People lived on the plateau for hundreds of thousands of years before anyone wrote about it. Stone tools, bronze-casting molds and a set of stone musical instruments are all that survive of most of that time. This page sets out what archaeologists and linguists have found, how sure they are, and who did the digging.
Who did the digging
Almost every excavation in the highlands has been carried out or supervised by Vietnam’s state Institute of Archaeology in Hanoi, sometimes with Russian partners. We do not use Vietnamese state publications as sources. Here we cite scholars outside Vietnam, a peer-reviewed foreign journal, and older French work; but the field data behind them often come from the Institute, and we say so.
The oldest tools
Around An Khê, in Gia Lai, a Russian–Vietnamese expedition has found more than thirty sites with stone hand axes and pebble tools. The archaeologist A. V. Kandyba reports that tektites — natural glass from a meteorite impact — found in the same layer as the tools gave dates of about 806,000 and 782,000 years ago. The dates are of the glass, not of the tools themselves, and depend on the two having lain together undisturbed.
The stone musical instruments
On February 2, 1949, road laborers extending a track beyond the Mnong Gar village of Ndut Lieng Krak, in Darlac, dug up a set of long worked stones. Local people took them for Cham work. The French anthropologist Georges Condominas, who was living among the Mnong Gar, recognized them as shaped stone and had them put back where they had been found, “toutes dressées verticalement et groupées les unes contre les autres” — all standing upright and pressed together. There were eleven blades of dark hornfels; one, broken, no longer rang. They were a lithophone, a stone xylophone, and were taken to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.
No one knows how old they are. The musicologist André Schaeffner, who published them in 1951, wrote that the set “peut dater de plusieurs siècles ou — comme certains préhistoriens l’estiment — de quelques millénaires”: it could be several centuries old or, as some prehistorians thought, a few thousand years. The American scholar Fritz Kuttner rejected a Stone Age date altogether. Other stone instruments have since been found in the region, and our peoples still make music on stone and bamboo. See Instruments beyond the gongs.
Farmers and metalworkers
Later, people on the plateau made polished stone adzes and hoes, and pottery. Scholars working with the Institute’s data describe several regional cultures: Lung Leng in the Kon Tum basin, Biển Hồ on the Pleiku plateau, and Buôn Triết in the south-west around Lắk. At Lung Leng, 15 kilometers west of Kon Tum, the archaeologist Charles Higham describes “a major Bronze Age occupation” with “numerous shouldered stone adzes and pottery vessels,” where “bronze-casting moulds reveal local expertise in metal working.”
Where our languages came from
Our peoples speak languages of two unrelated families. The Bahnar, Sedang, Mnong, Koho, Stieng and many others speak Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer) languages, whose speakers, in one scholarly account, were “surely once a broad belt” across the region. The Jarai, Rhade, Chru and Raglai speak Chamic languages, part of the Austronesian family of the islands, which “was probably introduced into Central Vietnam during the first millennium BC from Island Southeast Asia.” Peter Bellwood links the Sa Huỳnh culture of the coast to these Chamic speakers, who established “the Chamic (Austronesian) enclaves in formerly Austroasiatic regions of southern Vietnam.” When the ancestors of the Jarai and Rhade moved up onto the plateau is not settled. Linguists also disagree about which way words were borrowed: work by Paul Sidwell since 2007 argues that much of it ran from Chamic into the neighboring Austroasiatic languages. See Dega tribes and languages.
The edge of history
The first written record in the highlands is Cham. The art historian Jean Boisselier describes Cham remains in the region of Cheo Reo, in Jarai country, as appearing “to constitute the first recorded evidence of artistic activity in the mountain hinterland.” At Yang Prong, near Ea Súp in Đắk Lắk, a brick sanctuary of the kingdom of Champa carries inscriptions on its door jambs from the reign of one of its kings; it is usually dated to around 1300. See The Kings of Fire and Water.
What is missing
We have not yet read Condominas’s own 1952 report on the lithophone, Kuttner’s reasons for rejecting a Stone Age date, or Graham Thurgood’s history of the Chamic languages, and radiocarbon dates for the highland cultures are published mainly by the state Institute. Our own peoples have their own accounts of where they came from, and those belong here too.
Sources
- A. V. Kandyba, “Early Paleolithic of Vietnam and Southeast Asia,” The Russian Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2023)
- André Schaeffner, “Une importante découverte archéologique: le lithophone de Ndut Lieng Krak (Vietnam),” Revue de musicologie 33 (July 1951)
- Georges Condominas, We Have Eaten the Forest (English translation, 1977)
- Trần Văn Khê, “Du lithophone de Ndut Lieng Krak au lithophone de Bac Ai,” Revue de musicologie 68 (1982)
- Fritz A. Kuttner, The Archaeology of Music in Ancient China (1990)
- Charles Higham, Early Cultures of Mainland Southeast Asia (River Books, 2002)
- Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood (eds.), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004)
- Peter Bellwood, Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (revised edition, University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997)
- Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (eds.), Archaeology and Language II (Routledge, 1998)
- Papers from the 30th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, JSEALS Special Publication 8 (2021) — on Sidwell’s revision of Thurgood
- Jean Boisselier and Emmanuel Guillon, Hindu-Buddhist Art of Vietnam: Treasures from Champa (2001)
Compiled September 2026.