Talk:Spirit Cave (Thailand)

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The Spirit Cave is an important site in thailand, it shoows how the hoabhinian culture changed from hunting and gathering to horticulture. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 150.216.177.198 (talk) 01:41, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

A substantial portion of this article is a rewording of Kent V.Flannery THE ORIGINSOF AGRICULTURE. Annual Review of Anthropology Vol 2 (1973) pp. 271-310 Flannery should be cited. Also, Solheim and Flannery's date to 1973. After the lapse of 40 years it may be that the current view of the importance of Spirit Cave may be different from either of their views. The present article would benefit from an update. TwelveGreat (talk) 18:09, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Gorman's presentation of the Spirit Cave data was cautious and reasonable. He was well aware that none of the plants recovered had been shown to differ genetically from their wild phenotypes; indeed, one "bean"might be a palm, and another could not be identified to genus. Conspicuously absent from the collection of nuts and condiments was rice-or any other real staple of the Far East. Such absence, however, in no way prevented this from being one of the most important collections of plant remains ever recovered from an archeological site. It was our first look at the way man had used the floral environment of Southeast Asia in that remote, pre-pottery,cave-dwellingperiod. To those those of us interested in such things, it seemed that the Spirit Cave data needed no "window dressing": they were exciting enough at face value.

We were therefore surprised a few years later, by an article in a popular journal by W.G. Solheim, overall director of the Thailand project of which Spirit Cave was one part (Solheim 70). While conceding in one sentence that the material recovered might all be "merely wild species gathered from the surrounding countryside," Solheim spent various sections of the article claiming that "an advanced knowledge of horticulture"characterized the occupants of Spirit Cave "about 10,000 B.C."; and his chronology chart (70, p. 38) pushes "incipient horticulture" in Southeast Asia back to 20,000 B.C. Consequently, the subtitle of the article tells us that the agricultural revolution "began some 5000 years earlier" in Southeast Asia than in the Middle East. This seems to be a bit of an overstatement until we know, among other things, whether we are dealing with a pea or a palm! It is not, however, the only confusing aspect of the chronology chart; although Spirit Cave was still aceramic at 6800 B.C., the chart tells us that pottery was invented in Southeast Asia at 13,000 B.C. But then, as Solheim says, his reconstruction "is largely hypothetical."

The problem with this overstatement is that it has created a widespread "credibility gap" between an important and reliable excavation by Gorman (which everyone accepts) and the inflated claims in the popular press (to which professional archeologists react with skepticism). There is a real danger that the significance of Spirit Cave-our first solid evidence for the plants early man was eating at 7200 B.C. in the forested uplands of Thailand-will be lost somewhere in a smokescreen of exaggerated claims.