Place-Making, Fire, and the Praxis of Becoming Angkor

Summary

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ninth- to fifteenth-century Angkorian state was premodern Southeast Asia’s earliest large-scale collective, and its roots extend back to an early first-century CE polity described as Funan, and then to a confederation of successor states called Chenla. Place-making was intrinsic to Angkorian rulership: rulers formalized transportation and communication routes linking the capital to its peripheries and inscribed their acts on sandstone stelae embedded in state monuments. Angkor’s capital swelled to 750,000–900,000 residents at its twelfth- to thirteenth-century peak, yet Angkorian citizenship did not require urban residence at the capital. Multisite archaeological fieldwork across Cambodia suggests instead that Angkorian Khmers constructed state places through their monuments and intangible sites of memory. Ritual practice in the Angkorian world merged indigenous animist beliefs with Brahmanical and Buddhist ideologies to require new ways of moving through the Angkorian world and harnessing pyrotechnologies to produce and use iron goods (including architectural) and stoneware ceramics across the empire. This paper explores how Angkor’s citizens engaged with deeply historized places, transitioned local tutelary spirits in small shrines to sculpted gods in sandstone temples, and created a sense of collective belonging through the manufacture and consumption of unique objects forged through fire.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38109.0