2024-04-15 16:00:21
Angkor… The evocative power of this name makes majestic mountain temples emerge from the tropical forest sculpted with a thousand gods, a thousand warriors, a thousand dancers: Angkor Wat, Bayon, Baphuon and others. However, these pyramidal constructions, wonders of Cambodia’s past and tourist magnets, mask an abysmal void. Where is the Khmer capital, where its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants lived, where even is its royal palace?
In the latter’s enclosure, only a small temple and ponds remain, surrounded by a myriad of shards of tiles and ceramics, scattered on the ground, the only vestiges of the life that once teemed there. Just like the city, the palace of the kings is a ghost, because, made of wood, it has not resisted the passage of centuries, monsoons and termites. Its only residents are a pair of recently reintroduced gibbons, which we hear calling to each other in the canopy and which, luckily, we can see swinging from branch to branch, fluttering with tree-like grace. like a tree, always on the verge of falling and yet never falling.
Here we are just north of the city wall. Deafening stridulation of the cicadas hidden in these spindly trees which soar, straight as i’s, to explode in a bouquet of leaves 30 or 40 meters higher, when finally the sky comes into view. Perpetual squawking of furtive birds, spider webs stretching into trapping tubes and, here and there, blocks of sandstone or reddish laterite. It is in this small area at the back of the terrace of the Leper King that, since 2016, a team of archaeologists led by Brice Vincent – lecturer at the French School of the Far East (EFEO) and responsible of the study center of the said EFEO in Siem Reap, the neighboring city – pierces windows in the past. And more precisely in a forgotten artisanal area, that of the foundry where, in the 11th century, bronze statues were cast on behalf of the kings of Angkor. The only known foundry from this period in Cambodia.
Two modest squares to search
Named Langau, a word which, in old Khmer, means “copper” – this metal being the main component of bronze – this multi-year project is supported by the EFEO and the Authority for the protection of the site and the development of the region of Angkor (Apsara) Cambodian. For this 2024 campaign, two squares measuring 4 meters on each side have been drawn on the ground and are beginning to be explored with a small trowel, protected by plastic sheeting stretched with ropes hung from the trees. In a temperature that will reach 38°C in the afternoon, around twenty people – mainly villagers from the region used to digging – are busy in the two squares, each bucket of evacuated earth being immediately transported to the areas of sieving. We must not miss the slightest sherd of ceramic, valuable for dating, or the slightest fragment of metal escaped from the foundry.
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