Nui Do

Archaeology finds

In 1960, in Thanh Hoa province, a team excavating a Bronze Age cemetery noticed stones scattered on the slope of a hill nearby. Nui Do is a basalt hill standing beside a tributary of the Ma River. The site was taken up by Boriskovsky, a Soviet archaeologist working as an adviser, who also trained Vietnam's first generation of Palaeolithic specialists. Around 1,500 stone artefacts were collected in the early years.¹

He analysed more than 800 of them in detail. The great majority turned out to be flakes, with only two classic Acheulean handaxes, the type long taken as a marker of the Lower Palaeolithic. From this he concluded that Nui Do belonged to the Lower Palaeolithic. Yet the conclusion was not one its own author fully trusted: in his own book he recorded that he still had doubts about the age of those artefacts.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. The difficulty is that 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 Boriskovsky misattributed these late bifacial tools to the Lower Palaeolithic; many researchers have questioned that attribution, starting from a critical review published in 1990.¹