Boriskovsky

Archaeology finds

He was a Soviet archaeologist working in Vietnam as an adviser, and alongside his work on the site he trained Vietnam's first generation of Palaeolithic specialists. The site attached to his name is Nui Do in Thanh Hoa, a basalt hill beside a tributary of the Ma River, noticed in 1960 when a team excavating a Bronze Age cemetery nearby saw stones scattered on its slope.¹

Around 1,500 stone artefacts were collected in the early years, and he analysed more than 800 of them in detail. The great majority proved to be flakes, with only two classic Acheulean handaxes among them. He concluded that Nui Do belonged to the Lower Palaeolithic. What is striking is that in his own book he recorded that he still had doubts about the age of those artefacts — the doubt was first raised by the man who drew the conclusion.¹

Those doubts grew. In 1986 Vietnamese archaeologists found a Bronze Age workshop on the hill itself, and the stone axes it produced look a great deal like Palaeolithic handaxes. Bifacial tools of that shape were made across South and East Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, so dating them by shape alone invites error. The 2021 survey says plainly that this is why even a seasoned specialist like him misattributed these late bifacial tools to the Lower Palaeolithic; many researchers have questioned that attribution, starting from a critical review published in 1990.¹