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Hoabinhian

Archaeological culture in Southeast Asia

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  • 7 chapters

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Through Stone Age, Holocene and China

The Bacsonian is often regarded as a variation of the Hoabinhian industry, characterized by a higher frequency of edge-grounded cobble artifacts compared to earlier Hoabinhian artifacts, dated to c. 8000–4000 BCE.

Definition

The term Hòa Bình culture (Vietnamese: Văn hóa Hòa Bình; French: culture de Hoà Bình) was first used by French archaeologists working in Northern Vietnam to describe Holocene period archaeological assemblages excavated from rock shelters. The related English adjective Hoabinhian (French: hoabianien) became a common term in the English-based literature to describe stone artifact assemblages in Mainland Southeast Asia that contain flaked, cobble artifacts. The term was originally used to refer to a specific ethnic group, restricted to a limited period with a distinctive subsistence economy and technology. More recent work by Shoocongdej (2000) use the term to refer to artifacts and assemblages with certain formal characteristics. The term had been questioned earlier. In 1977 Ian Glover and Karl Hutterer both argued that no clear difference in technology or in patterns of resource use separates Pleistocene from Holocene hunter-gatherers in the region, and Glover held that the term should be dropped if it could not be defined well. Rasmi Shoocongdej agrees that it needs serious re-examination and proposes describing whole assemblages instead, as Late Pleistocene or early Holocene assemblages. She adds that a systematic evaluation of all available data is needed before the term is abandoned.

History

In 1927, Madeleine Colani published some details of her nine excavations in the northern Vietnamese province of Hòa Bình. As a result of her work the First Congress of Prehistorians of the Far East in 1932 agreed to define the Hoabinhian as:

a culture composed of implements that are in general flaked with somewhat varied types of primitive workmanship. It is characterised by tools often worked only on one face, by hammerstones, by implements of sub-triangular section, by discs, short axes and almond shaped artifacts, with an appreciable number of bone tools.

Despite the general terms of the definition, Colani's Hoabinhian is an elaborate typology as indicated by the 82 artifacts from Sao Dong that Colani classified into 28 types. The original typology is so complicated that most Hoabinhian sites are identified simply by the presence of sumatraliths. The chronology of Hoabinhian artifacts was assumed to be Holocene because of the extant fauna found in the assemblages and the absence of extinct fauna by Colani and others working before the availability of radiocarbon dating methods in the 1950s.

Problems with Colani's typology were exposed by Matthews (1964) who analyzed metric and technological attributes of unifacially flaked cobble artifacts from Hoabinhian levels at Sai Yok Rockshelter, Kanchanaburi Province, west-central Thailand. His aim was to determine if Hoabinhian artifact types described by Colani could be defined as clusters of constantly recurring attributes such as length, width, thickness, mass, length-width ratio and cortex amount and distribution. Matthews found that Hoabinhian types did not exist and instead Hoabinhian artifacts reflect a continuous range of shapes and sizes.

Following his archaeological excavation and surveys in Mae Hong Son Province, northwestern Thailand, Chester Gorman (1970) proposed a more detailed definition as follows:

  1. A generally unifacial flaked tool tradition made primarily on water rounded pebbles and large flakes detached from these pebbles
  2. Core tools ("Sumatraliths") made by complete flaking on one side of a pebble and grinding stones also made on rounded pebbles, usually in association with iron oxide
  3. A high incidence of used flakes (identified from edge-damage characteristics)
  4. Fairly similar assemblages of food remains including remains of extant shellfish, fish, and small-to-medium-size mammals
  5. A cultural and ecological orientation to the use of rockshelters generally occurring near freshwater streams in an upland karstic topography (though Hoabinhian shell middens do indicate at least one other ecological orientation)
  6. Edge-grinding and cord-marked ceramics occurring, individually or together, in the upper layers of Hoabinhian deposits

Gorman's work included a number of radiocarbon dates that confirmed the Holocene age of the Hoabinhian. Gorman's carbon-14 dates place Hoabinhian levels at Spirit Cave between 12,000 and 8000 BP, these levels have also produced cord-marked ceramics. The term was redefined in 1994 by archaeologists attending a conference held in Hanoi. At this conference Vietnamese archaeologists presented evidence of Hoabinhian artifacts dating to 17,000 years before the present. A vote was held where it was agreed that

  1. The concept of the Hoabinhian should be kept
  2. The best concept for "Hoabinhian" was an industry rather than a culture or techno-complex
  3. The chronology of the Hoabinhian industry dates is from "late-to-terminal Pleistocene to early-to-mid Holocene"
  4. The term "Sumatralith" should be retained
  5. The Hoabinhian Industry should be referred to as a "cobble" rather that a "pebble" tool industry
  6. The Hoabinhian should not be referred to as a "Mesolithic" phenomenon

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