Vietnam’s Role in Understanding Settlement and Social Change in Mainland Southeast Asia from c. 5000 – 3500 BP.

Vietnam possesses some of the best-preserved early 5^th to mid- 3^rd millennium BP archaeological sites anywhere in Southeast Asia. They are often deeply stratified open air settlements and/or shell mounds with evidence of singular or multiple occupations with varying lengths of residency. Combined, these sites not only provide the foundations for constructing a robust long sequence chronology that records economic and social change through time, but also enable investigation into similarities and variability in material culture attributes between contemporaneous prehistoric communities across the region. In this presentation I will discuss recent research on archaeological sites in central and northern Vietnam by our ANU and Vietnam University of Social Sciences and Humanities collaborative team that are starting to provide important new insights into changes in settlement and society in Vietnam between 5000 – 3500 BP.