via World Archaeology, 06 June 2024: Recent scholarship and fieldwork from 2017 to 2023 at Angkor Thom reveal that ancient Cambodian religious sites and statues have maintained spiritual significance through ancestral animist practices, despite their disassociation from original Brahmano-Buddhist identities. This ongoing sacredness is evidenced by the deposition of statues and localized acts of place-making near older ruins, showcasing the dynamic reidentification, reuse, and transformation of these ancient elements over time.
A growing body of scholarship exploring Cambodia’s cultural-religious environment alongside reinterpretations of ancient Angkorian epigraphy has illuminated the enduring sacredness of Cambodia’s ancient religious places and objects. This assertion comes despite apparent dissociation of these elements from their original ascribed identities (Brahmano-Buddhist) and disuse as focal points of politico-religious congregation at some point in the past. Although documented within Cambodian archaeological studies since the 20th century, fieldwork conducted at ancient Theravāda Buddhist monasteries (vihāra/praḥ vihār) within the Khmer civic-ceremonial center of Angkor Thom between 2017 and 2023 have substantiated that these ancient statues and holy spaces continued to serve as equivalently spiritual, highly localized arenas of ancestral animist practices and cultural-historical negotiation over time. This paper assesses several categories of these archaeological data within the framework of reidentification, reuse, and transformation beyond initial discard, including the deposition of statuary and acts of place-making in the vicinity of older ruins.
