| Abstract: |
Households form the basic social unit in every culture yet have been long ignored within studies of Angkorian society (Bâty et al. 2014; Wilk and Rathje 1982). In contrast to the monumental stone temples for which Angkor is well known, domestic residences were built from perishable materials that are difficult to see in the archaeological record. Recent technological advances such as lidar and increased field-based research have begun to expand our knowledge of the locations for Angkorian houses and with it the daily lives of Angkorian people, including non- elites. In this chapter we examine the archaeological, historic, art historic, and ethnographic data to ‘reconstruct’ what we know about the Angkorian house. The study of past households and their activities is an important avenue for understanding daily practices of people in the past (e.g., Allison 1999; Flannery 1976; Robin 2013; Webster and Gonlin 1988; Wilk and Rathje 1982). Household archaeology can be especially informative for understanding the socio-political and economic variations within communities and between communities or settlements, as well as between elites and non-elites (Flannery 1976; Robin 2003). In this chapter, we take a broad view of ‘the Angkorian house’ to include documenting the structure itself, the range of occupants, and the quotidian activities that took place in and around it. This examination of life at a local or village level complements earlier research on Angkor that has focused on ritual and elite contexts like temples or landscape scale research on broader settlement patterns and water management networks. Viewing Angkorian society from the household offers new perspectives on the daily lives of the majority of the Empire’s inhabitants
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