Pre-Angkorian and Angkorian Cambodia

This chapter reviews key cultural developments in pre-Angkorian and Angkorian Cambodia, and seeks to find the roots of the great Khmer empire that dominated much of Mainland Southeast Asia from the ninth–fourteenth centuries ad. In Mainland Southeast Asia, the transition from the prehistoric period to the historic period, sometimes called the protohistoric period, falls approximately between 200 bc and ad 500. Most historical studies of the Angkorian period have emphasized divine kingship and the structuring role of Indic ideologies rather than examining the economic infrastructure of the empire. Yet some research suggests that the Khmer state was based on an agrarian infrastructure which future archaeological research has great potential to illuminate. The Khmer Empire depended on an infrastructure of wet-rice agriculture, fishing, trade tribute, taxation and corvée labor. The nature of the Khmer state – and of state ideology – changed at some point in the thirteenth century, when Theravada Buddhism replaced the earlier syncretic form of Hinduism.