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Students excavate a kiln at Cheung Ek, Cambodia. Photo courtesy of Phon Kaseka.

Cheung Ek is well known for harboring the infamous killing fields of the Khmer Rouge where some 20,000 Cambodians were murdered between 1975 and 1979. Cheung Ek has a much deeper history, however. Today, this once- horrifying landscape is being investigated by a team of archaeologists led by Phon Kaseka of the Royal Academy of Cambodia.

As it turns out, Cheung Ek was settled around 300 B.C. and played important part in the emergence of Southeast Asia’s first great economy, the mysterious Indian-influenced civilization knows as Funan. Centered in the lower Mekong floodplain, Funan flourished from about the 1st to the 6th century and eventually gave rise to the well-known kingdom of Angkor that culminated in the 13th century.

According to Kyle Latinis of the of the University of Cambodia “Cheung Ek may be one of the pinnacles” to an ostensible complex of sites that has a lot of implications for understanding the rise of civilization is Southeast Asia. Both Roman and Chinese historical texts record trade voyages to Funan and archaeologists have uncovered artifacts from Rome, Persia, India, and Greece at the Funan port town of Oc Eo, a site today located in southern Vietnam. Archeologists also have investigated another important Funan site, Angkor Borei, in Southern Cambodia.

Kaseka’s team is just beginning to investigate Cheung Ek and has already discovered sixty-one pottery producing kilns strung out over a distance of 5 km. The kilns have been carbon dated to the 5th – 7th century and so far are the oldest uncovered in this part of Southeast Asia.

While more work needs to be done, if the kilns were all used around the same time, it supports the idea that Cheung Ek was a major producer of pottery and a critical part of the engine that fueled Funan’s economy. Local potters likely made several kinds of pots, including spouted vessels called kendi used for storing and pouring water, perhaps in ritual ceremonies.

This Google image shows the Cheung Ek archaeological site which overlaps with the killing fields. The killing fields museum is labeled A. In the lower right-hand corner is a circular wall and moat feature that is part of the site and has a diameter of about 750 m. The kilns, houses, and temples are strewn across the landscape. Copyight 2009 Digiglobe.

Archaeologists can learn a remarkable amount about ancient technology as well as trade from studying kilns and the waste, such as clay debris and pots broken during manufacture, usually recovered from them. By examining the chemical composition of the clay debris and then testing kendi pots dating to the same time periods that have been recovered at sites across Southeast Asia, the team hopes to determine the extent of Cheung Ek’s trade network.

Common with many other Funan period sites, there is evidence that Cheung Ek continued to be occupied after the decline of Funan and well into theera of Angkor. A mysterious large, almost perfectly circular, earthwork dates to at least the 10th century and the team is testing several hypotheses as to its design and purpose. Work has yielded stone inscriptions, architecture, brick temple or shrine foundations and other features characteristic of later periods.

Kaseka’s team is eager to continue excavating the site’s kilns, temples, and houses, but is facing a very difficult landscape. While Cambodia has recovered from its violent past under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, that recovery process is proving detrimental to the nation’s cultural heritage. Rapid and often uncontrolled growth coupled with an external demand for marketable artifacts has intensified, and looting and urbanization are destroying Cheung Ek. 

“Action needs to be taken now,” says Kaseka. As part of a new generation of Cambodian scholars, Kaseka’s fieldwork plans include community education and finding ways to pressure developers and looters from destroying the site and others like it. While sections of Cheung Ek have been preserved as a site museum and memorial to the horrors of the killing fields, attention is also shifting to preserving the rest of this amazing site that will reveal so much about Cambodia’s deep past.

—Christina Elson

For a related story on the killing fields museum click here.

Pharaoh Tutankhamun's skull defines his general appearance. Its anyone's guess what his skin color was. This particular model (right) was prepared from a CT-scan-based "cast" of his skull (left) without knowing its identity. Reconstruction by Michael Anderson. Photos in composite © 2007 Michael Anderson and Mark Thiessen © 2007 National Geographic Society.

I’ll never forget attending opening night of the King Tut exhibit in Los Angeles in June 2005. As I approached the exhibit entrance with Elisabeth Daynes, the French sculptor who created a likeness of King Tut for the cover of National Geographic magazine, we passed a patch of animated demonstrators whose placards read “King Tut’s Back and He’s Still Black.” A few steps further I was informed by other National Geographic staff attending the event that Dayne’s sculpture, which she had traveled from Paris to see on display, was out of the show.

I was disappointed, but not surprised. Every time the magazine’s art department attempted to depict ancient Egyptians, we received letters complaining about their appearance. This was despite every effort of talented artists and hard-working researchers to be accurate and fair. For the King Tut reconstruction we went to the extreme of commissioning a second model by a team that was not informed of the identity of the skull cast we provided. Their results confirmed that the cover image was as reasonable as forensic reconstructions of individuals can be. One can quibble about the shape of Tut’s nose and ears, and the color of his eyes and skin, but hard bone determined his general appearance. Judging from the demonstrators outside the exhibit in Los Angeles, we were once again unable to please everyone.

The reasons for this dissatisfaction are complex. Confusing notions about ‘race’ and a concern that scholars ignore Africa’s contribution to civilization seem to be at the heart of it. There is still some debate about the skin color of ancient Egyptians, but most experts agree that, from Alexandria in the north to the Sudanese border, ancient Egyptians would have looked much as they do today.

Our story about ancient Egypt’s 25th dynasty in the February issue of National Geographic provides an opportunity to look again at questions about the appearance of ancient Egyptians and whether Egypt’s, ergo Africa’s, contribution to civilization has been ignored. If you’d like to comment on our story or this topic, here’s the place.

Before you respond on the skin color issue, I recommend that you review how scientists currently view race at http://www.understandingrace.org.

In the current issue of Nature you’ll find a much-awaited report on the bodies (as opposed to the heads) of the folks that lived at Dmanisi in Georgia (the former Soviet Republic) about two million years ago. The report was much-awaited because only the heads of four of the individuals discovered there have been thoroughly reported. That left many of us wondering what their bodies were like.

We knew their brains were small and early estimates of their height and weight showed they were small in body as well, but we didn’t have a good sense of their body proportions or skeletal details from the neck down. And the reason why we cared about their bodies so much was that a paradigm was about to be broken.

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