Penn Today publishes articles featuring research updates and other accomplishments from faculty, staff, and students. On July 29, 2021 the news hub published a Q&A featuring a conversation with Joyce White and Elizabeth Hamilton about their research and recently-published article in Archaeological Research in Asia. The article, entitled “The metal age of Thailand and Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage,” is based on their decades-long research into the prehistoric metal working system in Southeast Asia and argues that, unlike most of the world, the adoption of bronze metallurgy in Thailand was not driven by the desires of elites for control over a valuable material, but by the choices made by mostly non-hierarchical individual communities participating in a manufacturing, trade, and exchange system that stretched over hundreds of kilometers.
Read the Penn Today article here.
Find the open-access Archaeological Research in Asia article here.
Confirming our opinion about the article’s importance, the Museum issued a press release: The_Metal_Age_of_Thailand_and_Ricardo’s_Law_of_Comparative_Advantage.pdf
Other non-Penn websites that picked up on the article include phys.org (Metal artifacts in Southeast Asia challenge long-held archaeological theory) and Ancient Origins.net (Study Contradicts Top-Down Theories on Ancient Thai Metal Production).