Hoa Binh Culture in Vietnam after Nearly A Century since Its Discovery

Tóm tắt

This paper presents an overview of the Hoa Binh culture in Vietnam after nearly a century since its discovery. It covers topics ranging from historiography, new insight into habitats, and characteristics of archaeological tools, to economic activity, the rise of populations and relationships between the culture and the archaeological sites inside and outside Vietnam. Vietnamese archaeologists consider the Hoa Binh culture to be a phenomenon of a material culture created by a specific group of people, of possibly one ethnicity, who inhabited the mountainous limestone terrain of northern Vietnam. The culture dating c. 20,000 to 7,000 BP consist of three periods: (i) the pre-Hoabinhian (20,000-11,000 BP), (ii) the typical Hoabinhian (11,000-9,000 BP), and (iii) the developing Hoabinhian (9,000-7,000 BP) [1, p.126], [35, pp.3-8], [30, pp.22-30]. The author finds that Hoabinhian was a Southeast Asian phenomenon which originated in northern Vietnam. It represented the transition periods from Pleistocene to Holocene, from Palaeolithic to Neolithic, and from a hunter-gather society to primitive agricultural activities. The Hoa Binh culture has left a legacy of outstanding cultural values relating to many topics such as man’s adaptation to the environment, settlement patterns, food exploitation strategy, and tool making techniques.