The History Project Part II

Early Cambodia Through Angkor

The effort to trace the history of Angkor Chum district to its very beginning is really an attempt to describe events in ordinary village life in the many hundreds of years before this one. Understandably, this is a very difficult task. One can only infer that what must have happened to other parts of Cambodia must have happened here. However, what little we do know is extremely useful because it can be linked to practices that are still common today. Much of what is known about prehistoric Cambodia bears a striking resemblance to the modern country we know today. A large source of protein in the average person’s diet came from fish, and their houses were raised above the ground and made accessible by means of a ladder. They also had access to domesticated animals, and grew varieties of rice by the slash and burn method. The very first people to live in this area may have indeed used this method to literally carve out their existence from the surrounding jungle.

The earliest record of human settlement in Angkor Chum can be found in the northern part of the district. Following the laterite road away from Wat Char Chuk, one can discover three man made structures that date back to the time of Cambodia’s ancient empire. Turning left from the road at a gnarled old tree, two crumbling temples standing guard over an expanse of fields. If one goes straight about a kilometer past the tree instead of turning left, a disused stone bridge spans a river. Many of the provincial and district maps of the area do not have these structures marked, and finding them is a little difficult if you do not know where you are going. If one were to make a guess about their origin, one could probably say that they are connected to the great Angkorian structures some forty kilometers away, ranging from the tenth or eleventh century. The local people only know them only Prasat Koul, citing the commune in which they are found. Some refer to them as being part of an ancient highway between Thailand and Angkor Wat, but given its position on the map this seems entirely unlikely. Upon visiting the structures themselves, one can see the damage that centuries of disrepair have done to them. Only a few structures remain standing, and the jungle is reclaiming even those. The second temple, which is a much larger than the first, is littered with stone blocks and round balustrades. Many of the carvings on the stones remain intact, and one can still find a few nagas faced down in the dirt or broken into pieces. Their eroded expressions no longer hold the fierceness that they once did. As unfortunate as it is, these structures find themselves among the ranks of hundreds of temples in the surrounding area that were built during that time. If no effort is done to preserve them, it is likely that they will continue to dissolve into the earth until no trace of them is left.

What kind of society existed in that time is as elusive to historians as the one that existed at Angkor Wat. The presence of a temple in this area may well suggest that the area around it was inhabited enough for a temple to be built there. From a quick survey of the area, one can also guess that many of the practices of daily life in that time are little changed from the ones found today. Unlike the massive irrigation works around Angkor Wat, which were used to grow year round in order the feed its giant population, the farmland in this area was probably used to grow rice only during the wet season from April to October. Animals such as water buffaloes were probably used as a source of manual labor for plowing fields and transportation just as they are today. Houses were made from wood on stilts, with thatch covering the roofs and wooden planks lining the walls. Remarkably, a description of a rural market near the site of Angkor in 1296-1297 by Zhou Daguan, a visiting Chinese diplomat, resembles what the daily market in Angkor Chum looks like today: “The local people who know how to trade are all women…There is a market every day from around six in the morning until mid-day. There are no stalls…only a kind of tumbleweed mat laid on the ground, each mat in its usual place.” Many of these observations are still true. An observer of the daily market in Angkor Chum could tell you that the market closes down before lunch, and that most of the people who work there are women. While stalls and tables have sprung up, most of a person’s wares still lie on a mat on the ground. Other than these descriptions, one can only guess what other aspects of daily life have remained the same.