Digging in the Dirt

Good scholars, honest scholars, will continue to differ about the interpretation of archaeological remains simply because archaeology is not a science. It is an art. And sometimes it is not even a very good art.

-William Dever

Reassembling the past from the archaeological record is like trying to piece together the last chapter of a novel when all the earlier chapters of the book have been torn to shreds; all you have to go by are have a mere handful of page scraps. To make sense of the ending, we analyze these scraps, categorize them, catalog them, and make an inference. But in the end, much of what we think we know is little more than an educated guess.

No matter how deep a hole you dig, you can always dig deeper. When digging into history, I have to ask myself: how deep is deep enough? Or, back to the tattered novel analogy, if the final chapter is the present, how many scraps and snippets will I need before I can make a reasonable statement about how we arrived at the final chapter?

We know the Vietnamese culture began about 3000 B.C.E., but I want to dig down a little deeper, to find out more about the people who became the Vietnamese. I have to look even farther back. But how far? Hominids have been living in Eastern Asia for the last 1.5 million years. These hominids may have been Homo erectus. And they could have been Homo eragaster. Just to make things interesting, these two could be the same species anyway--we just don't know. Such is the difficulty with anthropology.

Regardless, I'm sure I don't need to go back as far as 1.5 million years. Let's just dig down to, say, 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. That's about when the first humans migrated to Asia. From the moment of people's entrance into Asia, all the way to the beginning of the Hồng Bàng dynasty, this period is called the stone age. That's where (or rather, when) we'll pick up tomorrow.