Go Mun

Archaeology finds

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. 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.¹

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 asymmetric axe of Go Mun is the last technical link in that chain: an off-centre blade, but the foundation leading straight into the Dong Son culture.¹

Until the middle of the last century, Vietnamese archaeology knew only 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. 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 Phung Nguyen, Dong Dau and Go Mun are precisely what was filled into that gap.²

The ninety-year survey records one further detail of the craft: by the Dong Dau and Go Mun stages, casters were adding arsenic and antimony to the alloy to make arrowheads sharper. Only at Dong Son did they add lead — the element that makes large objects possible, drums, situlae and bells. That survey also notes that the sequence Phung Nguyen — Dong Dau — Go Mun — Dong Son is not a single line: the Ma River basin and the Lam River basin each have a line of their own.³