Place
Hoa Binh
A mountainous province west of Ha Noi that gave its name to the Hoabinhian, following cave excavations in the 1920s.
At a glance
- Location
- In northern Vietnam; together with Thanh Hoa it forms the heartland of Hoabinhian sites, which lie in clusters along the valleys1
- Type
- A country of caves and limestone rock shelters: of the 145 Hoabinhian sites known in Vietnam nearly all lie in caves or under rock shelters, only two in the open air, and Hoa Binh with Thanh Hoa account for 106 of them1
- Dates
- Western scholarship places the stone-working industries of northern Vietnam, the Hoabinhian among them, at roughly 27,000 to 8,500 years ago; on the same account, Hoabinhian technology was present in Yunnan in southwest China from around 43,000 years ago2
- Discovered
- The name Hoa Binh culture comes from cave excavations carried out in the north during the 1920s by the French archaeologist Madeleine Colani; 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 it1
About the place
Archaeology finds
The name Hoa Binh culture — the Hoabinhian, in international literature — comes from cave excavations carried out in northern Vietnam during the 1920s by the French archaeologist Madeleine Colani. 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. The word culture here carries the narrow sense Vietnamese archaeology gives it: the material traces left by one specific population.1
145 Hoabinhian sites are known in Vietnam today, and nearly all of them lie in caves or under limestone rock shelters; only two are open-air. Hoa Binh province and Thanh Hoa alone account for 106 of them, arranged in clusters along the valleys. That makes this the densest concentration in the whole Hoabinhian map of Vietnam, and the area where the clustering along valleys shows most clearly.1
Their characteristic tool is a river cobble flaked on one face, alongside pestles, grinding stones, and implements of bone, antler and shell. From this the diet comes partly into view: they hunted small and medium game, taking many different species but only a few animals of each, so no single species was hunted out. They gathered mountain and stream snails, ate them and dropped the shells where they lived, year after year, leaving shell layers three to five metres deep in some caves.1
Two large questions stay open. The first is farming: since the 1970s there has been a hypothesis that Southeast Asia was among the earliest places to domesticate plants, but the Vietnamese survey of nearly a century of Hoabinhian research answers carefully: as of now there is no strong evidence that Hoabinhian people in Vietnam practised domestication or cultivation. The second is origin: most Vietnamese archaeologists regard Vietnam as the birthplace, since this is where the richest and most typical sites and artefacts are found, while Western scholarship reports that Hoabinhian technology was present in Yunnan from around 43,000 years ago and spread south afterwards.12
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