Insights from Difference: text and archaeology in Angkor

Summary

The study of Angkor was predominantly the domain of epigraphers, art historians and architects for much of the past century of research. To some degree it continues to be. This focus, to its great credit, has reconstituted a millennium of the political history of Khmer society prior to the 16th-17th C CE. The effect has however, been to prioritise a historicist viewpoint, leading to the material record of the monuments being fitted in to the expectations of textual interpretation. Archaeological inquiry has also tended to focus on the monuments rather than their context, the urban landscape and environmental conditions. Since the early 1990s this focus has changed dramatically, initially with the work of the EFEO and then the addition of the Greater Angkor Project. As a result significant differences have become apparent between the textual evidence and the archaeological record in the dating of monuments, the history of urban development, the perspective on Angkor as an urban landscape and on our understanding of the demise of Angkor.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Difference in Archaeological Theory and Practise

Keywords

Spatial Coverage