Through these surveys and excavations, we have found a great number of artifacts with difference types, such as unfinished stone axe or adze, production tools, points, ornament with fragments of bracelet, beads…. These are all fine products.

This paper is about a quite unique artifact, banian bud-shaped stone spear head. When conducting a survey at Dong Khoi site in October 2001, we found a banian bud-shaped spear head with some artifacts, fakes… on the surface of the Dong Khoi paddy-field.  

The spear head is quite intact, 9.2cm in length, 5,2cm in width, made of cement-colored bazan stone, labeled KK: BTTH 5932/Đ: 1650.

The spear head is in the banian-bud shaped, very nice, perfectly-retouched, (not polished). Two sides of the spear head are quite flat. One side is flat and a bit concave, trace of the first flake. The last side is slightly convex and its surface got a lot of concaves resulting from retouching.  The handle of spear head is short and in rectangular shaped. Two edges are sharp and got thinner to the point which is keen.  

To understand more about this artifact, we do research all the artifacts revealed from Dong Khoi and Con Chan Tien site (having equivalent phase) being kept in the museum. However, we have not found any artifacts like banian-bud shaped spear head unearthed in Dong Khoi site. Probably, this is the only stone spear head in Dong Khoi site, Early Bronze Age, in Thanh Hoa province. And then, this stone spear head becomes the model for bronze spearhead and harpoon which develop and get perfect in later period: Dong Son culture. It makes a considerable contribution to Dong Son culture, a splendidly -developed culture in the world, 2000 years BP.

Minh Luan

References: Dong Khoi excavation in December 2006- Pham Thanh Son’s Graduated Paper