Regional settlement responses of the Khmer Empire to environmental stress and Angkor abandonment

Summary

The Khmer Empire dominated Southeast Asia between the ninth and fifteenth century, but had all but collapsed by the time Portuguese explorers began documenting their discoveries of the jungle-strewn temple ruins over a century later. Historical sources, in conjunction with new palaeoclimatic evidence, suggests that the royal court abandoned the central and administrative city of Angkor sometime in the mid-fifteenth century and migrated south to the Phnom Penh region after (among other things) a series of sustained droughts, interspersed with particularly intense monsoon seasons, caused irreparable damage to the city’s water infrastructure system. It is undoubted that this event caused a disruption to the geographical and political dominance of the predominantly agricultural Khmers in Southeast Asia from which it never recovered, however the individual responses of the kingdom’s regional agricultural settlements to these dramatic climatic fluctuations remains unclear. Was there a simultaneous or cascading collapse of populations in these secondary cities, or were they more resilient than Angkor? Palaeoenvironmental evidence, analysed from sedimentary cores retrieved from two of these peripheral settlements, indicates that population dynamics throughout the kingdom are far more complex than traditional collapse studies of Angkor suggest.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Environmental Archaeological Approaches in Southeast Asia

Keywords

Spatial Coverage