A Metallurgical Study of Early Bronzes from Northern Vietnam: Some Thoughts on Methodology, Local Practices and Inter-regional Interaction

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper presents the results of the metallurgical analysis of 43 fragments of bronze artifacts recovered from Bronze Age sites in northern Vietnam. It represents the largest systematic study undertaken so far of early north Vietnamese bronzes using a range of archeo-metallurgical techniques. The artifacts, which are associated with the Dong Dau, Go Mun and Dong Son archaeological cultures, were studied using various techniques, including pXRF, SEM-EDS, and metallography. Although the sample size remains small, the compositional data on the copper, tin, lead and arsenic contents of different types of bronzes, combined with evidence of metalworking processes (e.g., hammering and heat-treatment), so far points to clear changes in metallurgical practice over the 1st millennium BCE, as well as differences with early metallurgical traditions in adjacent regions such as southeast and southwest China. The paper also reviews the uses and limitations of the different techniques used in this study of north Vietnamese bronzes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24015