A new project to understand how ancient cultures travelled and settled southern Asia has uncovered a particularly compassionate and inclusive late Stone Age community in northern Vietnam.

Dr Marc Oxenham sits in a shaded, grim pit dug a metre down into the limey earth of northern Vietnam. From above it would appear to be a strange scene, at once macabre and compelling, because he is surrounded by some 40 excavated skeletons, each 3,500 years old.
Yet these are more than just old bones.

Over the lip of the pit, which is situated at the base of a giant limestone monolith, are flat plains made green by the oppressively humid climate that fall away towards the small village of Man Bac. There is a modern cemetery nearby, with white crosses at the head of each grave.
Inside the pit, Oxenham brushes soil away from a protrusion in the damp earth. As he does this, he supposes that it is the skull of a very young child. It is flatter than a typical rounded adult skull, and it is small. It would not be surprising to find the skull of an infant here, as child mortality was higher than today, and many others had been uncovered in the pit.
As the bone is revealed, it becomes more curious. It is elongated and curved. Oxenham grows more puzzled, until his archaeological brushes finally reveal that he has in fact found ivory, in the form of an ancient elephant tusk. The tusk is broken into two parts, with the lower-middle section missing.

This discovery adds yet another piece to the puzzle of the study of this late Stone Age community in the Red River delta.

“This was the only ivory we’ve found. We’re not so surprised by the fact that it was here, but we are surprised by the way it’s been left,” Oxenham says.

“It appears that the ivory was put to more utilitarian uses, because the tusk had been cut and a piece had been taken out. We don’t know for what purpose, because we haven’t found the cut out piece. But the rest of it had been left in a way that indicated it had just been dropped, left there once the piece to be used had been removed.”

Surprise is common in an excavation of old, old bones. It’s a slow revealing of clues, each one adding more to our understanding of how these pre-Bronze Age people lived all those thousands of years ago.

Oxenham is part of a team from the School of Archaeology and Anthropology with an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant to uncover more evidence about the movement of people and agriculture and the development of cultures across Southeast Asia over 4,000 years between 3500BC and 500AD – ambitious, no doubt. It builds on a linguistic, biological and archaeological theory of migration put forward by Professor Peter Bellwood, of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, which hypothesises that there was migration southeast through the Philippines and eventually into the Pacific, as well as major movements of people, language and agriculture into mainland Southeast Asia from the north.

The entire ARC project will see excavation sites in Taiwan, the northern Philippines and the one at Man Bac to try and establish geographical and cultural links. But as Oxenham’s dig is proving, each site will be a revelation in itself before the links between are established.

Take the young ones in this early community. Oxenham’s excavation has shown that children were probably cherished as an integral part of society, even against the spectre of high mortality and their lower economic contribution to the village.

“It’s obvious today that children are special and that they’re cherished. But this long ago we might expect that parents distanced themselves from forming an emotional bond with their kids because there was a great risk they’d be dead before five.

“A lot of kids died under the age of five: respiratory disease and diarrhoea killed children very quickly.

“Children also had an economic role to play and in some cultures we still see this today: they did jobs that adults didn’t do but that contributed to the wellbeing of the whole community. They weren’t just at play all day; probably from a very early age they helped with chores. There probably wasn’t a lot of time to be children and form bonds with parents.
“Still, it seems that they were ascribed status. We can tell this from their graves, which show that at least 40 per cent of children under five years old are buried with grave goods. This indicates to us that there was a sense of loss, or grief, when children passed away because significant items were placed in their graves – shells, necklaces, jade beads.

“I don’t think this would happen in a culture where the child was not valued as a child.”
The picture of familial caring community grew even clearer when the excavation team discovered a skeleton, curled up in the foetal position, which was very different from the rest. Closer examination revealed that this person had been disabled.

“The diameter of the femur bones was very small, like a child’s, but clearly from the skull this person had made it to adulthood, perhaps into his twenties. Yet the muscle markings we would usually expect to see on the legs of a person of this age were non-existent.
“Then we got to the shoulder area. It was massively developed and there was evidence of chronic arthritis in the shoulder and wrist which would be very unusual in an individual of this age, except, perhaps, if this person used their upper body a lot.

“When we examined the spine, we saw the probable reason for these patterns: the cervical bones [at the top of the neck] were fused together which would have incapacitated this person to a very large extent. We think that they probably had little use of their legs – hence the underdevelopment of the femur bones – and perhaps moved around using their arms.
“What surprises us is that this person lived quite so long. It seems as if this person was probably a part of the community, could contribute with some work using the hands and arms, and was looked after in some way.

“They were afforded the same basic burial as other members of the community, so I think we can safely speculate that this was a sophisticated society that valued the human above perhaps the need for them to provide an equal amount of food, safety and protection as a healthy adult did.”

A basic burial of all of those aged over about five years old featured a clay pot. This appears to be minimum inclusion in all burials and likely indicates an offering to the afterlife, Oxenham says.

Some graves are more richly stocked with extra pottery, beads, stone implements and jade. What this indicates is something of which Oxenham is uncertain.

Even more uncertain is the way in which the skeleton with the richest grave at the Man Bac excavation came to be so revered, given that he is an outsider. He has the physical appearance of the earlier and likely original inhabitants of the region, often referred to as Australomelanesians.

The grave of this man included beads, shells and pots as well as jewellery including a curved, shell necklace and a jade bangle which Oxenham suspects denotes prestige.
Strangely, it is the man’s teeth that provide the strongest clue to his origins, indicating that he most likely came into the community later in life.

“Typically we see, particularly in the area that is today Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, that there was a practice of tooth ablation – where two teeth from the individual are removed. It’s a ritual and generally happened fairly early in life.

“There are different patterns of which teeth are removed depending on what change in status it indicates: adulthood, marriage, a change in status.

“But this guy, who from his skull shape is clearly not of the same ancestral origins, had no teeth removed. He was an outsider, that much is clear, and we suspect he came into the community later.”

For Oxenham, it is a small landmark: it says that this community’s original inhabitants accepted outsiders, and even revered them.

“This guy comes into a community area as an adult and ends up one of the richest guys in the site, indicating he was someone with influence.

“It’s also a peaceful integration. We can safely say that. He comes in from a different ethnic group, integrates into a small village, is buried with prized grave goods and there’s no evidence of weapons being used against other humans at all.

“I’d say this community, at this time, was caring, peaceful, multicultural, and well off in terms of everyday goods like pottery, tools and jewellery given that they were all placed in graves. From what this site is telling us I’d say it was probably an idyllic place and you could live a good life up to the age of 60.”

The challenge now is to extract the exact information about where this outsider came from by examining strontium levels. The metal strontium leaves an environmental signature in bones that can reveal the provenance of the person.

As well as revealing a more exact origin for the mystery outsider, Oxenham hopes the strontium testing will also provide more clues on just how much multiculturalism there was in this community, particularly regarding marriage of women or men from outside.

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ANU Reporter 
Spring 2007