(Cinet)- The Thanh Cha excavation site in central Binh Dinh province – home to vestiges of Vijaya, the political and cultural hub of Champa Kingdom found three layers of architectural structures on December 18.
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| Photo:Internet |
The findings were results of an excavation carried out by the Center for Imperial City Research under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.
The bottom layer was a square-structured shrine covering 64.78 square metres, which was assumed to date back between the 4th and 10th centuries when Vijaya was still a county of Champa Kingdom.
The second layer extended a larger area of 289.59square metres, where archaeologists found a drain, four sections of brick walls and three separate brick floors. The third layer on top was a system of holes containing brick pieces resembling the Vietnamese ancient method to strengthen the foundation.
The last two structures were estimated to be built between the 11 th and 15th centuries when Vijaya became the capital of Champa.
The excavation also found 6,691 artifacts including pieces of Ying Yang roof tiles, basins, bowls and Sa Huynh pottery.
The history of Champa begins in prehistory with the migration of the ancestors of the Cham people to mainland Southeast Asia and the founding of their Indianized maritime kingdom based in what is now central Vietnam in the early centuries AD, and ends when the final vestiges of the kingdom were annexed and absorbed by Vietnam in 1832.
The Vietnamese government fears that evidence of Champa's influence over the disputed area in the South China Sea would bring attention to human rights violations and killings of ethnic minorities in Vietnam such as in the 2001 and 2004 uprisings, and lead to the issue of Cham autonomy being brought into the dispute, since the Vietnamese conquered Cham people in a war in 1832, and the Vietnamese continue to destroy evidence of Cham culture and artifacts left behind, plundering or building on top of Cham temples, building farms over them, banning Cham religious practices, and omitting references to the destroyed Cham capital of Song Luy in the 1832 invasion in history books and tourist guides. The situation of Cham compared to ethnic Vietnamese is substandard, lacking water and electricity and living in houses made out of mud.