Digging Deep: A Journey into Southeast Asia's past

by Charles F.W. Higham

"Charles Higham - rugby player, talented excavator and one of the great archaeologists of his generation - is an engaging raconteur. His fast-moving autobiography tells of the life well lived, of a world authority on Southeast Asia’s past. This is a fascinating and adventurous journey complete with academic debates, serious archaeology, its triumphs and minor disasters galore. Read this book if you aspire to be an archaeologist. It will inspire you to great deeds." - Brian Fagan, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Archaeology, University of California, Santa Barbara. "Higham charts an archaeological Odyssey from Roman Britain via the Bronze Age stock-breeders of central Europe to prehistoric Thailand and the origins of Angkor. This complements a personal journey equally eventful, from a double first and rugby blue at Cambridge to building a university department in New Zealand. Here is a life laden with academic honours and the thrill of discovery on a series of digs that have transformed understanding of the human past in a hitherto-under-evaluated part of the ancient world." - Professor Norman Hammond, Senior Fellow, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University. "Charles Higham presents a readable and often witty account of a golden age in archaeological excavation in Thailand, Neolithic to Iron Age, from his perspective as a fundamental contributor. A must-read for colleagues, students, and the interested public are like." - Emeritus Professor Peter Bellwood, Australian National University. In this unique memoir, Charles Higham, one of the great archeologists of his generation, describes the inside story of how his many excavations have introduced Southeast Asia’s past to a worldwide audience. For over 50 years, he and his Thai colleagues have explored the arrival of early humans, the impact of the first farmers, the remarkable rise of social elites with the spread of metallurgy and the origins of civilizations. Once seen as a cultural backwater, Southeast Asia now takes center stage in understanding the human past.

226 pages, Paperback

Published June 26, 2022

About the author

Charles Frank Wandesforde Higham ONZM is a British-born New Zealand archaeologist. In 1957, he was offered a place at St Catharine's College, Cambridge to read Archaeology and Anthropology. However, he first spent two years at the Institute of Archaeology, London University. In 1959 he went up to Cambridge, and studied the Neolithic Bronze and Iron Ages of Europe. He took a double first and was elected a Scholar of his college in 1960. He was provided with a State Scholarship in 1962, and embarked on his doctoral research on the prehistoric economic history of Switzerland and Denmark. He was awarded his doctorate in 1966. He was appointed Foundation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Otago in 1968, and began fieldwork in Southeast Asia a year later. He is most noted for his work on the Angkor civilization in Cambodia. Dr. Higham is a Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand; he is also a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of New Zealand, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge.