Summary:

The Khmer and Cham kingdoms created great monuments acknowledged as part of the world’s cultural heritage. Sites and research suffered severely during the Indochina Wars. Since peace came in 1990, young citizens of Vietnam, Lao, and Cambodia have acquired basic archaeological training. Whereas historical sources tend to stress conflicts, archaeological remains suggest that people have a tendency to create networks of communication through which ideas, people, and goods flow. A view of long-term trends presents a much more optimistic image of the past, in which people from different regions of Mainland Southeast Asia stimulated one another to produce works of art of great beauty, and prosperous trading relations.

The growth of great kingdoms in this region cannot be obtained through research which is confined by national boundaries. We therefore propose a regional archaeological study of northeast Cambodia, southern Lao, and central Vietnam. This project will contribute not only to the understanding of the histories of the Khmer and Cham kingdoms; it also aspires to investigate the nature of interaction across borders and frontiers in early Southeast Asia, and to improve the capabilities of local and regional institutions (educational and research institutions in particular). It also aims to create a framework for regular communication and collaboration between archaeologists in Mainland Southeast Asia. The ultimate, long term objective of this endeavor is to contribute to the writing of a common ancient history of the Mekong region.

Cambodia, Lao and Vietnam are home to three sites inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List: Angkor, Vat Phu, and My Son. These sites coexisted within the same cultural landscape, in societies which appropriated philosophical, religious, and artistic ideas from South Asia to embellish their own depictions of the link between humans and the universe. Under the umbrella of Khmer civilization during the Angkorian period between the 9^th and the 15^th centuries AD, three states in Peninsular Indochina developed very strong interactions among themselves.

The proposed research is a comparative study of the relations between the above mentioned UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The concerns of this research are twofold: one is to investigate the socio-economic system which supported or enabled construction and management of the historic sites; the other is to reconstruct the economic network which characterized overland networks of communication and trade in Southeast Asia.

A glance at the map shows that the Truong Son Range and its rivers look like the spine and the ribs of the land between Asia’s southeastern coast and the Mekong river basin: the large system of rivers that flow from two sides of the peninsula toward the east as well as the west. These rivers have served as an integration transportation system, bringing people together for thousands of years.

Extant models of Southeast Asian communication tend to focus exclusively on the role of rivers as avenues of communication. Very few studies have been conducted on the overland routes despite the fact that much circumstantial evidence and some archaeological data indicate that land routes played a significant role in linking peoples across rivers and mountain ranges. It is known that people and products moved from the lowlands of the eastern coast to the uplands of the mountainous areas of Central Vietnam, and from the western highlands to the Mekong river and the Sekong river basins in Lao and Cambodia. Luxury goods were exchanged between groups living in the area comprising southeastern Lao, northeastern Cambodia, and the western highlands of central Vietnam, then collected in the port-cities of Champa, from whence they were fed into the  long-distance maritime trade routes linking China, Insular Southeast Asia, and the countries of the Indian Ocean. In return, imported products from the lowlands such as ceramics, metal tools, salt, cloth, and so on were provided to the upland people.

It has been hypothesized that religious sites functioned as foci around which peaceful economic activities clustered, ensuring a “peace of the market” in the hinterlands of Southeast Asia. Comparative studies of the historic sites of My Son, Vat Phu, and Steung Treng, combined with evidence for interaction between these historic sites through the land trading route would, we argue, shed important new light on a different set of relationships among ancient states in a wide cultural landscape of the Cambodia/ Lao/Vietnam intersection than those which are visible among the kingdoms in the Southeast Asian littoral which have received much greater attention.

Land trading routes between these sites linked not only the dominant Khmer and Cham ethnic groups, but also Katuic-speaking people who belong to Austro-Asiatic/Mon-Khmer speakers, representatives of whom still reside in the provinces of Sekong, Attapeu, and Salavan in Lao, and Quang Nam, Thua Thien-Hue, and Quang Tri in central Vietnam. In principle, the Katuic speakers were the elephant-herding intermediaries who provided the critical link between the boat-using peoples on the rivers of the eastern watersheds of central Vietnam and the western watersheds of the Mekong Basin.

At the heads of the navigable portions of the rivers, periodic markets functioned as meeting points where lowlanders in their boats met uplanders skilled in elephant transportation. Oral history depicts rich families who owned hundreds of elephants and controlled the overland connections across the mountains. These periodic markets included those in central Vietnam (Cam Lo in Quang Tri province, A Luoi in Thua Thien-Hue province, Ben Hien and Ben Giang in Quang Nam province); Lao (Muong La Mam, Muong Ka Lum in Sekong province, Muong Phin in Savanakhet province, Muong May and Muong Saisetha in Attapeu province); and Cambodia (Ba Deum, Ba Con and Thalabarivath in Steung Treng province). These locations provide vital indicators of key nodes along the ancient overland communication routes in the crossroads area of Cambodia/Lao/Vietnam. In addition to archaeological studies of these locales, study of the current state of these periodic markets has much potential to shed light on the nature of pre-modern relations among the three ancient regions through ethnographic analogy. This project also makes a practical contribution into the promotion of cultural and tourist exchange in the context of the East West Economic Corridor Project (EWEC) of ASEAN.

The project will apply an interdisciplinary combination of landscape archaeology, history, art history, and anthropology through field research concentrating on the sites of periodic markets along the ancient land routes in Steung Treng, Rattanakiri provinces in Cambodia; in Savanakhet, Champasak, Sekong, Palavan, Attapeu provinces in Lao as well as in Binh Dinh, Quang Ngai, Quang Nam, Kon Tum, Thua Thien-Hue, Quang Tri, Quang Binh provinces in Central Vietnam.

The project will be conducted by three archaeologists from Vietnam, Cambodia and Lao. Those are: Mr. Tran Ky Phuong (Senior Researcher of Vietnam Association of Ethnic Minorities’ Culture and Arts, Hanoi, Vietnam); Mr. Phon Kaseka (Researcher of Royal Academy Cambodia, Phnom Penh, Cambodia) and Dr. Thonglith Luangkhoth (Vice-Director of Division of Archaeology, Department of Cultural Heritage, Ministry of Information and Culture, Lao PDR, Vientiane, Lao).

The scientific consultants of the project are: Prof. John Miksic (Archaeologist, Southeast Asia Program, National University of Singapore); Dr Emmy Bunker (Art Historian, Asian Art Department, Denver Art Museum, USA); Dr Rie Nakamura (Anthropologist, Visiting Lecturer, College of Law, Government and International Studies, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Sintok, Kedah Malaysia).