Madeleine Colani

Archaeology finds

The name Hoa Binh culture — the Hoabinhian, in international literature — comes from the cave excavations she carried out in the north during the 1920s. The first Congress of Prehistorians of the Far East, meeting in Hanoi in January 1932, passed a resolution defining the culture as she had described it: what the resolution took as its standard was that description. The word culture here carries the narrow sense Vietnamese archaeology gives it, the material traces left by one specific population.¹

The name she gave now covers 145 known sites in Vietnam, nearly all of them in caves or under limestone rock shelters, with Hoa Binh province and Thanh Hoa holding 106. Its boundaries, however, are under review: most Vietnamese archaeologists regard Vietnam as the birthplace of the Hoabinhian, while Western scholarship finds that as more sites are excavated and more radiocarbon dates come in the lines between the names keep blurring, and reports that Hoabinhian technology was present in Yunnan from around 43,000 years ago.¹²