Posted on 01/15/2005 4:44:46 PM PST by blam
Aussies find bronze age canoe
January 14, 2005
AUSTRALIAN archaeologists have unearthed one of the oldest log canoes ever found in South-East Asia.
A team from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra and conservators from the National Museum of Australia excavated a 2.5m section of the boat last month at Dong Xa, about 50 kilometres southeast of the capital Hanoi.
The boat was used for burial and contained the body of an adult.
It would have been about 10m long and was believed to have been used in the Red River delta area around 100BC by a people known as the Dongson, ANU's Peter Bellwood said.
"This was a bronze age culture, the people were quite well known because they manufactured very large bronze drums which often had designs on them, and many of the designs show these boats," Professor Bellwood said.
"We've only found one end of it. The end was chopped off and used for burial.
"It's one of the oldest surviving boats under conservation in South-East Asia."
Project co-ordinator Judith Cameron, a specialist in prehistoric textiles from ANU, said the adult's body was covered with a shroud and surrounded by pottery and a large amount of matting.
"These textiles will reveal a great deal about the material and structural composition of textiles and the role of cloth in burials by the Dongson people more than 2000 years ago," Dr Cameron said.
Samples of the textiles and the bark lid and wood of the coffin are being analysed in Canberra.
The team also excavated the grave of a young child at Dong Xa, and will return to Vietnam in December.
GGG Ping.
Very interesting! I didn't know that there was a culture in Southeast Asia that practiced burials in boats.
Although, I suppose it probably was a common practice in many cultures throughout history.
Fascinating. I wish I knew more about the subject.
(Ancient burial practices are incredibly interesting I think, they speak volumes about the way in which those cultures viewed death. I recall that an anthropology teacher I had once said that being buried in a boat indicates a belief that death leads to renewal. I might be mistaken though, I took that class many years ago.)
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Asian Vikings?
The Sutton Hoo burial ship in England dates from the 7th century, more than 150 years before the first Viking raids on England.
I think there is a strong possibility that proto-Celtic people came from SE Asia. Read the book.
"In Eden in the East Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in Southeast Asia was the cradle of civilisation that fertilised the great cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Crete six thousand years ago."
Uh Oh... zot time
Goodbye!
It floats??? Guess I's better start reading more than headlines
It always amazes me that wooden things can last that long. SE Asia isn't an area where I'd look for old wooden things. But burial makes sense. People with an intimate connection to the sea would certainly look to it as having some mystical aspects and death at sea would be common to them. Makes sense to bury important with some connection to water.
Do you have you Oppenheimers mixed up? Certainly the Celts were long before this canoe, though.
Yup...And, you probably wouldn't look in Florida for mummies either. 169 7-8,000 year old mummies...90 have complete brains...And, guess what, they're Europeans.
I sure do. I mean Stephen not Robert.
Robert was the commie (along with Claus Fuchs) who was instrumental in giving the Soviets our atomic bomb secrets in the 50's.
Technically Sutton Hoo was a buried ship, not a burial ship.
10m thats a pretty good sized canoe, an entire Family could have been buried in that. The Man/Woman must have been respected.
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I had no idea Hanoi was the capitol of Australia.
No. That's the only place I've ever seen it mentioned. Thanks to SunkenCiv I have that exact tape. It was a PhD chap who was in the DNA lab where these samples were submitted. He was not a part of the archaeological team, an independent outsider. I'm challenged everytime I say 'European' but, those are his exact words.
Also, the physical features of the mummies (the oldest of which is 2000 BC) looked very much like someone from Europe today; the surviving fabric samples (some of which were similar to tartans) were similar to those of Europe and atypical of the then-contemporary Chinese fabrics. :')
What kind of wood was this?
I would think the oily woods would last the longest. (teak?)
I think you're getting your/our mummies mixed up. The 'tartan' mummies were those in the Tarim Basin in China. The Windover mummies are the ones found in the Florida bog and had fabrics but not similar to tartans.
European DNA Found In 7-8,000 Year Old Skeleton In Florida (Windover)
Let me offer one more technicality. The Sutton Hoo ship was clearly a burial but on dry land, not at sea. It was found in a group of mounds in Suffolk and is considered to be the burial site of an early 7th century Anglo Saxon Wuffing king or other high official. The amazing regalia found with it is on display at the British Museum and is not to be missed if you're ever in London.
Burials in ships are fairly common around the world. Several dry land ship burials have been found in Abydos, Egypt that date to around 3000 B.C. The symbolism of sending the dead off to an unknown paradise (Valhalla or...?) in a ship was probably a pretty universal idea back in the days when the world's geography was largely unknown. It has a lot in common with the current notion of a "heaven" in the unexplored reaches of space.
BTTT
Oh, sorry, I thought you were talking about that video I sent you.
Not quite. "ship": yes. "buried": yes.
But for it to be a "burial ship" requires habeus corpus.
Shall we say funerary ship?
Actually I was. I got mixed up too. At the time you sent me the tape about the Tarim Mummies, FReeper Shamusotoole sent me a copy of the Windover mummies tape. I just got who sent which one mixed up. Ahem, now I have it straightened out...and, it's nap time, lol.
:')
Well, I'll agree it's a "funerary ship" but experts at the British Museum believe it's also a "burial ship" although there's no surviving "habeus" corpus nor even a corpus delicti. Here's what the museum experts say:
"Amidships was the burial chamber, originally quite a building, made of oak beams five inches square and with a strong gabled roof formed by two layers of one inch oak planking laid cross-grained This structure eventually collapsed when the beams rotted and the thousand or so tons of sand and soil of the mound above fell in, sandwiching the contents.
"Except in certain protected locations, such as underneath the great silver dish at the foot of the body space, most things organic disappeared over the centuries in the acid sand of Sutton Hoo.
"The body of the king had been laid down along the line of the keel, with his head towards this western end, resplendent in the most marvelous regalia of gold and jewellery (some of the best of which appears to have been made in an East Anglian royal workshop), of a quality and a quantity unparalleled in the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, as we shall see in a moment. After thirteen centuries underground the mortal remains of the king had returned to dust but there can be little room for doubt that he had once lain there.
"He may have been lying on a bed or dais (perhaps with pillows and covers) on the deck of the ship with the great gable-ended burial-chamber above him, and about a thousand tons of soil of the mound above that. The eventual collapse of the decking and burial-chamber would have made it difficult to locate a probably already decayed body, all the more so given the acid nature of the sand in which all was buried.
"As to the identity the king embarked on this great vessel's last voyage, given that the evidence of the coin collection buried with the body suggests a date around the third decade of the seventh century, the most likely candidate on the present historical evidence is King Rædwald, one of the greatest of the Wuffing kings, who was overlord of Britain from c.617 until his death c.625."
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