Anna Willis

An Son and the Neolithic of Southern Vietnam

Between 4500 and 3500 years ago, partially intrusive Neolithic populations in the riverine basins of mainland Southeast Asia began to form mounded settlements and to develop economies based on rice cultivation, fishing, hunting, and the domestication of animals, especially pigs and dogs. A number of these sites have been excavated in recent years and they are often large mounds that can attain several meters in depth, comprising successive layers of alluvial soil brought in periodically to serve as living floors. The site of An Son is of this type and lies in a small valley immediately north of the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam. Excavated on five occasions since 1978, and most recently in 2009, it was occupied from the late third into the late second millennium b.c. An Son has produced evidence that attests the domestication of pigs and dogs in all layers apart (perhaps) from the most basal one, which was not investigated in 2009, together with the growing of rice of the subspecies Oryza sativa japonica, of Chinese Neolithic origin. The oldest pottery has simple incised and punctate zoned decoration with parallels in central Thailand, especially in the basal phases at Nong Nor and Khok Phanom Di. From its middle and later occupation phases (1800–1200 b.c.), An Son has produced a number of supine extended burials with finely decorated pottery grave goods that carry some unique forms, especially vessels with wavy or serrated rims. The An Son burials represent a Neolithic population that expressed a mixture of both indigenous Hoabinhian and more northerly (probably Neolithic southern Chinese) cranial and dental phenotypes, perhaps representing a likely ancestral population for some of the modern Austroasiatic-speaking populations of mainland Southeast Asia.

The Neolithic Demographic Transition and Oral Health: The Southeast Asian Experience

The purpose of this article is to present new oral health data from Neolithic An Son, southern Vietnam, in the context of (1) a reassessment of published data on other Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Age Southeast Asian dental series, and (2) predictions of the Neolithic Demographic Transition (NDT). To this end, frequencies for three oral conditions (caries, antemortem tooth loss, and alveolar lesions) were investigated for seven Southeast Asian adult dental series from Thailand and Vietnam with respect to time period, age-at-death and sex. A clear pattern of elevated rates for oral disease in the Neolithic followed by a marked improvement in oral health during the Bronze and Iron Ages was observed. Moreover, rates of caries and antemortem tooth loss for females were almost without exception higher than that for males in all samples. The consensus view among Southeast Asian bioarchaeologists that oral health did not decline with the adoption/intensification of agriculture in Southeast Asia, can no longer be supported. In light of evidence for (1) the low cariogenicity of rice; (2) the physiological predisposition of females (particularly when pregnant) to poorer oral health; and (3) health predictions of the NDT model with respect to elevated levels of fertility, the most plausible chief explanation for the observed patterns in oral health in Southeast Asia is increased levels of fertility during the Neolithic, followed by a decline in fertility during the subsequent Bronze and Iron Ages.

Emergence and Diversification of the Neolithic in Southern Vietnam: Insights From Coastal Rach Nui

ABSTRACT We examine the southern Vietnamese site of Rach Nui, dated to between 3390 and 3850 cal BP, in the context of three major aspects of the Neolithic in Mainland Southeast Asia: mound formation and chronology, construction techniques, and subsistence economy. Results indicate that this ca. 75 m in diameter, 5 m high mound, comprising over a dozen phases of earthen platforms, upon which were raised sophisticated wooden structures, was built in <200 years. While consuming domesticated millet, rice, and occasionally dogs and pigs, the main subsistence orientation included managed tubers and fruits and a range of mangrove ecosystem taxa: catfishes, turtles, crocodiles, monitor lizards, macaques and langurs, to name a few. This combined vegeculture-foraging lifeway in a mangrove forested environment, likely in the context of a tradable goods extractive industry, adds to a growing picture of significant diversity, and sophisticated construction skills in the Southeast Asian Neolithic.

Ancient genomes document multiple waves of migration in Southeast Asian prehistory

Ancient migrations in Southeast Asia The past movements and peopling of Southeast Asia have been poorly represented in ancient DNA studies (see the Perspective by Bellwood). Lipson et al. generated sequences from people inhabiting Southeast Asia from about 1700 to 4100 years ago. Screening of more than a hundred individuals from five sites yielded ancient DNA from 18 individuals. Comparisons with present-day populations suggest two waves of mixing between resident populations. The first mix was between local hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers associated with the Neolithic spreading from South China. A second event resulted in an additional pulse of genetic material from China to Southeast Asia associated with a Bronze Age migration. McColl et al. sequenced 26 ancient genomes from Southeast Asia and Japan spanning from the late Neolithic to the Iron Age. They found that present-day populations are the result of mixing among four ancient populations, including multiple waves of genetic material from more northern East Asian populations. Science, this issue p. 92, p. 88; see also p. 31 Ancient DNA data shed light on the past 4000 years of Southeast Asian genetic history. Southeast Asia is home to rich human genetic and linguistic diversity, but the details of past population movements in the region are not well known. Here, we report genome-wide ancient DNA data from 18 Southeast Asian individuals spanning from the Neolithic period through the Iron Age (4100 to 1700 years ago). Early farmers from Man Bac in Vietnam exhibit a mixture of East Asian (southern Chinese agriculturalist) and deeply diverged eastern Eurasian (hunter-gatherer) ancestry characteristic of Austroasiatic speakers, with similar ancestry as far south as Indonesia providing evidence for an expansive initial spread of Austroasiatic languages. By the Bronze Age, in a parallel pattern to Europe, sites in Vietnam and Myanmar show close connections to present-day majority groups, reflecting substantial additional influxes of migrants.

Between foraging and farming: strategic responses to the Holocene Thermal Maximum in Southeast Asia

Large, ‘complex’ pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer communities thrived in southern China and northern Vietnam, contemporaneous with the expansion of farming. Research at Con Co Ngua in Vietnam suggests that such hunter-gatherer populations shared characteristics with early farming communities: high disease loads, pottery, complex mortuary practices and access to stable sources of carbohydrates and protein. The substantive difference was in the use of domesticated plants and animals—effectively representing alternative responses to optimal climatic conditions. The work here suggests that the supposed correlation between farming and a decline in health may need to be reassessed.

Towards a Bioarchaeology of Care of Children

In many ways, the current staged approach for exploring the issue of care in the past proposed in the bioarchaeology of care model can be used with any individual, from any time period and/or cultural background, regardless of their final age-at-death. Indeed, the care model can be trained on children, adults and the very old to great effect. This was demonstrated in the first published case study of Man Bac Burial 9 (MB9) (Journal of Paleopathology, 1(1):35–42; 2011), in as much as MB9’s care commenced in childhood and continued into his teens and until his death in his mid to late twenties. The question is whether the bioarchaeology of care model can be used to explore possible provision of health-related care for children when disease and its manifestations are rather less dramatic. Might this model – or an adaptation of it – be useful in exploring health-related care needs and provision for children at a population level, particularly in the contexts of elevated rates of childhood mortality and morbidity often found in prehistoric and early historic lifeways? This chapter explores this issue, focusing on behaviour within the same population that raised and cared for MB9. The value of returning to the Man Bac population is that care has already been clearly demonstrated for one severely physically disabled individual, thus establishing a capacity for caregiving among some members of this community, at least. This chapter considers whether, in a situation where skeletal evidence suggests elevated rates of subadult morbidity and mortality, this capacity for intensive levels of care provision was invested in all children.

Cranio-morphometric and aDNA corroboration of the Austronesian dispersal model in ancient Island Southeast Asia: Support from Gua Harimau, Indonesia

The Austronesian language is spread from Madagascar in the west, Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) in the east (e.g. the Philippines and Indonesian archipelagoes) and throughout the Pacific, as far east as Easter Island. While it seems clear that the remote ancestors of Austronesian speakers originated in Southern China, and migrated to Taiwan with the development of rice farming by c. 5500 BP and onto the northern Philippines by c. 4000 BP (the Austronesian Dispersal Hypothesis or ADH), we know very little about the origins and emergence of Austronesian speakers in the Indonesian Archipelago. Using a combination of cranial morphometric and ancient mtDNA analyses on a new dataset from Gua Hairmau, that spans the pre-Neolithic through to Metal Period (5712—5591cal BP to 1864—1719 cal BP), we rigorously test the validity of the ADH in ISEA. A morphometric analysis of 23 adult male crania, using 16 of Martin’s standard measurements, was carried out with results compared to an East and Southeast Asian dataset of 30 sample populations spanning the Late Pleistocene through to Metal Period, in addition to 39 modern samples from East and Southeast Asia, near Oceania and Australia. Further, 20 samples were analyzed for ancient mtDNA and assigned to identified haplogroups. We demonstrate that the archaeological human remains from Gua Harimau cave, Sumatra, Indonesia provide clear evidence for at least two (cranio-morphometrically defined) and perhaps even three (in the context of the ancient mtDNA results) distinct populations from two separate time periods. The results of these analyses provide substantive support for the ADH model in explaining the origins and population history of ISEA peoples.