Heritage site
Samrong Sen
Samrong Sen is a prehistoric shell midden on the Chinit River,[1] about 22 kilometers (14 miles) east of the provincial port of Kampong Chhnang.[2] Roland Mourer counted it among the earliest prehistoric sites known in Southeast Asia.[1] Many of its polished stone tools are held in museums in Europe, especially in France.[2]
Setting
The Chinit (Steung Chinit) is a tributary of the Tonle Sap, and the site lies about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the point where the two rivers meet.[1][2] The ground around it is the floodplain of the Tonle Sap.[2]
Mourer, drawing on the excavation report of 1902, gave the deposit a greatest thickness of about 6 meters (20 feet). Under a layer of humus and a hard crust of freshwater shells lay the main archaeological layer, about 4.5 meters (15 feet) thick. It held many heaps of shells, and the richest finds of objects and animal bones lay close to these heaps, along with several hearths. The yearly floods had stirred the layer, scattering charcoal and breaking pottery into small sherds.[1]
Discovery and digging
The site was first mentioned in 1876.[1] Objects from it were collected from the 1870s onward and are held in museums in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Saint-Germain-en-Laye in France, and in Stockholm. The oldest collection, gathered by J. Moura in 1876, is in Toulouse.[2] Villagers burned the shells to make lime for use with betel, as H. Mansuy noted in 1902, and villagers were doing the same when Mourer visited in 1970.[1]
Accounts of the digging differ. Mourer wrote in 1977 that Mansuy carried out systematic excavations at Samrong Sen in 1902 and again in 1923, the only excavations at any shell midden in Cambodia.[1] Heng Sophady wrote in 2008 that the site had never been properly excavated. As far as he could tell, the objects in the collections came from casual finds on the surface or from unsystematic digging while villagers worked the shells for lime, and were often handed to missionaries.[2] Around 2001, the archaeologist Miriam Stark noted new projects at Samrong Sen run by Khmer students.[3]
Finds
The stone tools are mostly adzes, axes and chisels, finished by polishing.[1][2] Adzes are the most common, and some have a curved, hollow edge, which makes them gouges. Some have a shoulder or tenon for fixing to a handle.[1][2] The people of Samrong Sen also made rings, armlets, discs and beads of stone.[1] Their bone tools included arrowheads, spear points, fishhooks and tools for smoothing pottery, which Mourer took as signs of a way of life partly tied to the water.[1]
In 2008 Heng recorded 289 polished stone tools from Samrong Sen in museum collections in France and in Stockholm. Most were made of phtanite, and others of quartzite, schist, sandstone, hornfels, basalt and other rocks.[2] Wear marks on several tools showed use on wood or bamboo.[2] Resin left on the surface of one adze suggests that it was fixed to a wooden handle.[2] Heng wrote that the people of Samrong Sen made these tools at a time when houses on piles and boat building were essential for living in the flood zone.[2]
The pottery includes cups and bowls set on a foot, as well as vessels without a foot, nearly all with rounded bottoms. Some are decorated with geometric designs.[1] Charles Higham wrote in 2003 that Neolithic burials at the base of Ban Non Wat and Ban Lum Khao, the first evidence of early farmers in the Mun Valley of northeast Thailand, are matched in Cambodia by similarly decorated pottery at Samrong Sen, citing Mansuy's report of 1923.[4]
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 Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia, Roland Mourer, Laang Spean and the Prehistory of Cambodia (1977)
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 Annali dell'Università di Ferrara, Museologia Scientifica e Naturalistica, Sophady Heng, A study of polished stone tools from Samrong Sen, Cambodia: the French Museum collections (November 2008)
- ↑ Miriam T. Stark, New Perspectives on Early Cambodia from the Lower Mekong Archaeological Project (about 2001)
- ↑ Proceedings of the British Academy, Charles F. W. Higham, The Origins of the Civilisation of Angkor (2003)