Khmer Housing, Water and Living Conditions

At Angkor Wat, a major temple in the Angkor region of present-day Cambodia, excavators found raised residential mounds beside lower depressions that served as ponds. Builders had raised and flattened the ground to create this pattern, putting household spaces close to water. Zhou Daguan, a Chinese envoy who visited Angkor, then the Khmer capital, in 1296-1297, described how roof materials, house size and household equipment varied with rank and means.

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Houses and raised living space

Zhou describes a hierarchy visible in the buildings. Roof tiles were used on the royal private rooms and selected parts of noble houses; common homes and service buildings were generally thatched. Official rank shaped the dimensions and layout of princely and senior officials’ residences. Common families could vary the size of a house according to their means, but Zhou says they did not copy the arrangement of noble homes.

In the houses Zhou describes, enslaved household workers slept beneath the raised floors and entered the living level on their knees to serve their owners. The raised floor separated the main living space from the area below, while access to the upper level followed household rank.

Archaeology shows how raised residential ground was formed at Angkor Wat. Excavators identified a grid of mounds and depressions in ground deposited by the river. Builders raised and flattened soil for the mounds, while adjoining depressions became ponds. Habitation layers contain floor surfaces, plant remains, cooking ceramics, stones and a possible hearth. The excavators infer that houses with floors raised on posts or piles stood on these mounds, drawing on the physical layout and Zhou’s description of raised homes.

Carter and colleagues date the initial preparation of the mound-and-pond grid to the mid-eleventh century. They distinguish that groundwork from the later habitation layer on the mounds, which dates chiefly to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. After a gap in the dated sequence, lighter use appears again from the fourteenth or early fifteenth century through the seventeenth or eighteenth. Researchers suggest that some later structures may have served pilgrims and worshippers as Angkor Wat became a Buddhist pilgrimage center.

Cooking and household equipment

For everyday cooking, Zhou describes an earthen pot set over three stones planted in the ground to make a hearth. A coconut shell served as a ladle, while a second clay utensil was used to prepare sauce. Leaf cups and spoons could be made for a meal and discarded afterward. Water in a bowl beside the rice let people rinse sticky grains from their fingers. These simple items turned an open fire and a small group of vessels into a working cooking space.

Household possessions also marked differences in means. Zhou says people of middling status might have a house without a table, bench, basin or bucket, and that mats served as sitting and sleeping surfaces. Wealthier homes sometimes used silver or gold vessels; poorer people drank from earthen cups. The equipment was modest in many homes, while elite households displayed more costly materials.

Food-processing traces survive in the plant remains. At the temples of Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm, excavators found rice husks and spikelet bases, the small points where each grain attached to the rice plant. Because these fragments accumulate as rice is dehusked, archaeobotanists infer that people removed the husks where they lived before cooking the grain. Cotton seed fragments point to another task. Their presence led researchers to infer that cotton bolls, the seed-bearing fruits, were brought to the temple enclosures. There, people separated the soft lint around the seeds and prepared it as fiber. At Ta Prohm, cotton made up a large share of the economic-plant remains in deposits from the eighth to tenth centuries, before the temple was built; the study also records it in later phases.

Ponds, bathing and washing

The ponds beside Angkor Wat’s residential mounds formed part of the household landscape and cycled between wet and dry phases. Zhou describes a more immediate bathing arrangement at the capital: because the weather was hot, people bathed repeatedly, and a family had a bathing basin of its own or shared one with two or three families. His account says that younger people avoided the basin while parents or other older people were bathing, and older bathers likewise avoided it while younger people used it.

Sanitation outside the house

Zhou describes two or three families digging a shared pit for human waste and covering it with grass. When it filled, they covered it with earth and dug another pit elsewhere. After going to the pit, people went to an outdoor pond to wash with the left hand, while reserving the right hand for taking food.