Urban Economies and State "Peripheries": Angkorian Stoneware Ceramic Production and Distribution

Summary

Angkor’s agro-urban capital covered more than 60 square miles, and its landscape housed farmers and artisans. Constraints of the archaeological record limit our ability to document production scale of most activities; the genealogical skew of Angkor’s epigraphic record in another reason. Yet Greater Angkor’s gardens and fields must have fed residents in the Angkorian state’s epicenter. Artisans built its temples, sculpted temple images, and cast metal goods; specialists and communities tended temples; and voracious elites broadcast political and religious affairs in stone and through pageantry. Some archaeologists studying the multiscalar, multicentric nature of Angkorian production focus on ceramics as proxies for tracking state economy within and beyond Angkor’s urban epicenter. Stoneware ceramics were neither wealth nor staple finance; their functions complemented earthenware and metal objects; and they were ubiquitous in Angkorian households across the kingdom. Kiln excavations in three discrete Angkorian subregions have produced in-situ ceramics; field projects across Cambodia offer samples from consumption sites. Our Khmer Production and Exchange Project dates stoneware kilns and uses NAA to characterize geochemical compositions of stonewares from production and consumption sites. Here we examine ceramic consumption in the Mekong Delta (Angkor’s southern ‘hinterland"), and its relationship to economic centralization the Angkorian capital.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21526