast a character different from that of the Mun- Chi basin. This basin can itself be conveniently divided into two halves. The key site of the more northerly half was at the end of the first millennium the city of Fa Daet, standing not far from the point where the Chi River, flowing west to east, joins the Lam Pao and turns southward. Characterizing the southern half are the sites that lie between the southern tributaries of the Mun, as it traverses, west to east, across the entire Northeast. This is a region that has been strongly shaped by its proximity to Cambodia. The conquerors who established the Cakravartin dynasty of Cambodia were active at both ends of the Mun—at its mouth and in Si Thep—in the years before 600. Later, the Khmer expansion northward in the.