Household Archaeology at Angkor Wat

Handbook of East and Southeast Asian Archaeology, 2017

This paper aims to provide a glimpse into the sociopolitical settings of current archaeology in Cambodia. The archaeological training got a late start in Cambodia, beginning in 1968, and its first graduates were forced to confront a series of complications: social unrest, civil wars, and lootings. In the 1990s, National and international efforts revived and trained a new generation of archaeologists. The setting in which this new generation practices, unlike their predecessors, is not one of warfare but rather of continued lootings and developments that result in a large number of archaeological sites being destroyed for prime real estates and new road constructions without proper salvage research. However, in a few cases, some archaeologists are employed merely as salaried workers and data collectors for their international counterparts. Though the majority of research continues to be in Angkor and around large monuments, some projects have shifted focus to study early periods loca...

Routledge eBooks, 2023

More than a century after the 'collapse' of Angkor and the Khmer Empire, 16th-century King Ang Chan returned to Angkor Wat to restore it as a political and spiritual centre and rededicate other temples to Theravada Buddhism (Groslier 1985 , 16-19; Thompson 2004a , 205; 2006 , 143-48). Khmers continued to curate and invigorate their Angkorian heritage through ancestral worship and Theravada Buddhist practice through the mid-19th century; for example, King Ang Duong tried to revitalise Cambodia in the face of encroachments by Thailand and Vietnam by restoring (and building new) Buddhist pagodas in Oudong (Edwards 2007 , 132). This cyclical Cambodian worldview, which reinvigorates the past to generate new futures, contrasts markedly with progressive, linear-based approaches to the past that characterise most Western scholarship on the Angkorian world (Thompson 2006 , 151-52). Renovating and even transforming 'living' heritage sites continues to be a central concern for Buddhists in both Thailand and Cambodia (e.g., Keyes 1991 ; Byrne 1995). Despite repeated calls for diverse perspectives on Cambodia's premodern past and vitality in Khmer-driven scholarship, Cambodian voices remain under-represented in discussions of the Angkorian world. Contemporary heritage management in Cambodia involves multiple museums, World Heritage sites, and heritage units that hundreds of professionals with BAs in Archaeology from the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA) manage. Despite this surge in local capacity since the mid-1990s, Cambodian scholarship-like Southeast Asia-based archaeological scholarship more generally (Shoocongdej 2011 , 722)-remains nearly invisible in global scholarship. This chapter complements previous work (e.g., Carter et al. 2014 ; Heng and Phon 2017) and explores why Cambodian scholarship still plays a marginal role in shaping understandings of the Angkorian world by focusing on Cambodia's educational infrastructure and knowledge production during its 20th-century 'modernisation' period. We argue that four interrelated process explain Cambodians' near-invisibility: (1) frictions caused by competing Western and Khmer perceptions of heritage; (2) intellectual hegemony by the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and constructing narratives of Cambodia's aesthetic legacy (Muan 2001) and its Angkorian past; (3) mid-20th-century desire to 'modernise' Cambodia through Khmer studies that emphasised Buddhism, Khmer language and literature, and folk life; and (4) a lack of colonial commitment to capacity-building in Cambodian heritage 3 'INVISIBLE CAMBODIANS' Knowledge Production in the History of Angkorian Archaeology Heng Piphal , Seng Sonetra and Nhim Sotheavin 'Invisible Cambodians' 43 scholarship. Colonial scholarship on Cambodia's premodern past was largely divorced from the consciousness of the Khmer public, who viewed their heritage as a living religious tradition blending Buddhism, chronicular evidence, and folklore. Examining institutional histories and disjuncture between Khmer and foreign approaches to the past highlights complex relationships between archaeology, heritage management and education, colonised knowledge production, and the nation-state. Heritage and Archaeology in the Context of Khmer Studies Cambodia entered the 20th century with a cultural renaissance and modernisation that included an expansion of education beyond the traditional pagoda-based structure. New academic institutions that were founded (e.g., Royal Library, Buddhist Institute) became crucibles for the emergence of Kambuja Suriya journal, the fi rst Khmer dictionary, the Association of Khmer Writers , and the fi rst Khmer political journal (Sruk Khmaer and later Nagaravatta) (Clayton 1995 ; Edwards 2004 ; Harris 2005 , 105-56). Intense cultural and political exchanges between Cambodia and the French Protectorate characterised this period, as the French and the Khmers positioned themselves as rescuers of the descendants of Angkor to protecting their autonomy from encroaching neighbours of Thailand and Vietnam. Khmer local responses to geopolitics were more responsible for this renaissance than were western pressures to modernise (e.g., Edwards 2007 ; Hansen 2007). Khmers increasingly linked Khmer literary traditions, Buddhism, and their Angkorian past to an emerging Khmer national identity, and Angkor Wat became the symbol of the new Cambodia (Thompson 2004b , 2006 , 2016). French colonial scholars pushed back against this local narrative, denigrating contemporary Khmer literature and highlighting the rupture between modern Cambodia and Angkor through contrasting the 'degenerate' post-Angkor period with its Theravada Buddhist literature with Angkor's period of regional dominance (e.g., Coedès 1931). Some also charged that Khmers lacked self-expression altogether (Pou 1980 , 142). These colonial critics misunderstood Khmer literature, which-like Khmer education and knowledge production more broadlywas deeply enmeshed with Buddhism, the monarchy, and a patron-client system (e.g., Ayres 2000 ; Clayton 1995 , 2; Chigas 2000). They also underestimated the local respect for Khmer cultural heritage, which King Norodom explained in 1891 in opposition to a French request to remove statuary from Khmer temples:

Archaeological Research in Asia

The Angkor empire (9-15th centuries CE) was one of mainland Southeast Asia’s major civilizations, with a 3000 km2 agro-urban capital located in northwest Cambodia. Since 2010, the Greater Angkor Project has been investigating occupation areas within Angkor’s urban core. This work has identified temple enclosures as important residential areas that made up part of Angkor’s civic-ceremonial center. In this paper, we review excavations from residential areas within Angkor Wat’s temple enclosure. We concentrate on evidence for residential patterning by focusing on our 2015 excavations, one of the largest horizontal excavations of a single occupation mound within Angkor’s civic-ceremonial center. These data offer further evidence for archaeological patterns of residential occupation within the Angkor Wat temple enclosure and a comparative dataset for future research of habitation areas within Angkor as well as domestic spaces in other urban settings.

Nowadays, traditional Khmer farmers are living on the framework of the ancient capital cities of Angkor, which is also visited by more than 2 million tourists a year. They are torn between the aspiration of profiting from the country as it opens to the market economy and to mass tourism, and the restrictions of living in a place that is mummifying into a museum representation. With international heritage developers advocating the re-creation of an ancient idealized space, the solutions offered to the new generation are whether to leave the site or to become part of its folklore. But the approach these inhabitants chose when settling in this area whilst developing it within the framework of their living culture shall be taken into consideration. Angkor is not stuck in the past. These populations lay new layers on the partly erased ancient structure. Ancient developments, far from being simply archaeological remains to be preserved, are used on a daily basis in residential, farming, and religious activities. Angkor is not just an archaeological site, it is also a living territory.

Routledge eBooks, 2023

Lulu Publication, USA, 2018

Guidance and counseling are very consequential part of activity in scholastic institutions all over the world. But in Indian literature on this subject is very scanty and hence, there is a great desideratum for an ideal book on the subject in our land. In the present book guidance and counseling, an endeavor has been made to consummate this need in the wake of transmuting pattern of socio-economic, socio-scholastic and socio-cultural system which are composing involute shape owning to advancement in science and technology and transmuting nature of human comportment and a person’s adjustment with his family, community and society. After relegating the concept of guidance, the book studies its relationship with inculcate specialties, its areas, its types such as self-guidance and guidance to other individuals.it proceeds to discuss professional counseling and explicates counseling of individuals and in groups. It examines counseling for vocational development and leisure time guidance. This book Guidance and Counselling disseminates the necessary content of the educational practices.This book consists of five chapters and its deals with The Concept of Guidance, Areas and Techniques of Guidance, The Concept of Counselling, Counselling Tools, Techniques and Problems and Organization of Guidance and Counseling Services. This book is dedicated to all students. Suggestions and comments to improve the contents of this book will be welcomed.

Israel Studies Review, 2024