Temple occupation and the tempo of collapse at Angkor Wat, Cambodia
| dc.contributor.author | Stark, Miriam T. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Quintus, Seth | |
| dc.contributor.author | Zhuang, Yijie | |
| dc.contributor.author | Wang, Hong | |
| dc.contributor.author | Heng, Piphal | |
| dc.contributor.author | Chhay, Rachna | |
| dc.contributor.author | Carter, Alison Kyra | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-11-09T22:59:32Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-11-09T22:59:32Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2019-06-03 | |
| dc.description | 6 pages | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | The 9th–15th century Angkorian state was Southeast Asia’s greatest premodern empire and Angkor Wat in the World Heritage site of Angkor is one of its largest religious monuments. Here we use excavation and chronometric data from three field seasons at Angkor Wat to understand the decline and reorganization of the Angkorian Empire, which was a more protracted and complex process than historians imagined. Excavation data and Bayesian modeling on a corpus of 16 radiocarbon dates in particular demand a revised chronology for the Angkor Wat landscape. It was initially in use from the 11th century CE with subsequent habitation until the 13th century CE. Following this period, there is a gap in our dates, which we hypothesize signifies a change in the use of the occupation mounds during this period. However, Angkor Wat was never completely abandoned, as the dates suggest that the mounds were in use again in the late 14th–early 15th centuries until the 17th or 18th centuries CE. This break in dates points toward a reorganization of Angkor Wat’s enclosure space, but not during the historically recorded 15th century collapse. Our excavation data are consistent with multiple lines of evidence demonstrating the region’s continued ideological importance and residential use, even after the collapse and shift southward of the polity’s capital. We argue that fine-grained chronological analysis is critical to building local historical sequences and illustrate how such granularity adds nuance to how we interpret the tempo of organizational change before, during, and after the decline of Angkor. | en_US |
| dc.description.sponsorship | We thank the Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap for their collaboration and permission to undertake excavations within the Angkor Wat temple enclosure. We also thank Dr. Roland Fletcher for his guidance and support of our project. Our deep acknowledgments to So Malay and Martin King for administrative support, and the GAP 2010, 2013, and 2015 crew members, whose labor produced this research. We thank Tom Dye for his advice about how to structure the Bayesian model. Drs. Scott Fitzpatrick and Mitch Hendrickson provided helpful feedback on earlier versions of this draft. Damian Evans kindly shared LIDAR data from Khmer Archaeology LIDAR Consortium. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant DP1092663, the Dumbarton Oaks Project Grant in Garden and Landscape Studies, and the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society Grant 9602-14. We also thank The Robert Christie Foundation. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.citation | Carter, A. K., Stark, M. T., Quintus, S., Zhuang, Y., Wang, H., Heng, P., & Chhay, R. (2019). Temple occupation and the tempo of collapse at Angkor Wat, Cambodia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(25), 12226–12231. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821879116 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821879116 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.orcid | 0000-0001-6331-2149 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27803 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1821879116 | en_US |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.publisher | National Academy of Sciences | en_US |
| dc.rights | Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-US | en_US |
| dc.subject | archaeology | en_US |
| dc.subject | collapse | en_US |
| dc.subject | Angkor | en_US |
| dc.subject | Cambodia | en_US |
| dc.subject | Angkor Wat | en_US |
| dc.title | Temple occupation and the tempo of collapse at Angkor Wat, Cambodia | en_US |
| dc.type | Article | en_US |