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variety of resources were maintained. Dependence
on too few crops increased the risk of famine due
to crop failure. Domestication also had broad eco-
logical and health-related impacts. For example,
field preparation led to wide-scale ecological disrup-
tion with changed erosion patterns. Intensive irriga-
tion brought about soil salination in the Middle
Holocene of Southwest Asia. Desertification was
enhanced in some regions. Health risks increased
despite the year-round greater availability of energy.
Higher starch content in the human diet led to
poorer dental health. When people were brought
together by village life, the incidence of viral dis-
eases increased. Domestication and the agricultural
systems within which crops were produced intro-
duced systemic changes to human life around the
globe. Research on domestication is slowly revealing
an understanding of one of the most important
processes in the development of modern human
culture.
[See also Africa, Origins of Food Production in; Agri-
culture; Asia, Origins of Food Production in: Origins
of Food Production in South Asia; Asia, Origins of
Food Production in: Origins of Food Production in
Southeast Asia; Asia, Origins of Food Production in:
Origins of Food Production in China; Banyan Cave;
Guilá Naquitz; Holocene; Khok Phanom Di; Kuk;
Mesoamerica, Origins of Food Production in; Mis-
sissippian Culture; Near East; New Guinea, Origins
of Food Production in; North America, Origins of
Food Production in; Pacific Islands, Origins of Food
Production in the; Plant Remains, Analysis of; Pleis-
tocene; South America, Origins of Food Production
in; Spirit Cave.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cowan, C. Wesley, and Patty Jo Watson, eds. The Origins
of Agriculture: An International Perspective, 1992.
Gebauer, Anne Birgitte, and T. Douglas Price, eds. Tran-
sition to Agriculture in Prehistory, 1992.
Harris, David R., and Gordon C. Hillman, eds. Foraging
and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation, 1989.
Heiser, Charles B., Jr. Of Plants and People, 1985.
Rindos, David. The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary
Perspective, 1984.
Smith, B. “Documenting Domesticated Plants in the
Archaeological Record.”In Documenting Domestica-
tion: New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms, edi-
ted by M. A. Zeder et al., pp. 15–24, 2006.
Zeder, Melinda A. “Central Questions in the Domestica-
tion of Plants and Animals.”Evolutionary Anthropol-
ogy 15 (2006): 105–117.
Gary W. Crawford
D
ONG
S
ON
C
ULTURE
Beginning in the middle of the first millennium
BC, Southeast Asia and China’s southern fringes
embraced a distinctive metal-using tradition whose
northern Vietnamese manifestation was called
“Dong Son”(in Vietnamese, Đ^
ong Sơn). To the north-
west, the Yunnan counterpart is called “Dian cul-
ture.”The discovery of the protohistoric Dong Son
culture was the first exposure to Europeans of a
complex Bronze–Iron Age stratified society in main-
land Southeast Asia. At the site of Dong Son, on the
south bank of the Ma River near Thanh Hoa (north-
ern Vietnam), French and later Swedish excavations
revealed a rich cemetery complex containing objects
of bronze, iron, pottery, imported semiprecious
stones, and artifacts of Chinese origin. Subsequent
excavations at many Vietnamese sites indicate that
although the type of site was peripheral to the focus
of Dong Son activities in the Red River delta, it em-
bodies the Southeast Asian Iron Age in its reflection
of the socially stratified and semi-urban nature of the
culture as a whole.
Initially, the Dong Son was regarded as a distinc-
tive Bronze Age culture, principally on the basis of
archaeological materials derived from burial con-
texts at the type site and similar localities along
the Ma and Ca rivers of northern Vietnam, as well
as the recovery of Dong Son–style bronzes over a
much wider region of mainland and island South-
east Asia (e.g., Sumatra, Java, Bali, Irian Jaya), have
forced archaeologists to reevaluate the nature of
Dong Son culture, its geographic range, and its tem-
poral duration. Most archaeologists agree with Ha
Van Tan (1980) that the Dong Son culture has local
Vietnamese origins; indeed, design styles on the
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 10/8/2012, SPi
424 DONG SON CULTURE
bronze drums reflect stylistic continuity with the
preceding Phung Nguyen culture. Archaeologists
are able to delineate a clear development trajectory
between roughly 700 BC and AD 100 in which stylis-
tic elements of local Bronze Age origin are gradually
incorporated within the products of the Dong Son
bronze-casters.
Dong Son culture is best known for its mortuary
sites and the bronze wares, including so-called
drums, that these sites have yielded to archaeolo-
gists. Such drums were probably used both for com-
munal celebrations and as mortuary items; parallel
items in Yunnan’s Dian culture (southwest China)
also held cowry shells. Other typical Dong Son
bronzes include large bucket-shaped vessels termed
situlae, daggers, swords, and socketed axes. The
scale of the metal industry indicated by these finds
indirectly reflects the organizational complexity of
Dong Son society (the bronze drum from Co Loa,
e.g., weighs 159 lb [72 kg] and would have required
smelting from about 1 to 7 tons [.91 to 6.35 mt]
of copper ore). That such Dong Son objects (and
particularly the drums) are found throughout the
Southeast Asian region suggests their high prestige
value to local complex societies. That they reflect
local Southeast Asian cultures and their environ-
ments also seems likely: wetland deltaic motifs
(frogs, water birds) are common, and so are images
of people rowing long boats. Extensive Vietnamese
research on this period indicates that Dong Son
culture was not restricted to the low-lying delta
regions of northern Vietnam but also included
upland cultures.
Historical documents record that in AD 43, the
Dong Son homeland in Southeast Asia finally suc-
cumbed to Chinese invasions from the north, and
the entire region was incorporated within the terri-
tory of the Han dynasty. Toward the end of the Dong
Son sequence, Han Chinese expansion southward
into northern Vietnam becomes increasingly evident
in the material culture of Dong Son sites. Portable
artifacts (e.g., bronze mirrors, coins, seals, halberds,
Han stamped earthenware jars), and brick Han-style
tombs regularly occur in later Dong Son sites.
Whether iron metallurgy also arrived with the Han
Chinese remains a matter of some debate.
Through this period, Dong Son remained reso-
lutely Southeast Asian in the cultural traditions
that its archaeological remains reflect: its metal
tradition, its boat-shaped coffin burials, and its
locally manufactured ceramics all align this culture
more closely with other parts of mainland Southeast
Asia than with cultures north of the Yangtze River.
The extent to which similar metal-using traditions
in adjacent regions such as southwest China’s Dian
civilization, and adjacent regions immediately north
of Vietnam (particularly neighboring Chinese pro-
vinces of Guangxi Autonomous Region, Guangdong
Province, and Guizhou Province) should be consid-
ered an integral part of the Dong Son tradition
remains to be adequately explored. Another unre-
solved issue regards relationships between Dong
Son populations in northern Vietnam and their Sa
Huynh neighbors immediately to the south.
[See also Asia: Prehistory and Early History of South-
east Asia; China: Han Empire; Southeast Asia, King-
doms and Empires of.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Janse, J. M. Archaeological Research in Indo-China. Vol. 3,
The Ancient Dwelling Site of Dong-S'on (Thanh-Hoa,
Annam), 1958.
Ha Van Tan. “Nouvelles Recherches Préhistoriques et
Protohistoriques au Vietnam.”Bulletin de l'École
Française d'Extrême-Orient 68 (1980): 113–154.
Higham, Charles. The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia, 1996.
Higham, Charles. Early Cultures of Mainland Southeast
Asia, 2002.
John W. Olsen; revised by Miriam T. Stark
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 10/8/2012, SPi
DONG SON CULTURE 425
