Fifty years ago in the summer of 1966 in the Udon Thani village of Ban Chiang, I tripped over an exposed tree root, fell on my face in the dirt and so discovered a never-before-known Bronze Age culture.
Ban Chiang village is now a Unesco World Heritage site. A big museum has been built there containing a framed, rough outline drawing of me falling down in front of a tree. Villagers sell to tourists refrigerator magnets each covered with a copy of that black and white drawing, making me famous to some I suppose. But I get no royalties.
New finds and excavations over the past half century have proven the old Ban Chiang and similar cultures were widespread over mainland Southeast Asia.
These finds have overthrown the received history of Asia which was China-centric. Now we know that Southeast Asia was not a cultural vacuum to be filled with imports from China, India, and later Europe.
The ancient history of Southeast Asia is now an established fact just as the Chinese are asserting imperialist military claims to the South China Sea and are using warlike rhetoric against the United States for our attempts to block their expansionist ambitions.
- The Ban Chiang Project is online at this link.
China's current claims to traditional hegemony over Southeast Asia are bogus, as recent archaeology has proven.
The Ban Chiang Museum and the Thai Fine Arts Department graciously asked me to come back and speak at a conference in Udon Thani convened to mark the 50th anniversary of my serendipitous stumble.
My stumble has become a big deal. How many people do you know have ever found a Bronze Age culture.
I wasn't sure for a while what to say. I felt a need to address openly two groups who had never really reconciled themselves to my role as the "discoverer" of the Ban Chiang Bronze Age culture.
Some Thais are not all that happy that a foreigner was chosen by fate to bring the site to notice and so to get special attention. And only by unwitting accident, too.
Second, many professional archaeologists are similarly resentful that one of their tribe is not the discoverer but only a political science undergraduate, someone not trained at all in the science of archaeology.
So I looked for a way to talk about chance and mindfulness which would honour those feelings but yet still leave us all with a constructive way as to how to live when chance happens.
So what happened to me in Ban Chiang 50 years ago?
First, I was there entirely by chance. I was directed to one village out of a thousand or so by a French Jesuit archaeologist in Bangkok when I was looking for a place to interview villagers on their views on politics for a senior honours thesis at Harvard College under the supervision of Prof Samuel Huntington.
Then, one day after arriving in Ban Chiang -- again by chance -- I turned right down a short-cut path instead of going straight ahead the long way around.
Third, walking on the narrow path sloping downwards, I was talking with my village host, Siripong, who was walking to my left. I was looking at him as we talked and not ahead.
I missed seeing the tree roots in the dirt running from a tree on my right to the left across the path. So, by chance, I tripped and fell on my face.
As Siripong grabbed my left arm to help me up, I saw a circle in the dirt, the same colour as the dirt. But then I saw a second, third, fourth, and more all grouped together.
I asked Siripong: "What are these?"
"Old pots,'' he replied.
I thought: "Of course, anyone can see they are old pots!"
But then my mind opened and the mindfulness part of the episode kicked in.
"How old?" I wondered. That is the big question.
At that point I happened to see some 30 metres away two little boys breaking off pieces of the pots at their rims and throwing them in a game of toss and keep.
So I followed suit. I quickly broke off shards from three pots and examined them.
Prof Stephen B Young, now Global Executive Director of the Caux Round Table and a visiting faculty member at Sasin Graduate Institute Of Business Administration, received an award marking the 50th anniversary of Ban Chiang village from Anant Chuchote, director-general of the the Fine Arts Department. (Photo courtesy Sasin)
Now I was mindful of old Thai art and pottery because my parents had seen to my education in that way, especially my mother, Patricia Morris Young, recently deceased.
In 1961, Dad had been sent by President Kennedy to be the US Ambassador to Thailand. He had insisted we kids learn to speak Thai. He took lessons too. Mum, with her love of art history took us to more museums and lectures than we care to remember to learn about Thai art and history.
So in 1966 -- perhaps also by chance -- my mind was somewhat cognisant of what to look for in old pottery shards.
I quickly saw the shards had no glaze on their surfaces -- a sign of primitive manufacture. They had grains of rice and rice husks in the clay still visible -- a sign of low firing temperature and so of primitive technology.
And, most importantly, each piece in my hands had been painted with superb designs in red, each one different from the other, and all unlike anything ever found in Thailand.
I sensed they were very old and important and saw that the site was large. I was standing where hundreds of pots were poking up through the surface of the dirt path.
So as unobtrusively as I could I collected some specimen pots and took them back to experts in Bangkok and the Ban Chiang Bronze Age was then officially discovered.
I went back to Harvard College to write my thesis and finish my senior year.
Yet my mindfulness one day in 1966 in a small village in northeastern Thailand turned chance into history.
What happens to us by chance -- for good or bad -- gives us opportunities to take charge, to use our minds, to think, to draw on our education, our insights, our courage, to do right, and so to shape the history of our times.
We are not necessarily always pawns of those in power or victims of bad luck. Each of us has a capacity to engage with destiny and shape it.
Stephen B Young is Global Executive Director of Caux Round Table.