Heritage site

Circular earthworks of Memot

The circular earthworks of Memot are walled prehistoric settlements on the red soil plateau of eastern Cambodia and nearby Vietnam.[1] In Khmer they are called banteay kou.[1] A museum in Memot (មេមត់), a district of Tbong Khmum province, holds finds mostly from these sites, which it calls Memotian sites.[2] Latinis and Dega counted more than 55 of them in 2011, about 15 of which had been studied closely.[1]

Setting

Michael Dega wrote in 1999 that the earthworks lie only on a strip of basaltic plateau about 55 kilometers (34 miles) wide. Hills rising to mountains bound it to the north and east, and a broad floodplain opens to the south and west, toward the Mekong Delta and the Tonle Sap plains.[3] The sites belong to the terre rouge, or red soil, country of hills and plateaus above the floodplains.[1] In 1999, almost 90 percent of the recorded earthworks lay inside rubber plantations, planted from the 1930s on.[3]

Counts differ with the area each source covers. Dega counted at least 17 in eastern Cambodia in 1999, with 14 more just over the border in Vietnam.[3] The Cambodia Daily wrote in 2010 that the Memot Center for Archaeology had been set up to study the region's 37 earthworks,[4] and Latinis and Dega gave more than 55 in 2011.[1]

Form

Each site has similar parts: an outer earthen wall, a sunken ring or "moat" inside it, a central platform and a way in.[1] The sites typically stand at the top of gentle slopes, and the central platform sits lower than the ground around it. Each has one or two entrances, some simple paths and others more complex systems with bridges.[5] Dega found that the outer wall usually rises about 4 meters (13 feet) above the inner ring. It stands 2 to 2.5 meters (6.6 to 8.2 feet) above the platform and 1.5 to 2 meters (4.9 to 6.6 feet) above the land outside.[3]

The sources give different average sizes. Dega gave an average diameter of about 220 meters (720 feet) in 1999.[3] Latinis and Dega gave an average of 250 meters (820 feet), or about 5 hectares (12 acres), in 2011, with no one site much larger than the rest.[1]

Research

The earthworks first appeared in print in the 1930s, in a few lines on one near Loc Ninh in Vietnam. In 1959 Malleret used aerial photographs to find 17 circular settlements and one rectangular one near the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, five of them in eastern Cambodia.[3]

In 1962, 1966 and 1970, B. P. Groslier cut seven or more trenches across the middle platform of one site. Villagers call the site Banteay Meas, "Golden Fortress".[3] In the mid-1960s Groslier called it "one of the most important prehistoric sites" in Southeast Asia.[1][3] He assigned the earthwork and its finds to a "Mimotian culture", named for the biggest nearby town, and suggested that the site was Neolithic, from about 3000 to 1000 BC.[3] Dega and Kou Vet briefly analyzed the finds from his trenches at the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh in 1996.[3]

Work resumed in 1995.[1] A German teaching program at the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA) in Phnom Penh dug at the site called Krek 52/62 and made smaller test pits at Phoum Beng, Phoum Kampoan and Groslier's site.[5] In early 1999, a RUFA team under Gerd Albrecht reopened Groslier's site, and a RUFA and University of Hawaii team under Dega dug 31 trenches at six earthworks.[3] Dega noted that villagers knew every one of the 17 sites in Cambodia and guided the archaeologists to them, and that the sites carry the names villagers give them.[3]

Dating and way of life

Sources disagree on the age of the earthworks. Groslier proposed about 3000 to 1000 BC.[3] Dega wrote in 1999 that no radiocarbon dates were yet available and that the sites had given no evidence of metal or metalworking, though he noted that the acidic soils kept most direct evidence of metalworking from surviving. In his view, the settlements may have begun as early as 3000 to 2000 BC.[3] Albrecht and his co-authors questioned a Neolithic date in 2000. A fragment of a glass bracelet, found well inside the living layer at Krek 52/62, pointed to the 1st millennium BC.[5] The 2010 report in The Cambodia Daily described them as likely Iron Age villages of rice farmers from between 1000 and 500 BC.[4] Latinis and Dega dated their use in 2011 to about 2300 to 300 BC, with the eastern sites older than the western ones.[1]

The people of the earthworks probably grew rice. Dega found rice and rice chaff mixed into their pottery clay and took it as a sign that they did,[3] and Albrecht and his co-authors took the finds as evidence of villages of rice farmers. They also found pieces of lithophones at two sites. In their view, the shape of the walls and the lack of objects usable as weapons argue against an older idea that the earthworks were forts.[5] Dega found no evidence of social ranking at the Cambodian sites, unlike the moated sites of Thailand, and saw them as a group of equal communities in close contact.[3]

Latinis and Dega tested the chemistry of pottery from several earthworks in 2011. The results suggest that potters used local red soil clay, and the earthwork pottery did not reach the floodplain sites to the south, nor floodplain pottery the earthworks. Use of the earthworks fell off around 300 BC, at the same time as large settlements grew on the nearby floodplains. Latinis and Dega found no sign, however, that people left the earthworks for the floodplains and took their pottery with them, though they wrote that more data were needed to confirm this.[1]

Samrong earthwork

The Cambodia Daily wrote that in September 2010, bulldozers partly destroyed the Samrong earthwork, in Memot district, during building work for the sale of the state-owned Memot Rubber Plantation into private hands. A spokesman for the Asian Development Bank, which funded the sale, said that no maps or local records had shown the site. The spokesman wrote that, on the advice of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, the new village for the plantation's workers would be laid out to leave the site alone. A deputy district governor said that the earthwork was under a protection plan.[4] Heng Sophady, an archaeologist at the Memot Center for Archaeology, said that the moat and outer wall had been leveled but that the objects buried inside were intact.[4]

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, D. Kyle Latinis and Michael Dega, A Brief Study of Cambodian Circular Earthwork Ceramics as Explained through EDXRF Analysis (2011)
  2. ↑ Hello Angkor, Memot Archaeological Center and Museum (undated)
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, Michael F. Dega, Circular Settlements within Eastern Cambodia (1999)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 The Cambodia Daily, Julia Wallace, Ancient Earthwork Now Under Protection Plan (November 3, 2010)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Asian Perspectives, Gerd Albrecht and others, Circular Earthwork Krek 52/62: Recent Research on the Prehistory of Cambodia (2000)
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This page was last edited on 12 October 2026, at 00:22.