Dong Son Culture Beginning in the middle of the first millennium b.c., Southeast Asia, including the southern fringes of China, came under the influence of a distinctive metal-using tradition called Dong Son. The discovery of the protohistoric Dong Son culture was the first exposure to Europeans of a complex Bronze Age stratified society in mainland Southeast Asia. At the site of Dong Son, on the south bank of the Ma River near Thanh Hoa in northern Viet Nam, excavations conducted by Pajot and, later, by Janse revealed a rich cemetery complex containing objects of bronze, iron, pottery, imported semiprecious stones, and artifacts of Chinese origin (Janse, 1958). Subsequent excavations at Vietnamese sites such as Viet Khe, Lang Ca, and Lang Vac (Bellwood 1985, Tan 1980), indicate that although the type site was peripheral to the focus of Dong Son activities in the Red River delta (Higham, 1989), it is nonetheless typical of this aspect of mainland Southeast Asian Bronze Age culture in that it provides dramatic evidence of the socially stratified, semiurban nature of the culture as a whole. Initially, the Dong Son was regarded as a distinctive Bronze Age culture principally on the basis of archaeological materials derived from burial contexts at the type site and similar localities along the eastern margin of the Southeast Asian peninsula. Subsequent excavations of habitation sites such as Co Loa in the floodplain of the Red River, near Hanoi, as well as the recovery of Dong Son-style bronzes over a much wider region of Southeast Asia, including the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, have forced a reevaluation of the nature of Dong Son culture and its geographical and temporal parameters. The bulk of recent research indicates a local Vietnamese origin for the Dong Son culture. Archaeologists are able to delineate a clear development trajectory between roughly 1000 B.C. and 1 B.C. in which stylistic elements of local Neolithic origin are gradually incorporated within the products of the Dong Son bronze-casters. The Dong Son is best known for its bronze wares, including so-called drums (which often functioned also as cowrieshell containers), large bucket-shaped vessels termed situlae, daggers, swords, and socketed axes. The scale of the metal industry indicated by these finds is an indirect measure of the complexity of Dong Son society (the bronze drum from Co Loa, for example, weighs 159 pounds (72 kg) and would have required the smelting of between 1 and 7 tons of copper ore). Toward the end of the Dong Son sequence, during the last two centuries b.c., Chinese culture, as an exponent of the expansionist Han empire, began to exert greater and greater influence on Dong Son civilization. This influence is detectable in the form of bronze mirrors, coins, seals, halberds, and other small artifacts that regularly occur in later Don Son sites. It is also likely that it was the Chinese who introduced iron technology into the Don Son metallurgical repertoire. Historical documents record that in a.d. 43 the Dong Son homeland in Southeast Asia finally succumbed to Chinese invasions from the north and the entire region was incorporated within the territory of the Han dynasty. The extent to which superficially similar metal-using traditions in adjacent regions such as Thailand (e.g., the Ban Chiang complex) and south China (e.g., the Dian civilization) should be considered an integral part of the Dong Son tradition remains to be adequately explored. [See also Asia: Prehistory and Early History of Southeast Asia; China: Han Empire; Southeast Asia, Kingdoms and Empires Of.]
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 03:50:49 +0000
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