380 Part V: Southeast Asia
culture known as the Hoabinhian was distributed from Burma to southern China
to Malaysia and parts of Sumatra. These were preagricultural foragers whose
pebble tools are their most distinctive cultural feature at this distance in time.
By 3000 B.C.E., Neolithic (that is, food-producing) cultures were well estab-
lished on the Khorat Plateau of northeast Thailand, and probably in other allu-
vial sites on the mainland. The rice itself was most likely domesticated in
southern China around 5000 B.C.E. (see chapter 1). Rice cultivation is not
found outside low alluvial basins until after about 500 B.C.E. The phenomenon
of dry-rice swidden cultivators in the hills is apparently recent; three teams of
archaeologists have scoured the hills of Thailand looking for evidence of
ancient dry-rice cultivation without turning up anything (Bellwood 1992:122).
The Neolithic assemblage typically includes domesticated cattle, pigs, fowl,
dogs, cultivated rice, and flooded fields.
These Neolithic assemblages are joined by bronze working by 1100 B.C.E.,
when we find industrious metalworkers casting copper and tin in open-hearth
furnaces. They used both the lost-wax methods and bivalve molds made of clay
strengthened with rice-chaff. The site of Ban Na Di is a cemetery with many
burials wrapped in mats, and a child covered with a crocodile skin. The dead
were sent off with grave goods like necklaces and bracelets made of shell or
shell beads. Quickly made figurines of unbaked clay in the form of cattle, pigs,
dogs, other animals, and humans suggest concepts of an afterlife where these
companions will be needed.
These metal-working Neolithic societies reached a new cultural height
about 600 B.C.E. in a densely populated and stratified society centered on the
Red River in northern Vietnam known as the Dong-son culture. Here skilled
artisans began to fashion a wholly unique and beautiful bronze drum that has
become the distinguishing feature of the culture. These drums stood on splayed
feet, with bulbous upper sides and a flat tympanum. They were highly orna-
mented with scenes that hint of the culture where these drums resounded: war-
riors wearing feather headdresses, houses with raised platforms, and longboats
with a drum in a cabin or amidships. Around the upper perimeter were friezes
of birds, deer, and other animals, along with intricate geometric patterns. They
were cast in one piece, including their lavish ornamentation, by the lost-wax
method. Over 200 of these Dong-son drums have been found in Vietnam,
Cambodia, Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, and Indonesia, almost everywhere
but Borneo and the Philippines. However, they seem to have been manufac-
tured only in the Red River region and traded to other areas. Dong-son drums
are frequently found in burial sites, which give additional evidence of a strati-
fied society in the variations of wealth buried with the dead. One hundred
bronzes were found in one grave, and some very wealthy persons were buried
in coffins of lacquered wood.
When we turn to insular Southeast Asia we have much less to work with in
terms of archaeological evidence for the pre-Indic period, because conditions
are less favorable for preservation in the tropics. However, the archaeological