Son Vi

Archaeology finds

By the late Palaeolithic the human trace on this land becomes much clearer, and Vietnamese archaeology recognises two stone-working industries before the Hoa Binh period. The Nguom industry, roughly 40,000 to 23,000 years ago, concentrated on tools made from flakes. The Son Vi culture, roughly 30,000 to 11,000 years ago, flaked its tools from cobbles taken from riverbeds; it is that way of working stone that tells the two industries apart.²

Son Vi takes its name from the place where it was first identified. According to material published in Vietnam, the site consists of two locations in Son Vi commune, Phu Tho province, found in 1968 and excavated in 1969, yielding more than a thousand artefacts. The name is first of all the name of a particular patch of ground — two locations in one commune — and only then the name of a whole culture.¹

There is no clean line between Son Vi and Hoa Binh: for a stretch of time the two overlapped, and the archaeologist behind the Vietnamese survey has written a separate paper on that transition. Western scholarship has recently gone further: as more sites are excavated and more radiocarbon dates come in, the boundaries between Son Vi, Hoa Binh and Bac Son keep blurring, so it makes better sense to treat all three as a range of stone-working industries in northern Vietnam spanning roughly 27,000 to 8,500 years ago.²³