Khmer Legacies and Post-Angkorian Continuities

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Khmer royal center shifted south from Angkor, in present-day Cambodia, while people continued to live among and worship at the old capital’s temples. Archaeological layers inside Angkor Wat, later Khmer inscriptions and Buddhist images at Baphuon record different kinds of use. Cambodian communities still live and hold ceremonies in the Angkor park, while conservation has added a modern history to the monuments.

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Residents in Angkor Wat’s enclosure

Open ground separates Angkor Wat’s sandstone temple from the laterite, an iron-rich building stone, wall around its outer enclosure. Laser mapping has identified low mounds and depressions there, and excavations found evidence of habitation on the mounds: pottery, floor surfaces and plant remains. The depressions functioned as ponds that alternated between wet and dry periods.

In an excavation and radiocarbon study, researchers radiocarbon-dated charcoal from well-defined layers. A statistical model combined sixteen dates from three excavation seasons. The layers indicate activity from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, followed by renewed occupation from the fifteenth into the seventeenth or eighteenth century. A gap in the sampled dates suggests reduced or changed use of these mounds between the late twelfth or early thirteenth century and the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. The deposits include ceramics, cooking areas and household surfaces, evidence for people living in the enclosure as the capital’s political role changed.

Some residents may have worked for the temple. Inscriptions from Angkorian state temples record laborers assigned to ritual and everyday duties, and the excavators suggest temple workers are plausible occupants of the enclosure mounds. The Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan’s 1296-1297 account names Angkor Wat, while the dated household layers provide archaeological evidence of residents at other points in its history.

Buddhist worship and pilgrimage at Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat remained a place of worship after the royal court moved elsewhere. More than thirty Khmer inscriptions on its pillars, dated from 1541 to 1747, record pilgrim visits and Buddhist ceremonies. The temple’s transformation into a Buddhist sanctuary took place in the late sixteenth century, and paintings identified on its walls appear to belong to this period.

Japanese pilgrims visited in the seventeenth century, leaving inscriptions and a plan of the temple believed to date to about 1630. The plan records a visitor’s knowledge of the sanctuary’s layout; the Khmer inscriptions record visits, donations and ceremonies carried out across two centuries. These records show Angkor Wat serving as a destination for worshippers as political centers shifted.

The park remains inhabited today. UNESCO describes Cambodian villagers venerating temple deities through prayer, traditional music and dance; residents also bring medicinal plants to temple sites for blessing. These current practices belong to living Cambodian communities and their present religious life.

Baphuon reused for Buddhist worship

Baphuon, an eleventh-century temple in Angkor Thom, was originally dedicated to Shiva, a Hindu deity. In the early to middle fifteenth century, workers adapted its western side to include a giant reclining Buddha for Buddhist worship. They reused temple masonry to form the image, which is about seventy metres long. Earlier Hindu carvings remain on other parts of the structure, so a later sacred image became part of the older temple’s fabric.

Conservation and reconstruction

During the French Protectorate, the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) took responsibility for studying and preserving Angkor in 1907. The school established a permanent local office, Conservation d’Angkor, in 1908. After Cambodia became independent in 1953, the conservation office belonged to the Cambodian royal government, although EFEO retained scientific direction. In the present era, restoration involves Cambodian institutions and international partners.

At Baphuon, restoration began in 1960. Conservators dismantled and labelled roughly 300,000 stone blocks across the site. War interrupted the work, and the plans linking the labelled stones to their positions were lost. EFEO resumed the project in the mid-1990s, working with Cambodian cultural authorities; the temple reopened in 2011. The method, called anastylosis, stabilizes and reassembles a monument using its original materials. Today’s Baphuon therefore incorporates both the medieval rebuilding of a Hindu temple for Buddhist worship and a separate twentieth- and twenty-first-century conservation project.