| Abstract: |
The Khmer temples of modern day Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand have been the religious and iconic foci of the people who lived around these places for over a millennium. Not surprisingly, academic interest in the region has similarly been drawn to the vast array of architecture, art and epigraphy found at these sites. A consequence of this is that Khmer temples have been largely studied in isolation from each other and their regional geographic setting. B-P Groslier (1986[1973]) argued that any rational history of the Khmer and their temples must take into account the physical landscape, moving away from the local to consider patterns at regional and supra=regional scales. When viewed in this manner, the arrangement of these temples across the landscape provides crucial information about the nature, expansion and changes of the Khmer empire. The approach used in this investigation is an examination of spatial relationships between temples through a theory of transportation and communication. The need for movement of goods, people and ideas is linked to every aspect of society, and, as with the historic and modern nation states, binds society (or societies) together (Cooley 1974:28). Thus, it is logically informative to examine how the Khmer temples were integrated into an 'empire' using principles of transportation as the means of connection. By using geographic information systems (GIS), preliminary models of how and where contemporaneous Khmer temples 'communicated' with each other and how the site selection is intricately linked to the need for transportation are examined.
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