At the site of Co Loa, researchers are examining the foundations of power in Southeast Asia.
ABOUT 10 MILES OUTSIDE of Hanoi’s city center, where the urban environment gives way to rice paddies and vegetable stalls, a steep hill rises abruptly out of the landscape and runs adjacent to the road for half a mile before turning away. Closer examination reveals that it is man-made—substantial, certainly, and old. The rise is, in fact, the outer edge of the remains of Co Loa, Vietnam’s earliest urbanized center, an earthen rampart that, more than 2,000 years after it was built, still defines the land it occupies. The structure, says Nam C. Kim, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, represents a turning point in Vietnam’s history, the moment when a powerful, centralized state evolved out of the region’s proto historic Iron Age culture.
Co Loa is a city that shouldn’t have existed, at least not at the time and on the scale that its ramparts suggest. The lowest levels of Co Loa’s walls have been dated as far back as 300 b.c., a period in which, according to many researchers, centralized states had not yet evolved in Southeast Asia. Instead, scholars have long believed that the region’s only settlements were small, moated, and loosely organized at best. Such minor sites formed part of Vietnam’s ancient Dongson culture, a society known for its impressive ceremonial bronze drums. The Dongson left behind no written records, and their scattered burials and archaeological sites are linked to one another only by the distinctive bronze work—drums, daggers, vessels—that suggests a shared cultural production.
This story is from the July/August 2016 edition of Archaeology.
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This story is from the July/August 2016 edition of Archaeology.
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