Prehistory

Archaeology finds

The people who lived on this land before the era of the Hung Kings left no writing at all. What they left is a handful of teeth in cave sediment, river cobbles struck into tools, and shell middens metres thick. For nearly a century archaeologists have been picking through those remains, trying to read them; on some points they agree, on others the argument is still open. The open questions are worth telling as much as the settled ones, because they mark the real limit of what can be read out of the ground.⁵

The earliest trace is a handful of teeth in a cave in Lang Son. In the mid-1960s excavators cut into the sediments of Tham Khuyen and found the teeth of hominoids; most of the teeth in the cave belonged to orangutans, so any firm claim had to begin by setting out criteria to tell one tooth from another. Once sorted, the collection turned out to include teeth of Homo erectus alongside teeth of an extinct giant ape. Counting the neighbouring cave of Tham Hai, ten Homo erectus teeth were recovered, mixed with the bones of the giant panda and the stegodon.¹²

By the late Palaeolithic the human trace on this land becomes much clearer. Vietnamese archaeology recognises two stone-working industries before the Hoa Binh period: the Nguom industry, roughly 40,000 to 23,000 years ago, which concentrated on tools made from flakes; and the Son Vi culture, roughly 30,000 to 11,000 years ago, whose toolmakers flaked cobbles taken from riverbeds. There is no clean line between Son Vi and Hoa Binh: for a stretch of time the two overlapped, and the archaeologist behind this survey has written a separate paper on that transition.³

Hoabinhian people lived in caves and under limestone rock shelters. Their characteristic tool is a river cobble flaked on one face, alongside pestles, grinding stones, and implements of bone, antler and shell. They hunted small and medium game, taking many different species but only a few animals of each, so no single species was hunted out; they gathered mountain and stream snails, ate them and dropped the shells where they lived, year after year, leaving shell layers three to five metres deep in some caves. As for farming, there is as yet no strong evidence that Hoabinhian people in Vietnam practised domestication or cultivation.⁵

The tidy sequence of Son Vi, then Hoa Binh, then Bac Son rests on the narrow sense Vietnamese archaeology gives the word culture: the material traces left by one specific population. Western scholarship has recently taken a different view: as more sites are excavated and more radiocarbon dates come in, the boundaries between those three names keep blurring, so it makes better sense to treat them as a range of stone-working industries in northern Vietnam spanning roughly 27,000 to 8,500 years ago.⁵⁴