Ban Chiang Culture And Dong Son Culture History Essay

Ban Chiang Culture And Dong Son Culture History Essay For the origin of the metalwork in Southeast Asia, there were many different opinions of the scholars. Some scholars support that the metalwork in Southeast Asia was origin locally and some of them support that it was from India and China. But unluckily, there is not enough evidence to prove which of them would be the truth. Therefore, the origin of the metalwork in Southeast Asia is not clear and uncertain. Compare with the Ban Chiang culture, the Dong son culture was appeared later in Southeast Asia. The Dong son was also one of the flourishing cultures during Bronze and Iron Age period in Southeast Asia. In geography, the center of the Dong son culture was located in the Red river valley at the North Vietnam. It was named by the village where the archeologists had found. The Dong son culture was not form independently and it was probably developed from the local Neolithic cultures at Vietnam such as the Dong dau. Different to the Ban Chiang, there was the monarch kingdom (VÄà †â€™n Lang and Au Lac) appeared in Vietnam. The Dong son people did trade in Southeast Asia and also China and India by sea, it made the Dong son culture was influenced and transformed by the Indian and the Chinese. In 43 AD., the Dong son was occupied and rude by the Han dynasty in China. The characteristic of the Dong son culture was the bronze object with the high level craftsmanship. Till the Dong son period, the people mastered the technology and skill of the bronze making, they used the metals to make many different kind of metal tools. The metallurgy and the bronze making was in a very high level, and they developed their own sophisticated metallurgy techniques based on the special quality of the bamboo and they were able to use the bamboo to fashion a fire-piston that produced the heat required to liquefy metal.   [ 1 ]    The Dong son people used the metal tools in their life, especially the bronze. They used the bronze in making the agricultural tools such as the ploug hshare, axe, spade, sickles and hoe etc, (few of them were made by iron) it reflected that the agriculture was high developed in Dong son and the ploughshare was the typical agricultural bronze tools in this culture, it showed and proved that the Dong son people had already domesticated and used the water buffalos’ strength in their agricultural activities. Besides the agricultural tools, many weapons were found in the relics of the Dong son culture. It might reflect that there were wars happened in this region. There were various of weapons were found and it included the arrows, axe, daggers, spears, swords and breastplates etc., different kind of these weapons showed that the military technology of the Dong son people was quite completed. On the other hands, the weapons were rich of decorative patterns, those patterns were vividly and detailed. The weapons were made in many different shape and the patterns was usually animals and human figures, it represented that the metal lurgic technology of the Dong son people was very sophisticated and we can also see what the Dong son people looked like from the patterns.