Preah Vihear excavation starts

Thursday, 09 September 2010
Thet Sambath
The Phnom Penh Post

ARCHAEOLOGISTS working for the Preah Vihear National Authority have begun a dig for artefacts at the site of a village that was recently cleared to make way for development at the UNESCO World Heritage site, officials said yesterday.

Om Phirom, chief of the authority’s heritage police, said the dig began on Monday after officials found stone artefacts and statues at the former site of Kor Muoy village, which was built at the bottom of the ridge on which the temple sits.

“The archaeologists are digging at the former residences of the people to search, because we suspect there are ancient things hidden under the ground,” Om Phirom said. “We have found ancient stones and two ancient Buddhist statues when we bulldozed recently.”

The relocation of the families in Kor Muoy was first announced in July 2008 when fighting first broke out near Preah Vihear temple after its listing as a World Heritage site.

Officials said at the time that the 473 families living in the village would need to move because of safety concerns, and because they wanted to develop the area into a “cultural heritage site”.

Land has been allocated to the families in a new village 30 kilometres away, named Thamacheat Samdech Techo Village (Samdech Techo Nature Village), a name that incorporates part of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s honorific.

Om Phirom said yesterday that the last of the families were moved late last month.

“The research will take about one month to finish,” Om Phirom said of the dig. “It takes this long because the digging is done by spades, not by machinery.”

Deputy provincial governor Sor Thavy said archaeologists had also recently found four separate sites of temple ruins near Preah Vihear temple, and that they were continuing to explore the surrounding area.

“We have found four old small temples. We believe the places where the archaeologists are digging have old dikes and temple ruins,” he said.

He said much of the area near Preah Vihear temple was suspected to contain land mines, and that deminers were clearing land ahead of the dig.

If you are from Takeo, you may proud descendants of the Funan Empire (Nokor Phnom)

Our sincere thanks to Lok Bora Touch, Esq. for forwarding this interesting piece of information on Angkor Borei archeology.

LOMAP team in front of the Angkor Borei Museum (Photo: LOMAP)

Where was "Temu", capital of Funan? -- S.T. Lee Annual Lecture in Asian Art and Archaeology 2010

"Temu", the Funan's capital, was estimated to be 500 li from Funan's seaport, according to the Chinese envoys.

Oc Eo (Khmer, Keo river), believed by some as the port of the Funan (2th-7th century); but Oc Eo was not situated directly at the coast of the bay of Rach Gia province. At no time was there a port by which the Chinese envoys could enter the Funan polity. Additionally, there are no records mentioning a port at Rach Gia during or after Funan. But Peam Meas (from which "Meitho" derives) is known as a khmer port. Peam means "mouth" of a river or a lake, it also means "(water) port". (Thai, "Pa(k)" came from Khmer "Peam", Pac-nam mouth of the river) Peam Ro, for instance, in Prey Veng, was an ancient port of Ba Phnom. Peam Meas might have been the Funan's seaport the Chinese envoys mentioned. From Peam Meas, the Chinese envoys could (via the Mekong) enter the Ba Phnom's port of Peam Ro.

Now, the distance of 500 li or 200 km from the sea to the capital of funan, as estimated by the Chinese envoys recorded in 6th century cannot be seen from Oc Eo site. And it could not have been Angkor Borei, Takeo, as Angkor Borei was/is only about 85 km from O Keo/Oc Eo, and shorter in distance from Pean Meas/Meithor. Ba Phnom, Prey Veng, loosely fits the distance description by the Chinese envoys. Archaeological finds/riches at Prohear village, and Bit Meas, in Prey Veng, supports the description that Prey Veng's Ba Phnom might have been the capital of Funan, the Rich South.

Bora Touch
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S.T. Lee Annual Lecture in Asian Art and Archaeology 2010

The Lee Annual Lecture in Asian Art and Archaeology will be held in the Refectory of the Main Quadrangle of the University of Sydney from 6pm Wednesday 11th August 2010. This years lecture will be given by Professor Miriam Stark, Archaeologist, University of Hawaii-Manoa, United States of America.

The Mekong Delta Before Angkor: origins, landscapes and emergent complexity

The earliest states in mainland Southeast Asia emerged between 500 BCE and 500 CE, a period known as the Axial Age. In the West, this time encompassed Hellenistic Greece, the rise of the Roman Empire, and the birth of Christianity. Viewed from the East, the period included imperial expansion by the Han dynasty, the rise of the earliest Korean and Japanese kingdoms, the spread of Buddhism across the Asian continent, and rise of competing empires during the golden age of South Asia. Southeast Asians also embraced this Axial Age, although few historians or archaeologists have studied the period until recently. During this time Southeast Asians established a South China Sea maritime trade network and built large settlements along the region’s coasts and inland deltas. They adopted writing systems and religious ideology from South Asia, and created Indic-tinged templates for statecraft whose signatures shaped the emergence and operation of Southeast Asia's classical states like Angkor, Sukothai, and Pagan nearly a thousand years later.

Professor Miriam Stark has worked in collaboration with Cambodia's Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts since 1996 on the archaeology of the Mekong Delta. This region was politically central during the Axial Age, and work by her Lower Mekong Archaeological Project began with research at the archaeological site of Angkor Borei (Takeo province). Most scholars consider that this 300 ha walled site was a Funan capital that the Chinese annals described during the early to mid-first millennium CE. The region remained prominent in the following pre-Angkorian period, and research described in this lecture examines archaeological research by the Lower Mekong Archaeological Project on landscapes and emergent complexity.

Date: Wednesday 11th August 2010
Time: 6 - 8pm
Location: Refectory of the Main Quadrangle of the University of Sydney (http://www2.arts.usyd.edu.au/ArtsNetwork/docs/main_quad_instr.pdf)
RSVP: Monday 9th August 2010 (Martin King - 9351-7667 or martin.king@sydney.edu.au)

Miriam Stark was awarded a PhD from the University of Arizona in 1993, and has worked in Southeast Asian archaeology since 1987. With extensive field experience in North America (particularly the North American Southwest), she studied tribal potters in the northern Philippines for her doctoral research. She worked with the Thailand Archaeometallurgical project in central Thailand in the early 1990s, and “ after accepting a position at the University of Hawaii-Manoa -- began her archaeological studies in Cambodia. Through the Lower Mekong Archaeological Project and in collaboration with Cambodia's Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, Miriam has worked in the Mekong delta since 1996. The Lower Mekong Archaeological Project blends field research with training, and examines state formation and landscape evolution in the first millennium CE. She has joined the Greater Angkor Project for the 2010-2015 research program.

For additional information about this research, click here
To read a recent paper by Dr. Stark, click here

Archaeologists to dig for more clues about demise of ancient Angkor

Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The Associated Press

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: Excavations are planned at Angkor to scour for more clues about ecological problems which led to the demise of Cambodia's great ancient city, an Australian archaeologist said Thursday.

"We have clear evidence now that Angkor was big enough to have caused environmental problems," Damian Evans said.

"But we need finer-grained detail to determine for sure how severe those problems were, and whether or not the local population was able to deal with them or not," said Evans, deputy director of the Greater Angkor Project at the University of Sydney.

His group published its findings in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They reveal that Angkor, during its zenith between the 9th and 14th centuries, was "the world's most extensive preindustrial low-density complex" and far larger than previously thought. It included an elaborate water management network encompassing nearly 1,000 square kilometers (390 square miles).

Research found that the complex was too vast to manage. Extending rice fields to support a population of more than 1 million resulted in serious ecological problems, including deforestation, topsoil degradation and erosion.

The study's conclusions supported a theory in the early 1950s by Bernard-Philippe Groslier, a prominent French archaeologist, that the collapse of Angkor stemmed from over-exploitation of the environment.

The study produced a comprehensive digital mapping database detailing tens of thousands of individual features across nearly 3,000 square kilometers (1,160 square miles).

Previously, there were around 800 known temple sites in the mapped area, Evans said in an e-mail, adding that the number will likely be between 950 and 1,000 once results from the excavations have been verified on the ground.

In a separate statement posted on his group's Web site, he said some of those sites and other delicate traces of great archaeological significance are under serious threat from uncontrolled development in Siem Reap province to meet rising tourist demand.

He said the development is good for Cambodia, but that proper heritage management systems must be in place so that "small local temples sites and so on can be properly excavated and studied by archaeologists before they are destroyed for modern development."

He said he also hoped that the study will give a "stimulus for greater recognition of the need to stop the illicit international trade" in Cambodian antiquities.

The Angkor temples have suffered extensive destruction by nature and pillaging by looters during three decades of warfare and revolution in Cambodia.

The impoverished country is now at peace and the monuments, including the famed Angkor Wat, are the country's main tourist attractions, earning much-needed hard currency.

But in recent years, conservationists have expressed concerns about stress to the monuments from the tourist invasion.

Evans' study is a wake-up call for more vigilance in Cambodia's efforts to conserve its centuries-old heritage, an official of the Apsara Authority, the government agency managing the site, said Wednesday.

The official, Soeung Kong, said what happened to ancient Angkor in the past "appears to be repeating itself now" and thus highlights current challenges in managing and conserving the temples.

"Since we are aware of this, we have to take measures to prevent it from worsening or to minimize the impact as much as possible," he said.

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On the Net:

Greater Angkor Project:
http://acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/angkor/gap/index.php

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
http://www.pnas.org/current.shtml