Abstract
Phum Snay is renowned for its numerous burial sites belonging to the later half of the Cambodian Iron Age, which are unfortunately also famous for the extensive and large-scaled looting. Recent excavations performed by a Japanese team revealed that the Phum Snay site could provide us with richer chronological data than ever thought before. The Phum Snay artifact collection includes Snay vases and type-C deep bowls (mostly black ware) which are the typical chronological indicators, in addition to black/brown wares which are pottery types produced with deliberate design. The author describes the condition of the site from looting, salvage archaeology, a recovery campaign, and the Wat Bo Temple’s pottery collection, and then discusses how the findings can enable us to create a time frame by analyzing the “set of burial pot-types.” This procedure sheds light on the condition of the Phum Snay burial site, the age of the artifacts and a proposal for future regional heritage management. The key idea in this study is the comparison of the vessel catalogues of Phum Snay and those of Professor Dougald O’Reilly’s collection with the Wat Bo Temple’s collection using the Wat Bo Earthen Ware Ceramics Database (Calthorpe, Wat Bo earthen ware ceramics, 2007). This scheme is a step forward in an attempt at cross-dating between similar burial sites, regardless of their distances from the Phum Snay site.
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- 1.
The administrative divisions of Cambodia consist of three levels. The first-level consists of provinces (khaet) and the capital (krong). The subdivision in the capital is the section (khan), which is further divided into quarters (sangkat). Provinces are subdivided into districts (srok) and municipalities (krong) on the second level, which are then subdivided into communes (khum) and quarters (sangkat). Villages (phum) are subdivisions of communes and quarters (Kumano 2005).
- 2.
Based on Calvert and Roeun (2003) and O’Reilly et al. (2004, 2006). The original 2001 survey map of the location of Professor O’Reilly’s excavations consisted of regions near the 2001 trench, shown by a solid black rectangle. With the 2003 excavations in the schoolyard of Phum Snay Elementary School, the location map was expanded to include the areas near the school, resulting in an increase in the number of looters’ pits in the count. On the original survey map, 548 pits are counted. To this is added 473 pits (including the pits near the farm path). The number of looters’ pits totals 1,021.
- 3.
“Heritage Watch” http://www.heritagewatchinternational.org/.
- 4.
“Alison in Cambodia” A blog about archaeology and related issues in Cambodia http://alisonincambodia.wordpress.com/about/.
- 5.
NGO “Khmer Archaeological Society” http://www.khmeras.org.
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Akayama, Y. (2013). Comparative Study of the Artifacts of Phum Snay Site and the Wat Bo Temple’s Pottery Collection Database. In: Yasuda, Y. (eds) Water Civilization. Advances in Asian Human-Environmental Research. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54111-0_3
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