| Abstract: |
At its apex, the Khmer empire was Southeast Asias largest and most influential civilization: its civilizational reach stretched across several of todays nation-states, and its core contained one of the worlds largest pre-industrial urban complexes. The roots of 9th-14th century Angkorian civilization appeared in the Mekong delta more than a millennium before Jayavarman II declared himself the universal Khmer monarch in 802 CE. At the start and to the south was the early polity that 3rd century Chinese emissaries called Funan, and that contained urban centers, walled palaces, libraries, and rulers. The earliest Khmer writing appears in the 7th century in this region, or nearly four centuries after the Han Chinese reports of Funan. By the 7th century, Khmer elite inscribed their legitimacy onto brick shrines and temples they commissioned to honor Indic gods across the deltas landscape. Elite sponsorship of the construction and maintenance of ritual spaces required wealth
so did their support for ritual practices at these places, which materialized order that structured pre-Angkorian society. The rise of the pre-Angkorian Khmer state occurred during a period of fluctuating international trade in goods and ideas, and previous models have emphasized international trade as the catalyst for early state formation. This chapter studies early state formation instead through the development of the Mekong Deltas 6th-8th century monumental art and architecture. Brick constructions, their dedicatory inscriptions, and the statuary they housed created symbols of cultural commonality that linked formerly autonomous communities into coherent regional systems. The Lower Mekong Archaeological Project survey area includes the early urban center of Angkor Borei. Research described here emphasizes archaeological patterning in social power to offer Southeast Asian perspectives on the articulation between ideology and social order in early states.
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