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Bronze Age burial site discovered in Vietnam

Written by DeadGirl
Monday, 14 February 2005
By Meraiah Foley Sydney - The discovery of a Bronze Age burial site in northern Vietnam could help resolve a dispute among archaeologists about the evolution of agriculture in the region and the origins of modern-day Vietnamese people, an Australian researcher said on Thursday. Marc Oxenham, an archaeologist from the Australian National University, is part of a team of Australian and Japanese researchers studying the cemetery that was discovered near Man Bac, about 90 kilometres south of the northern city of Hanoi. The burial site dates back to south-east Asia's early Bronze Age, between 3 500 and 4 000 years ago, when the area's inhabitants were shifting from hunting and gathering to a more agricultural subsistence. Archaeologists disagree over whether early inhabitants of the region developed agricultural practises for themselves or adopted techniques from migrating tribes originating in what is now China, where the earliest signs of farming date back at least 8 000 years, Oxenham said. He said preliminary evidence from the newly discovered burial site tended to support the latter theory. Initial examinations of the bodies indicated that some of the inhabitants belonged to an ethnic group resembling today's indigenous Australians, while other bodies were more typically Asian in appearance, Oxenham said. Earlier burial sites in the region contain remains of only the first ethnic group. Oxenham said the presence of Asian-looking bodies in the cemetery - along with an array of agricultural artifacts buried with inhabitants from both ethnic groups - added to the theory that settlers from modern-day China introduced early farming practises to the region. The presence of various ethnic groups buried at the site could also signal the origins of Vietnam's modern-day population, he said. "We may be getting a major change in the population structure going on in the cemetery," he said. "We may also be seeing a very significant population change at the time." The presence of both ethnic groups side-by-side in the cemetery indicated that there was a significant degree of intermixing between the two races, possibly marking the earliest known origins of the modern-day Vietnamese population, which became fairly well established by around 2000 BC, Oxenham said. Intact burial sites were extremely rare in Vietnam, Oxenham said, due to the heavy acidity of the soil. "Man Bac is surrounded by steep, jagged limestone outcrops that have contributed to reducing the normally acidic soils to more alkaline soils, thus aiding the preservation of biological material," he said in a statement. http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=588&art_id=qw1108019521878B213

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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries