Việt Origins (Nguồn gốc người Việt) – 2021 Version
The topic of Việt origins is one that many people find interesting. However, it is a topic that requires that one constantly update one’s knowledge.Over the past 10 years, a…
Vietnamese Prehistory and International Scholarship – Part 3: Sauer, Solheim & Hòa Bình
The late archaeologist Wilhelm Solheim would probably be very surprised to find that statements he made way back in 1971 are cited today as "evidence" that the ancestors of the…
Vietnamese Prehistory and International Scholarship – Part 2: Thought & Solheim
In 1971, archaeologist Wilhelm "Bill" Solheim made some comments in the magazine National Geographic about the origins of agriculture. His comments were premature, and turned out to be false. Then…
Vietnamese Prehistory and International Scholarship – Part 1: Introduction
For the past half century or so there has been an idea circulating in the Vietnamese world that holds that the ancestors of the Vietnamese were the first people to…
Tiền sử Việt Nam và học thuật quốc tế (phần 1)
This is my first attempt at making a video in Vietnamese. . . You gotta start somewhere. . . In recent years some Vietnamese people interested in history, both inside…
Lý Đông A, Kim Định and a Mid-20th–Century Unorthodox Version of Early Việt History
I’ve written quite a lot on this blog about the South Vietnamese philosopher, Lương Kim Định, and his ideas about history. What was Kim Định’s view of the past? In…
Dương Bá Trác on the Origins of the Vietnamese Race
Scientists have long noted that there is no biological basis for race. Races of human beings do not actually exist. They are social constructs. People create different categories of human…
An Examination of the Name Giao Chỉ/Jiaozhi
Chen Jinghe/Trần Kinh Hòa was an historian who was born in 1917 in the Japanese colony of Taiwan. However, he went to school, from elementary to university, in Japan. As…
The Absence of Historical Memory in Early “Vietnam”
When medieval Việt scholars wrote the first histories of the Red River Delta region, they structured their histories around the political principle of an “orthodox line of succession” (正統, chính…
Nguyễn Phương on the Origins of the Vietnamese Nation
Nguyễn Phương was a Catholic priest and historian who worked at the University of Hue in the 1960s. In 1965 he published a book entitled Việt Nam thời khai sinh…