Associate Professor Dr Nguyen Lan Cuong has been a paleoanthropologist for 44 years. Cuong talks about his passion for his job, which seems to grow as time goes on.

Associate Professor Dr Nguyen Lan Cuong has been a paleoanthropologist for 44 years. Although retired, he still stays busy by taking trips to look for new archaeological discoveries. Cuong talks about his passion for his job, which seems to grow as time goes on.

Associate Professor Dr Nguyen Lan Cuong was born in 1941 to a family of intellectuals. His father, Professor Nguyen Lan, and six brothers are all university lecturers.

As a student in Germany in 1979 he was the first and only Vietnamese to study the restoration of human faces from skulls.

He is currently the deputy secretary general of the Viet Nam Archaeological Association and a history lecturer at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Why did you choose paleoanthropology as a lifelong career?

I graduated from the Biology Faculty at the National University in 1964. In 1965 I was sent to the Institute of Medicine to diagram medicinal herbs because I am very good at drawing. After only a few months I became bored of sitting in my office because I loved exploring and travelling.

When I heard that the Archaeological Team (the precursor of today’s Institute for Archaeology) was hiring staff to study ancient human skeletons at excavation sites I decided to join them.

You chose to study human skeletons after only briefly hearing about the job. Why?

Because I thought the job was in a new field that would create conditions for me to travel a lot.

Archaeology was a very new sector, existing in Viet Nam for only ten years before that. Only foreign scholars studied archaeology in Viet Nam during the French colonial regime.

What is the significance of your job?

So far I have studied about 800 ancient skeletons. We typically find ancient skeletons near excavation sites of ancient items made out of pottery, stone or metals.

The study of ancient skeletons is very necessary because paleoanthropologists are able to discover secrets about the person’s life: their burial posture, male or female, age at death, did they have any diseases, how tall they were, their level of fitness, and, the most difficult thing to identify, their race.

Some people around the world have found Buddha statues which are actually the embalmed bodies of monks. You have found some such mummies in Viet Nam. Can you describe their special features, compared to other mummies found in the world?

I was the head of three projects that studied nhuc than, which are special mummies of Buddhist monks: the entire body was embalmed, including all organs, then the corpse was covered with many layers of paint and Nepalese paper to become a Buddha statue. Discoveries of nhuc than have only been found within Zen schools.

Viet Nam and China appear to be the only countries that used this burial method.

Embalming in Egypt required the removal of the brain and all inner organs, except for the heart, from the body.

We found four nhuc than, including two statues of the monks Vu Khac Minh and Vu Khac Truong in Dau Pagoda in Ha Noi, a statue of monk Chuyet Chuyet in Phat Tich Pagoda and a statue of monk Nhu Tri in Tieu Son Pagoda in Bac Ninh Province.

China still has one entire mummy in Guangdong Province.

What are some of the difficulties in your job?

I spent a lot of time studying archaeology on my own because there weren’t any teachers in Vietnam.

Fortunately, I attended a course in Germany from 1979 to 1981. I was the first Vietnamese to study methods for restoring human faces from skulls at the Berlin Scientific Academy.

For the sake of comparison, Japan has 300 paleoanthropologists, while we only have three. One is retired, one will retire soon and the other is a young researcher.

Although the job is difficult, we don’t receive much money while travelling in remote mountainous areas. So if we did not love the job we could not pursue it.

What are some of the important elements for a paleoanthropologist?

The most important thing is a passion for the job. We recently found an ancient skull in Mai Da Nuoc, in Ba Thuoc District, in the central province of Thanh Hoa. It was partially fossilised and covered with a thick layer of sediment. My colleague Nguyen Kim Thuy and I spent six months cleaning it. The skull was almost complete and was fairly beautiful.

Even though we could never get rich doing this job, it does allow us to travel a lot. We have often been amazed by the beautiful landscapes of the Motherland.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

We should create conditions for young people to study. In my time I had to rely primarily on self-study, but the State should invest in training the young generations in science, particularly gene studies. Science should be considered equal to culture and economy.

VietNamNet/Vietnam News