Phung Nguyen

Archaeology finds

What the Phung Nguyen people left behind is first of all stone: axes, rectangular adzes, chisels and ornaments, all worked to a high standard. Then pottery — thrown on a wheel, fine clay tempered with fine sand, thin-walled, burnished on the outside, the decoration symmetrical geometry: triangles, circles, upright S-shapes. As for bronze, the point has to be stated precisely, because it is often overstated. At Phung Nguyen sites traces of metalworking were indeed found, but up to the time the two archaeologists wrote their survey, not one complete bronze object had been found in a cultural layer. They had touched metal without yet making anything out of it.¹

The Phung Nguyen people lived in houses raised on piles — known from the postholes still printed in the soil, so dense that one excavation square of ten metres by ten held 356 of them. A density like that means not a house for each small household, but a large house for a whole extended family or a lineage. They grew rice: traces of it have been found at Trang Kenh and at Dong Dau. The animal bones at the sites include domesticated species, while traces of hunting and fishing are slight — implying that food came mainly from the fields rather than from the forest.²

The archaeologist who excavated Phung Nguyen offers one further argument worth weighing. The Red River carries an average discharge of about 4,000 cubic metres per second, rising to 30,000 at its peak; to live beside a river like that you have to control it, and controlling it is beyond the strength of one household or one hamlet. From this he argues that the Phung Nguyen people must have been organised into a league of villages, or into something larger still. This should be stated plainly: it is an inference from natural conditions, not something dug out of the ground — reasonable, but not evidence.²

The argument connecting Phung Nguyen to Van Lang rests on three points: the area where the sites cluster most densely coincides with the Phong Chau region that legend makes the capital; the two date ranges overlap; and legend says the Hung king divided the country into fifteen districts and handed them to his younger brothers, which suggests a league of several groups, while archaeology likewise finds groups living close together, alike in technique but differing in a few types of tool. Yet the very archaeologist who put those three arguments forward wrote his own conclusion thus: we do not find a complete correspondence between the Phung Nguyen culture and Van Lang, yet neither can we disregard the overlap in dating.²

He goes further. In that same 1980 paper, coming to the eighteen generations of Hung kings, he writes plainly that this is still disputed, and that the number eighteen may be eighteen different names for one and the same dynasty rather than eighteen reigns. What is still missing is a single line of contemporary writing that names that land: no artefact bears the words Van Lang, and the correspondence between archaeology and legend is a correspondence of place and of span of time, not of name.²