Hoabinhian

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Prehistoric cultures of Vietnam
Old Stone Age
Dieu culture approx. 30,000 BC Chr.
Sơn Vi culture 20,000–12,000 BC Chr.
Mesolithic
Hòa Bình culture 12,000-10,000 BC Chr.
Neolithic
Bắc-Sơn culture 9,000-5,000 BC Chr.
Quỳnh Văn culture 3,000–1 BC Chr.
Đa Bút culture 4,000-1,700 BC Chr.
Bronze age
Phùng Nguyên culture 2,000-1,500 BC Chr.
Đồng-Đậu culture 1,500–1,000 BC Chr.
Gò-Mun culture 1,000–700 BC Chr.
Đông-Sơn culture 800 BC Chr. – 200 AD
Iron age
Sa Huỳnh culture 500 BC Chr. – 100 AD
Óc-Eo culture A.D. 1-630
Using a stone hammer

Hòa Bình Kultur ( Vietnamese : Văn hóa Hòa Bình ) is the name of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer society of the early Holocene . It existed from around 12,000 to 10,000 BC. In Vietnam . Traces of this culture have also been found in other countries in Southeast Asia . The people of the Hoabinhian lived mainly in caves and under rock roofs ( abri ) and ate animals and plants. In addition, the stone implements that can be assigned to these hunters and gatherers are called the Hòa-Bình culture . It is to one side abgeschuppte debris devices ( pebble tools ), which from the period 10000-2000. And are often referred to as Sumatralith .

Development of terminology

The name Hoabinhien was coined in 1927 by the French archaeologist Madeleine Colani for an ethnic group who practiced natural economy in the North Vietnamese province of Hòa Bình for a limited period of time . Colani has excavated 54 sites with similar remains in the provinces of Thanh Hoa , Quang Binh and especially Hoa Binh in northern Vietnam. At the first congress of prehistorians of the Far East, a definition was agreed (in translation):

“(It is about) a culture with tools that are generally scaled as a result of various primitive working methods. It is characterized by tools that have often only been worked on one side: stone hammers, roughly triangular tools, discs, short axes and almond-shaped artifacts, as well as a considerable number of tools made from bones. "

- Matthews : 1966
At the congress it was also agreed to split the Hoabinhian into three parts:

"Hoabinhian I: -exclusively teeing devices, rather large and coarse.
Hoabinhian II: -slightly smaller and more finely crafted devices, associated with protoneolithic tools.
Hoabinhian III: - even smaller devices, mainly chips with secondary processing, no protoneolithic tools. "

- Matthews : 1969, 68

The typology originally proposed by Colani was so complicated that e.g. B. The 82 artifacts of Sao Dong had to or could be differentiated into 28 different types. After Matthews had examined the Hoabinhian rock roof at Sai Yok in the Thai province of Kanchanaburi in 1964, he found that the artifacts merged in terms of size and shape and therefore do not represent real types. After Chester Gorman had evaluated the finds from the Phimaen cave in 1970, he presented a more detailed definition of the Hoabinhian, which z. B. the presence of one-sided scaled tools made of pebble and a characteristic composition of the food leftovers ( crustaceans , fish and small to medium-sized mammals ) included.

In 1994, at a congress in Hanoi, the view used today was found that Hoabinhian is more an industry than a culture or a techno-complex and appears on the basis of rubble devices (and not pebbles).

distribution

Distribution area of ​​the Hoabinhian

Hoabinhian was first examined in Vietnam , which is also where most of the sites are found, more than 120. This, however, in all probability only reflects the more intensive exploration of Vietnam compared to the other areas of Southeast Asia. Hoabinhian sites have been found in Thailand , Laos , Cambodia , Burma and Sumatra .

Important sites are the following caves and rock roofs

In addition to this core area, however, archaeologists such as Johannes Moser also identify isolated camps in Nepal , southern China , Taiwan and Australia .

The question of the origins of agriculture in Southeast Asia

Gorman had found the remains of numerous plants in Phimaen Cave after finely sieving the earth. So came u. A. Almonds , betel nuts , broad beans , peas , bottle gourds , water chestnuts and fruits of the light walnut tree are revealed. This led to the hypothesis that Hoabinhian was associated with the beginning of agriculture in Southeast Asia. However, it has been shown that the varieties of all these plants do not differ from those found in nature, i.e. that no cultivation has taken place.

The finds in the Phimaen Cave nevertheless prove that the Hoabinhian people had a complex knowledge of the plant world and were able to make use of it.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Johannes Maria Hämmerle Stories and Songs from the Island of Nias in Indonesia - page xi "Their culture is largely identical to the Hoa Binh culture known from Vietnam."
  2. ↑ Kipfer (2000), p. 238, keyword "Hoabinhian"
  3. ^ M. Colani: "L'âge de la pierre dans la province de Hoa Binh". MSGI , Vol. 13/1 (1927).
  4. ↑ Valéry Zeitoun, Hubert Forestier, Supaporn Nakbunlung -Préhistoires au sud du Triangle d'Or 2008 "Le terme Hoabinhien est apparu pour la première fois dans les années 1920, suite aux travaux pionniers de Madeleine Colani qui a prospecté et fouillé près d'une soixantaine de cavités in the calcaire region du Nord Viêt-Nam, parmi ... "
  5. ^ Moser (2001)
  6. ^ WG Solheim: "An earlier agricultural revolution". Scientific American Vol. 226: 34-41 (1972).

literature

  • Barbara Ann Kipfer: Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archeology . Berlin: Springer 2000. ISBN 0306461587 .
  • Johannes Moser: Hoabinhian: Geography and Chronology of a Stone Age Technocomplex in Southeast Asia . Cologne: Lindensoft 2001.
  • Surin Pookajorn: Archaeological Research of the Hoabinhian Culture or Technocomplex and its Comparison with Ethnoarchaeology of the Phi Tong Luang, a Hunter-Gatherer Group of Thailand. Tübingen 1988.