Go Cao Su Site

Just under the ordinary soil of the Đức Hòa area, in the old Long An province, a cultural layer has slept since prehistoric times. People call the place Gò Cao Su.

Gò Cao Su is an archaeological site in Đức Hòa Thượng commune. The land once belonged to Long An and now belongs to Tây Ninh province. According to the National Museum of History, the site covers about 2,000 square meters. In 1994, the Institute of Archaeology and the Long An Museum excavated it. They found a cultural layer and took samples for carbon-14 dating.

The dating results show some spread, and specialists have to read them in context. That does not lessen the meaning of Gò Cao Su. It belongs to one of the oldest layers of history that southern Vietnam still keeps, from the time before the Óc Eo culture. Óc Eo was an ancient port settlement in the Mekong Delta.

In the archaeology of the old province, Gò Cao Su is named with a group of nearby sites. The group includes Bình Tả and An Sơn. It also includes the large and the small mound of Gò Tháp. According to a 2024 study by Lã Thúy Hường, all of these sites belong to the prehistoric and Óc Eo heritage.

The Đức Hòa area is not only farmland or modern industry. Beneath that ordinary soil lie cultural layers from a time when people lived, traded and organized their daily lives here. That was thousands of years ago, before there were village names or province names as there are today.

The first people to step onto that mound would have seen a wild plain, with no canal banks and no bamboo hedges. They lived, made pottery and buried their loved ones, and slowly faded from memory. Thousands of years later, archaeologists gently turned back the earth. They found the traces of those people still there, quietly waiting to be told again.