Mueang Uthong () is an archaeological site located in the U Thong district, Suphan Buri province. It was inhabited from about the 10th century BC and developed into a complex state society between the 3rd and 6th centuries CE. Uthong was among the largest of the city-states that emerged on the plains of central Thailand in the first millennium, and was abandoned about 1000 AD after epidemic and the loss of its standing as a trading centre. It was resettled in the Ayutthaya period but was abandoned again after the fall of Ayutthaya in the 1760s.
Excavation has recovered inscribed silver medallions bearing the name Dvaravati, Brahmanical images including a rare ekamukhaliṅga, wheels of the law, and stucco figures read as foreign merchants. Imported Tang ceramics, Persian Gulf glazed ware, Abbasid coins and glass beads from India, the Middle East and China have also been found. The town has been placed at the inland end of routes running from the coast to the tin and lead of the western hills.
The site has been identified with several polities named in Chinese and Greek sources, and with the Suvarnabhumi of Buddhist tradition, though none of these identifications is settled.
History
Prehistory The results of archaeological studies revealed that the area around U Thong has been inhabited since about the 10th century BC, between the Neolithic and Metal Ages. The evidence found was tools made of stone and metal, such as bronze spear blades, bronze axes, and earring molds made of stone. A double animal-headed ear pendant from U Thong, about 40 mm long, was published by Ian Glover in 1996. Hsiao-chun Hung and Peter Bellwood include it in the distribution of that ornament type, which is otherwise concentrated in Iron Age sites of central and southern Vietnam, the Philippines and peninsular Thailand. They trace the green nephrite used for the type to the Fengtian source in eastern Taiwan, and the finishing of such ornaments to workshops in Southeast Asia rather than in Taiwan itself.
Before the 7th century
Excavation and finds Higham reports that radiocarbon determinations from the U Thong sites suggest that the transition into complex state societies in the area took place between about 300–600 AD. A copper inscription from the mid-7th century states, "Sri Harshavarman, grandson of Ishanavarman, having expanded his sphere of glory, obtained the lion throne through regular succession," and mentions gifts to a linga. The site includes a moat, 1,690 by 840 m, and the Pra Paton caitya.Higham, C., 2014, Early Mainland Southeast Asia, Bangkok: River Books Co., Ltd., That copper plate, K. 964, was recovered from the ancient moat and is now in the U Thong National Museum.
Three of the inscribed silver medallions that carry the name Dvāravatī were excavated here under controlled conditions in 1997, at monument 7 of Khok Chang Din, inside a jar holding uninscribed ritual coins and chopped silver ingots. That site has yielded only Hindu remains, among them a rare stone ekamukhaliṅga now in the U Thong National Museum, and other Śiva-liṅgas, including a second and unusual ekamukhaliṅga, are recorded from the same area. Nicolas Revire takes the combination to suggest that the lord of Dvāravatī counted the erection of a Śiva-liṅga among his meritorious works. A terracotta chandraśālā antefix carrying a bust of Śiva, of the second half of the fifth century, is recorded from Wat Satavas at Ban No Lao in U Thong. At monument 5 of the Khok Chang Din group, on the south-eastern foot of Khao Khok, a temple base was found with traces of a sacred pond, a śiva-liṅga and an ekamukhaliṅga on a yoni base. Phatharaphong Kao-ngoen dates the last on Gupta parallels to the 7th or 8th century. A high-relief slab of four-armed Viṣṇu, of the 8th or 9th century, was found at Tha Phraya Chak, the town's old landing.
Boisselier dug at the site for the Fine Arts Department in the 1960s, chiefly at its stupas. William Watson and Helmut Loofs excavated systematically between 1966 and 1970 and obtained five radiocarbon dates, and Andrew Barram and Ian Glover later processed five more. Comparing the pottery with that of Chan Sen, they found wave and line decoration, spouted vessels, carinated wares and clay lamps of Dvaravati type in layers datable to the 1st to 4th centuries. H. G. Quaritch Wales's synthesis of 1969, as his reviewer Stanley O'Connor summarised it the next year, read the small tin ornaments from the site, which resemble finds from Óc Eo in design and manufacture, as "Funanese". That look suggested a range of roughly the 1st to 6th centuries, with Amarāvatī-style terracotta and stucco reflecting contact with India and Ceylon in the 3rd or 4th century.
San Thaiyanonda's three test pits of 2010 added to the sequence. Pottery with wavy line decoration from the rampart is dated to the 4th or 5th century, by comparison with material from the Pontian River in Pahang and from Go-Hang and Canh Den in Vietnam. A potsherd carrying a Pallava inscription appears to be of the mid-6th century. The other two pits gave the more conventional 7th to 9th centuries, and a late Dvaravati phase of the 9th to 11th. Thaiyanonda concludes that both the moat and the connection with Indic culture date to the mid-4th century at the latest. Matthew Gallon takes moat building as a public work carried out by a more centralised authority, and so as an indicator of early state formation, which Stephen A. Murphy reads as proto-state activity at U Thong in the 4th century.
The Faculty of Archaeology at Silpakorn University excavated at Noen Phlapphla in 2015. A layer associated with funerary practice was reached, and a child's skeleton was recovered with a chain of beads tied at the knees.
A fragmentary terracotta relief of three monks with alms bowls, now in the U Thong National Museum, is attributed on style to the Nagarjunakonda school and so to the 3rd or 4th century. Boisselier and Phasook Indrawooth took that as the date of the stupa it came from, which would place Buddhism at U Thong two or three centuries before the conventional start of the Dvaravati period. Others, Nicolas Revire among them, argue for the 7th or 8th century, and Gallon holds that the monument itself needs absolute dating before any conclusion is drawn. The plaque is recorded from stupa 2, and a locally made stucco Buddha sheltered by a nāga, in the same Amarāvatī manner, from within the town.
Setting and trade The city of Uthong was located on the bank of the Nam Chorakhe Suphan River (currently called Khlong Chorakhe Sam Phan). The boundary of the Palaeo-gulf lay further north than the present-day shoreline, so trading ships could reach the city by the Nam Chorakhe Suphan River. That made Uthong an important port of the region, along with the Funan's port city of Óc Eo in present-day southern Vietnam. Baker and Pasuk report that recent research has the sea receding earlier than once thought, with the coastline settling near its present position by 500 CE. That revises the long-held view that the lower gulf was under water in the first millennium and that many Dvaravati sites then stood on the coast. Murphy reports Trongjai Hutangkura's reconsideration of the old shoreline as finding that the survey it rests on overestimated the height of the mean sea level, and that what was mapped as coast was a floodplain.
The ancient city of Uthong also had trade contacts with the West, from the Indians to the Greeks and Romans in the Mediterranean Sea, that expanded the sea trade to countries in Southeast Asia and China. Evidence found in the area, including glazed Chinese ceramics from the Tang dynasty, beads and jewelry from India, Persian wares, and many other decorations from Greece, Rome, China, and the Middle East, proves the area was contacted by external territories. The trade also brought Brahmanism and Buddhism from India to U-Thong, making it the first settlement to practice such religions in the region.
Dvaravati period: 7th–11th century
Trade and routes The hills behind the town carry a group of sanctuaries and inscriptions. The Pushyagiri inscription was found at the foot of Khao Tham Thiam, and the votive tablets from the shrine of Phu Hang Nak on Khao Rang Kabit are Mahayana in type and Pallava-influenced. Walailak Songsiri reads the Mahayana material as Pala influence reaching U Thong from Odisha and Kalinga. She describes the town as the inland end of routes running from the coast and the Tenasserim range by the Mae Klong and the Phachi. They led to the tin of Suan Phueng, Thung Kha and Chom Bueng in Ratchaburi, and to the lead worked between the Khwae Noi and the Khwae Yai. Lawa highlanders collected aromatic wood, horn, hide, beeswax and stream minerals for the middlemen.
Phasook Indrawooth traces the same material to Srivijaya instead, and dates its arrival to the 9th to 11th centuries. She records a bronze Padmapāṇi 23.5 cm high, dug from an irrigation ditch in U Thong subdistrict, of about the 9th or 10th century. An Avalokiteśvara head from stupa 13 and a votive tablet in Śrīvijaya style from stupa 15 are recorded with it. Manop Nakkarnrian and his co-authors note that the bronzes are small and may have been carried north by travellers from the peninsula. The Śrīvijayan reading has a longer history. Reviewing Quaritch Wales in 1970, O'Connor reported Boisselier's argument in Nouvelles connaissances archéologiques de la ville d'U T'ong (1968) that the decorative arts of Dvāravatī underwent "a virtual renaissance" in the 9th century under Śrīvijayan influence. He found Quaritch Wales unduly reserved toward it.
Goods from further afield reached the town along the same routes. Sherds of Tang ceramics and of Persian Gulf turquoise-glazed ware are reported from the site, one turquoise-glazed sherd having been set into stucco ornament; it is in the U Thong National Museum. Two Abbasid copper coins are recorded, one of them displayed in the museum. One bears a date equivalent to 767, in the caliphate of al-Mansur, though its provenance is not established. The other, of al-Mahdi, who reigned from 775 to 785, was excavated by the Fine Arts Department at monument 12 of the Khok Chang Din group. Stucco and terracotta figures recovered in clearing the monuments have been identified as foreign merchants, unlike the more numerous local figures in feature and dress and wearing tall hats and sometimes boots.
Glass beads from Noen Phlapphla in U Thong subdistrict include one of the lead composition that Robert Brill and Gan Fuxi treat as diagnostic of Chinese production. A single gold-imitation bead from the town belongs to a type made at Siraf in Iran, at Berenike in Egypt and at Thung Tuek in Phang-nga. Striped beads had been found at U Thong earlier and are displayed in the U Thong National Museum. Chin Youdi took them in 1966 for Roman products, evidence of Mediterranean contact with Asia in the third and fourth centuries, and allowed that Asian copies may have followed. Peter Francis held in 1996 that beads of this kind were made in the Middle East. Krit Won-in and colleagues analysed thirty beads from the site, in twelve colours, by scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry, by infrared spectrometry and by atomic force microscopy. They report the oxides present in each colour, and surface pitting read as corrosion. The study was intended to build a reference set from which beads from different sites could later be compared.
Extent and religious remains