| Abstract: |
Outside Vietnam, the ceramics produced in Vietnamese territory during the first millennium AD are poorly known and mostly ignored by scholars. These ceramics have turned out to be transition wares bearing the marks of a major technical innovation: the use of kilns composed of a closed, perennial structure. They bear witness to the appropriation of technology coming from the Chinese world. The study of the ceramic kilns that were active during the ten centuries of Chinese presence in North Vietnam has entered a new phase. The recent excavation of the Tuần Châu site, funded by the École Française d'Extrême-Orient and done in collaboration with the Institute of Archaeology in Hanoi and the Museum of Quảng Ninh Province, opens up new prospects for a group of sites which are poorly known outside of the country to become more widely studied. The purpose of this paper is not to draw up a typology of the sites, but rather to place them in the broader context of a technological innovation that strengthened the inclusion of Vietnamese society in regional and interregional exchange networks.
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