Piphal Heng _"In the Beginning Was Angkor: Heritage and Identity (Part I)"

Hybrid Event
Join us in person at Luce 203 or register on Zoom here

Angkor was the largest premodern empire in mainland Southeast Asia, with political and ritual influence that extended across much of the region between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE. Yet popular portrayals of Angkor as a “lost” civilization, “lost” city, or “lost” empire continue to frame it as a vanished world—an image that obscures the long afterlives of Angkorian culture embedded in landscapes and religious institutions. Cambodia is one of only a few countries to feature a cultural monument on its national flag, which demonstrates how deeply Angkor has become entwined with national identity. At the same time, recent border conflicts between Cambodia and Thailand—often narrated through contested claims over Angkorian temples situated along boundaries demarcated during the early twentieth-century colonial period—highlight how heritage can become inseparable from sovereignty, territory, political memory, and nationalism.  How, then, did something so often described as “lost” become central to Cambodian culture and identity?

This first of two public talks has three goals: (1) to introduce Angkor to a general audience (what it is, when it flourished, and how it worked as an imperial system); (2) to present current archaeological perspectives that move beyond viewing Angkor as a field of “dead temples,” emphasizing people, everyday life, and continuity; and (3) to establish the historical and conceptual foundations for Part II, which examines how Angkor was transformed into Khmer heritage.

Dr. Piphal Heng is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, specializing in the Southeast Asian archaeology. His research focuses on urbanism, political economy, and religious transformation in Cambodia, with particular attention to the Angkorian and post-Angkorian periods (9th-18th century CE). Dr. Heng integrates geospatial technologies—including LiDAR, remote sensing, and spatial analysis—with archaeological fieldwork to examine long-term landscape use, settlement patterns, and urban infrastructure. He currently directs the Phum Archaeology project, which explores the social and spatial dynamics of low-density urbanism in the Lower Mekong basin.