Like many previous excavations, the 6th excavation of the Nguom Stone Roof archaeological site in 2025 is coordinated by the Thai Nguyen Provincial Museum (under the Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Thai Nguyen) with a number of prestigious archaeologists and researchers from the Thai Nguyen Provincial Museum.
Nguom Stone Roof has a frog-shaped shape, located on the mountainside, about 30m higher than the residential road and about 40m higher than the water level of Than Sa River. The surface area of the stone roof with traces of cultural layers is nearly 1,000m2 , known as an archaeological site of the Paleolithic era with the famous Nguom industry.
After excavations in 1981, 1982, 1985, 2017, the 5th excavation in early 2024 expanded the scope deeper and wider than the 4th excavation, archaeologists and scientists discovered the existence of cultural layers with completely different structures and colors than before, cultural layer 5 is orange, dry and loose; cultural layer 6 is more moist yellow-brown but the loose structure contains many small limestone blocks.
In the 5th and 6th cultural layers, fragmentary tools, raw pebble cores, core tools, flakes, split pieces, along with animal remains, fruit seeds and a modest number of terrestrial and aquatic molluscs were discovered. In particular, the excavation discovered burnt animal bones, bringing new insights, making many prestigious archaeologists moved by the collected artifacts, determining that the age of human habitation may be earlier than the previously determined age, that is, humans lived here about 41,500 years ago.
Director of Thai Nguyen Provincial Museum Tran Thi Nhien said that the 6th excavation of the Nguom Stone Mai site in 2025, conducted by many archaeologists and scientists from the Institute of Archaeology on an area of 8m2 , continues to consolidate some observations on the stratigraphy from the 2024 excavation, while adding some very new insights into the structure of the stratigraphy that previous excavations have never recorded.
That is, in the 5th excavation in 2024, only about 6 to 7 cultural layers were identified depending on the location, but in the 6th excavation in 2025, archaeologists encountered cultural layers 7, 8, 9, 10 and possibly up to the 12th layer. There is additional evidence to confirm the behavior of searching for and consuming plant seeds, which was first recorded in our country at a site dating back more than 124,500 years ago. The existing documents are sufficient to conclude that Mai Da Nguom is also the place where the earliest evidence of fire use in Vietnam and the entire Southeast Asia region was recorded.
At the conference reporting the preliminary results of the 6th excavation of the Nguom Stone Mai site in 2025, which was recently held, in the initial preliminary assessment, many archaeologists and scientists commented that this excavation was very successful. With the available sources of information, they believe that there is enough basis to affirm that Nguom Stone Mai is the first relic that can help understand the transition process from the middle to the late Paleolithic period, not only in Vietnam but also on a regional scale.
Many archaeologists and scientists believe that it is necessary to continue to carefully and systematically research both the geological depth and spatial breadth at Nguom Rock Roof to search for and research new information about this famous archaeological site.
Source: https://nhandan.vn/phat-hien-moi-khi-khai-quat-di-chi-mai-da-nguom-lan-thu-6-nam-2025-post896780.html
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