The Cambodia Daily - Dec 20-21, 2003
Looters Steal Clues to History from Prehistoric Sites
Cambodia's most ancient history has long been the province of a few archeologists and forensic experts who have struggled to extract information from the buried remnants of ancient peoples.
And more often than not, those few experts find their work balked by the necessity of protecting the people of Cambodia's past from the people of it's present.
Now, as the results of one of Cambodia's first major prehistoric excavations are being readied for publication, their principal author has said he's stepping away from research, at least temporarily, and joining the fight to protect the country's ancient sites from being stripped bare to feed a thriving international black market in stolen artifacts.
Since 2001, Canadian archeologist Dr. Dougald O'Reilly has led three excavations of an Iron Age cemetery near the town of Phum Snay, in Banteay Meanchey province.
The cemetery at Phum Snay is far from the only prehistoric remain in Cambodia, he said, but is the first to be thoroughly researched.
"Because of the state of Cambodian archaeology -- it's in it's infancy -- any archeological find is of significance," O'Reilly said in an interview earlier this month.
"But they're not being protected."
Epaulettes recovered from Phum Snay: clay with bronze bull's horn decoration.
In Western nations, he explains, archeology is done by developing a theory, then researching it in the field.
"Here, that whole scheme has to be turned on its head," he said.
"It has to be motivated by rescue."
Questions like where the Khmer people came from, how they lived and how they came to form the great society of the Angkorian age, remain largely unanswered even today. And by most accounts, there are only four or five groups in the country studying them.
"People on the outside get very into Angkor," explained Christophe Pottier, an archeologist and member of the Ecole Française D'Extreme Orient.
"Life existed before Angkor, and life existed after Angkor," he said. Pottier, whose work has been focused on uncovering the urban roots of the great temple complex, said he is currently working to excavate another Iron Age burial site in the vicinity of Angkor Thom.
The work done in Phum Snay was remarkable, Pottier said, given the state of the site when researchers found it.
"I never saw a site as looted as Phum Snay," he said.
Pits dug by looters at Phum Snay. "It was a moonscape," O'Reilly said.
The burials at Phum Snay were discovered in 1999 by a road crew digging around a large natural mound near the village, O'Reilly said.
It wasn't until over a year later that the massive looting at the then one-of-a-kind site was brought to the attention of officials at the Royal University and the Ministry of Culture.
Working at first with funds from the University, and later through grants from the Ford Motor Co. and the Center for Khmer Studies, O'Reilly and colleagues Kate Domett, of James Cook University in Australia, and Pheng Sytha and Thuy Chanthourn of the Royal University, set out to explore and catalogue what remained of the site.
As is often the case, the yawning graves yielded more questions than answers. However, O'Reilly said, the exploration of Phum Snay was a crucial first step towards discovering what came before Angkor.
Even after the depredations of looters, the remains at Phum Snay offer tantalizing hints of a Mon-Khmer warrior culture in the land now called Cambodia, with the beginnings of manufacturing and iron working, and engaged in specialized trade with it's neighbors.
The Iron Age, the period between the discovery of iron tools and the beginning of the era of recorded history, varies from society to society, but is generally said to have begun roughly 500 BC.
Results from carbon dating have been inconclusive, but O'Reilly estimates the burials were probably made between 300 and 600 AD, though ceramics found at the site show it remained inhabited until at least the 10th or 11th centuries.
Phum Snay, then, is a small piece of continuity between the temple-builders of the 9th - 15th centuries and the little-known nations that preceded them.
One of the most surprising finds at Phum Snay was the abundance of iron swords, axes, spear heads, and other military accoutrements interred in several of the graves.
Since Phum Snay was the first site of its kind to be thoroughly explored in Cambodia, many of findings there can only inspire hypotheses to be confirmed by further researches, O'Reilly warned.
However, he said, compared to sites from the same period uncovered in northeast Thailand, the swords, spears, and knives found in the Phum Snay burials are signs of a high level of social friction and competition.
"In northeast Thailand, you don't find that much militarization," he said.
A spiked bronze bangle from Phum Snay
Not only that, but iron slag found at the site shows that the people of Phum Snay were doing their own ironwork - though how much, or for what, again remains unknown.
Questions of how societies developed trade and manufacturing are among the most crucial in prehistoric archeology, according to experts.
The discovery in the tombs of a type of highly specialized pottery called Phimai black, previously found only in a small area surrounding the Thai town of Phimai, indicates that the people of Phum Snay were trading across the Daeng Raek mountains.
"It's really a big surprise to find it here," O'Reilly said. Further excavations may help clarify the nature and extent of the trade, he said.
So who were the people of Phum Snay? The answer to that question is still far in the future, O'Reilly said.
So far, he said, it appears they were a Mon-Khmer people. Their remains show that they were larger than most Cambodians today; several of them would have been over five-and-a-half feet tall.
And, O'Reilly said, they would have had a very distinctive look. Most of the people buried at Phum Snay had had the teeth between their front and canine teeth pulled, in what appears to have been a cultural marking practice, giving them a striking fanged smile.
Similarities in burial practice indicate they might well be the same, or closely related to, the people whose elaborate moated burial grounds and agrarian villages have been found dotting the Mun river valley in northeast Thailand, O'Reilly said.
Even more tantalizing than what was found was what was not.
In 2002, O'Reilly and his students from the Royal University collected accounts from villagers living near Phum Snay of what had been looted from the tombs.
Villagers described finding weapons and martial adornments, round shields and helmets of bronze, breastplates of metal, and even ancient coins.
Asked about the reliability of such accounts, O'Reilly answered with a helpless shrug of his shoulders .
"If it was true, it would be astounding," he said. "Unfortunately we never found any evidence of it in the scientific excavations."
Some of the villagers' accounts have proved right. O'Reilly said he was dubious of descriptions of ceramic epaulettes adorned with bronze bull's horns, until he found several examples in Phum Snay's undisturbed graves.
One of the skeletons, he said, shows signs of having something bronze on its head. But, he added, it wasn't necessarily a helmet. It could easily have been a bowl.
The tragic looting of Phum Snay was the catalyst for O'Reilly to put aside pure research for a while in order to start an NGO, Action Against the Antiquities Trade.
Surprisingly, despite what is widely agreed to be a huge problem with the looting and sale of artifacts and antiquities, there are few or no private organizations working directly to stem the problem of looting.
The field is currently occupied only by the Cambodian government and UNESCO, and the resources of both are spread thin, experts said. So much attention is, justifiably, being focused on preserving the towering monuments at Angkor that there is little left for what is under the ground.
With Action Against the Antiquities Trade, O'Reilly hopes to start a widespread education campaign, to teach looters, sellers, and tourists about the cultural consequences of antiquities theft.
The situation remains serious. In the first week of December, Cambodian government officials received reports of two more previously undiscovered Iron age burial grounds in Pursat province, one of which was already being ravaged by looters who steal ancient artifacts for sale overseas.
Government and provincial authorities have said they are taking steps to guard the sites, but such efforts have proved ineffective in the past - as they did at Phum Snay.
"The only tactic that's possible is education," O'Reilly said.
He admitted he could understand the lure and mystery that an ancient artifact can hold, "otherwise I wouldn't be an archeologist," he said.
"But," he said, "I don't have it on my shelf at home, because there, it's just an object of art, it doesn't inform us about the human condition."
O'Reilly's results from the digs at Phum Snay are still being prepared for publication. He hopes to have his full results published next year in the "Bulletin de L'Ecole Française d'Extreme Orient", or in the journal "Antiquity."
Images are courtesy Dr. Dougald O'Reilly. More information about archeology in southeast asia can be found here.