Heritage site
Laang Spean
Laang Spean is a prehistoric cave site at the top of a limestone hill in Battambang province, in northwest Cambodia.[1] Its name means "bridge cave"[2] or "cave of bridges",[1] after the stone arches left where part of the cave roof fell in.[2][1] Its layers hold a Palaeolithic level with flakes of chert, a Hoabinhian level of pebble tools and a Neolithic level with burials.[1]
Setting
The cave lies at the top of a limestone hill, Phnom Teak Trang[2] or Phnom Teak Treang,[1][3] about 150 meters (490 feet) above sea level.[2][3] The hill belongs to a group of limestone hills along the road from Battambang to Pailin, 38 kilometers (24 miles) from Battambang.[2] A trail about 5 kilometers (3 miles) long runs north from the main road to the site, and the plain lies 30 meters (98 feet) below the cave entrance.[1] The cave was carved out of marine limestone of the Permian period.[1][3]
Roland Mourer gave the cave's greatest length as 42 meters (138 feet) and its greatest width as 20 meters (66 feet), under a roof about 20 meters (66 feet) high.[2] Its floor covers about 1,000 square meters (10,800 square feet).[1][3] The people who used it made most of their tools from hornfels pebbles, a hard stone, taken from the Chanob River at the foot of the hill and from the larger Stung Sangke, which crosses the Battambang plain.[3]
Excavations
Roland and Cécile Mourer excavated the cave several times between 1965 and 1970.[1][3] They dug in three places in the cave. Near the west wall of its central part, they recognized nine layers in a deposit 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) thick.[2] Their work gave the first evidence of a major Hoabinhian occupation in Cambodia.[1][3]
A French-Cambodian prehistory mission, led by Hubert Forestier and Heng Sophady of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, took up excavations again in 2009.[1][3] The mission found that the cave fill is at least 5 meters (16 feet) deep, without reaching the bedrock.[1] As of 2024, its excavations, which extended Mourer's trenches, covered about 98 square meters (1,050 square feet).[3]
Layers and dates
Mourer's radiocarbon dates placed the oldest level, which held no pottery and only rough flakes of chert, at 6800 BC or earlier.[2] Pottery first appeared in a level dated to 4290 BC, mostly decorated with the marks of cords or paddles. In Mourer's view, the pottery reached its richest forms and decoration between the 3rd millennium BC and the first half of the 1st millennium BC, then grew plainer. He found that people used the cave until about the beginning of the 9th century AD.[2] The stone tools changed little over that long span. They were worked mostly on one face and never polished, which Mourer saw as giving them a clear Hoabinhian character.[2] Pollen from his excavation showed no cultivated plants.[2]
The Hoabinhian is a stone-tool tradition of the last hunter-gatherers of Southeast Asia, known for pebble tools shaped on one face.[1][3] The mission working since 2009 found the Hoabinhian level between a Neolithic level with burials above it and a Palaeolithic level with chert flakes and cores below it.[1] The Hoabinhian level is dated between 11,000 and 5000 years before the present[1] or between 12,900 and 5000 calibrated years before the present.[3]
The Hoabinhian hunters took mostly land animals. Wild cattle, the gaur and the banteng, gave about three-quarters of their meat, and large deer and, less often, rhinoceros gave much of the rest.[1] They also fished, gathered shellfish and caught turtles and tortoises.[1][3] Forestier and his co-authors wrote in 2015 that these hunters drew on every habitat around the cave, above all the rainforest.[1]
Burials
The Mourers found only a few human jaw fragments and teeth, all in the upper levels; they found no burials.[2][3] Since 2009 the mission has found six Neolithic burials and the scattered bones of five more people of the Neolithic period.[3] The Neolithic graves cut into parts of the older Hoabinhian level.[1] The Hoabinhian level itself held 57 fragments of a skull cap and ten other scattered bone fragments. The team fitted the skull fragments together on a computer into one skull.[3] In 2024 the excavators wrote that these Hoabinhian remains are hard to place precisely within the layers.[3]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Hubert Forestier and others, The Hoabinhian from Laang Spean Cave in its stratigraphic, chronological, typo-technological and environmental context (Cambodia, Battambang province) (2015)
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia, Roland Mourer, Laang Spean and the Prehistory of Cambodia (1977)
- ↑ 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 Quaternary Environments and Humans, Valéry Zeitoun and others, An integrative study of new environmental and cultural data from the Hoabinhian of Laang Spean Cave (Cambodia) including modern human remains (August 5, 2024)