Beyond the Greater Angkor Region

Understanding processes of urbanization, regional networks, and the ability of systems to undergo change while maintaining the same functions, i.e. their resilience, is critical for the continued existence and growth of communities today in urban and rural contexts alike.

Archaeology has a rich history of investigating human-environment coupled systems in urban settings and is well-suited to identifying characteristics of resilient systems over the course of centuries.

Detailed analysis of urbanism and human-environment interactions have been conducted on the giant low-density complex of Greater Angkor Region; however, this has not been investigated in the context of regional networks of the medieval Khmer Empire (9th – 14th centuries CE).

This project, “Beyond the Greater Angkor Region (BGAR),” addresses these issues in regional contexts, including the six medieval urban centers that were recently (2015) identified by the Cambodian Archaeological Lidar Initiative and the agro-urban zones stretching among them.

This research agenda takes place within the framework of a dynamic and multidisciplinary network of scholars interested in human-environment interactions in mainland Southeast Asia.

In this project, we will use various methods, including machine learning and network analyses, to address regional issues of agricultural production in inter-connected urban contexts.

This project has five deliverables: 1) An updated database of temple communities (agricultural units of production) in Cambodia; 2) A regional “urban” morphology; 3) Modelling to determine how regional urban centers interact with the temple communities in their peripheral agro-urban systems; 4) A network analysis to identify shifts over time from small-world networks to scale-free networks; and 5) A redefinition of urbanism in the Khmer Empire and beyond.