From Pottery to Bronze: Phung Nguyen, Dong Dau, Go Mun

Archaeology finds things the books never wrote down. The last four episodes went as far as the books go: what legend tells, what the old chronicles record, and where the Nguyen court historians crossed their own sources out. From this episode on, we put the books down and look at the ground.

One thing should be said first. Until the middle of the last century, Vietnamese archaeology knew two cultures, one at either end: Hoa Binh and Bac Son in the Stone Age, then Dong Son in the Bronze Age. Between those two ends lay a gap that could not be bridged.¹ People knew their ancestors had once sat in caves flaking cobbles, and knew that later they cast bronze drums. But how anyone got from the one to the other, nobody could answer.

The three names in this episode — Phung Nguyen, Dong Dau, Go Mun — are precisely what was filled into that gap.

Phung Nguyen is the name of a village in Phu Tho. The sites that carry that village's name are spread across the plains and the uplands of northern Vietnam, densest where the Red River meets the Da River, around Viet Tri.²

What the Phung Nguyen people left behind is first of all stone. Axes, rectangular adzes, chisels, ornaments — all worked to a high standard. Then pottery: thrown on a wheel, fine clay tempered with fine sand, thin-walled, burnished on the outside, in colours from pale pink to greyish brown. The decoration is symmetrical geometry, triangles, circles, upright S-shapes.²

And bronze? This is the point that has to be stated precisely, because it is often overstated. At Phung Nguyen sites, traces of metalworking were found. But up to the time the two archaeologists wrote their survey, not one complete bronze object had been found in a Phung Nguyen cultural layer.²

To put it another way: they had touched metal, but they had not yet made anything out of it. That is the threshold, not yet the step across it.

Dong Dau lies in the same country, and much here is identical to the layer below: the same axes, the same adzes, the same stone bracelets, pottery of the same shapes. Which means the same line of people, not someone else arriving to replace them.²

But one thing is entirely new. At Dong Dau, many complete bronze tools were found, and stone moulds for casting along with them. Rectangular axes, spearheads, fish hooks.²

A casting mould means bronze casting was no longer a matter of chance. It had become a craft, with people who knew how to do it, doing it over and over to the same pattern.

The pottery changed too. No longer thin, light and burnished as before, but thicker and heavier, decorated with comb-incised patterns, waves, spirals, plaited cord.²

By Go Mun the balance has tipped decisively. There is more bronze: socketed spears for hafting, fish hooks, bronze wire, sickles, and one item worth noting, the asymmetric axe — an axe with an off-centre blade, regarded as the technical foundation leading straight into the culture that follows.²

At the same time the role of stone visibly declines: fewer forms, fewer pieces. The pottery is harder, having been fired at a higher temperature.²

Those three layers line up into one continuous sequence: smelting known but no objects made, objects made and casting moulds in hand, then bronze crowding stone out. There is no break anywhere that would force us to assume a party of strangers arrived carrying the technique from somewhere else.

The Phung Nguyen people lived in houses raised on piles. This is known from the postholes still printed in the soil — in one excavation square of ten metres by ten, 356 postholes were counted. A density like that means not a house for each small household, but a large house for a whole extended family or a lineage.¹

They grew rice. Traces of rice have been found at Trang Kenh and at Dong Dau. The animal bones at the sites include domesticated species. Traces of hunting and fishing are slight — implying that food came mainly from the fields rather than from the forest.¹

The archaeologist who excavated Phung Nguyen offers one further argument worth weighing. The Red River carries an average discharge of about 4,000 cubic metres per second, rising to 30,000 at its peak. To live beside a river like that you have to control it, and controlling it is beyond the strength of one household or one hamlet. From this he argues that the Phung Nguyen people must have been organised into a league of villages, or into something larger still.¹

This should be stated plainly: it is an inference from natural conditions, not something dug out of the ground. It is reasonable, but it is not evidence.

This is the question everyone wants to reach, and also the easiest place to overreach.

The argument connecting Phung Nguyen to Van Lang rests on three points. First, location: the area where Phung Nguyen sites cluster most densely coincides with the Phong Chau region that legend makes the capital. Second, time: the two date ranges overlap. Third, social structure: legend says the Hung king divided the country into fifteen districts and handed them to his younger brothers, which suggests a league of several groups — and archaeology likewise finds groups living close together, alike in technique but differing in a few types of tool.¹

But the very archaeologist who put forward those three arguments wrote his own conclusion as follows: we do not find a complete correspondence between the Phung Nguyen culture and Van Lang, yet neither can we disregard the overlap in dating.¹

He goes further. In the same paper, coming to the eighteen generations of Hung kings, he writes plainly: this is still disputed, and the number eighteen may be eighteen different names for one and the same dynasty rather than eighteen reigns.¹

That is a Vietnamese archaeologist writing in 1980, about the very culture the Vietnamese had discovered and excavated.

And the dating? Also unsettled. A foreign scholar places Phung Nguyen at roughly 3000 to 1500 BCE, but that figure does not match the radiocarbon dates measured at Trang Kenh and Phung Nguyen. Most Vietnamese scholars lean towards a start around 2000 BCE, lasting some thousand years.¹

The radiocarbon measurements published in 1980 give Dong Dau about 3,330 years before present, with an error of plus or minus 100 years; Trang Kenh about 3,405 years, with the same margin.² These are the raw figures of that time, uncalibrated by the methods used today — so read them as an approximate range, not as a fixed marker.

Strip out all the inference and this is what is left.

In the midlands and plains of northern Vietnam, from around 2000 BCE onward, there were communities living settled lives in large stilt houses, growing rice, making pottery on the wheel, and learning to cast bronze through three visible stages: no bronze objects made, objects made and casting moulds in hand, then bronze crowding stone out.

That is a real process, one that can be measured and laid out in layers.

What is missing is a single line of contemporary writing that names that land. No artefact bears the words "Van Lang". The correspondence between archaeology and legend is a correspondence of place and of span of time, not of name.¹

The next episode reaches the topmost layer of this sequence, and the most famous of them: The Dong Son Culture.