Dong Son

Archaeology finds

The people who named this culture were all outsiders, and they could not agree on its age. The first excavations were carried out by a customs officer who also collected antiquities, from 1924 to 1932; a researcher at the French School of the Far East published the finds under the name the bronze age in Tonkin and northern Annam; only in 1934 did an Austrian archaeologist propose calling it the Dong Son culture. One thing was common to the view of that era: while granting that the culture was indigenous, Western scholars still tended to look for the origins of Dong Son outside it — in the steppes to the north, in the state of Chu, or in the Dian region of Yunnan.¹³

After 1954 the focus changed: instead of asking where Dong Son came from, researchers asked what came before it. The result is the sequence Phung Nguyen, Dong Dau, Go Mun, then Dong Son. But that sequence is not a single line: the Ma River basin has one of its own, Con Chan Tien, Bai Man, Quy Chu and then Dong Son; the Lam River basin has Den Doi, Ru Cat, Ru Tran and Lang Vac. Several different local lines all arrived at Dong Son, rather than one centre spreading outward. The author of the survey states the second half plainly: in the course of its development, Dong Son selectively took up elements of neighbouring cultures, chiefly the Dian and the Han.¹

Bronze casting is where Dong Son genuinely differs from the layers before it. Since Phung Nguyen times people knew how to alloy copper with tin; by Dong Dau and Go Mun casters were adding arsenic and antimony; at Dong Son they added lead, and it is lead that makes large objects possible — drums, situlae, bells — since metal alloyed with lead runs further in the mould. The Dong Son people used at least eleven different alloys, choosing one or another according to the object they meant to make. Moulds of sandstone and fired clay have been found at Lang Ca, Lang Vac and Lang Ngam; moulds for drums, though, are so rare that there is only a single fragment, found at Luy Lau in Bac Ninh and belonging to a later phase.¹

Grave goods differ between burials, bronze weapons make up about half of the bronze artefacts in burials, the ramparts of Co Loa were raised, and at Cau Vuc nearby a cache of tens of thousands of bronze arrowheads was found. From these signs the author of the survey concludes that the state of Van Lang, and then Au Lac, came into being on the foundation of the Dong Son culture. That conclusion holds two claims of different kinds. That society was stratified, had centres of power and could organise production at scale is something archaeology points to directly. That the state was named Van Lang and headed by the Hung Kings comes from texts written down hundreds to thousands of years afterwards. No Dong Son artefact carries writing that gives the name of a country or of a king.¹⁴

This culture did not live alone. To the south, Dong Son influence on the Sa Huynh culture is clearer than the other way round: Dong Son bronze drums have been found within Sa Huynh territory. To the north, the exchange of bronzes between Yunnan and northern Vietnam began early and was strongest in the period of the Dian culture — this is exactly where the hypothesis once stood that Dong Son originated in Dian, a hypothesis later refuted by radiocarbon dates, the more widely accepted reading being that the two developed in parallel and traded back and forth. Further west and south, Dong Son bronze drums have been found in Laos, Cambodia, northeastern Thailand, the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia.¹³