PALEOLITHIC COMPLEX OF THE HOABINHIAN XOM TRAI CAVE (VIETNAM)
Abstract
In the first half of the 20th century, the French researcher M. Colani, based on archaeological work in the caves of North Vietnam, identified the Hoa Binh culture. Later it turned out that Hoabinhian industries are widespread in the Indochina Peninsula, Sumatra, and southern China. This publication is dedicated to the collection of stone tools obtained as a result of excavations by a joint Russian-Vietnamese expedition of the Xom Trai cave in 2022, discovered by Vietnamese researchers in 1980. The conducted technical and typological analysis showed that the stone industry of the Xom Trai Cave is pebble-flake and belongs to the late stage of the Hoabinhian, which corresponds to the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary. A large number of tool forms, a minimal amount of primary fission products, and evidence of intensive economic activity allow us to define this type of site as a site-settlement. The features of the Hoabinhian stone industry correspond to the type of adaptation of the ancient population, characteristic of tropical rainforests.
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