Latest / The Khmer Empire: The Lost Civilization Behind Angkor Wat — Fexingo History / The Megalithic Jars of the Khmer Empire's Uplands
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, we've talked a lot about Angkor's sandstone — the quarries on Phnom Kulen, the massive blocks that built Angkor Wat and the Bayon. But there's another side to Khmer stonework that hardly ever gets mentioned, and it's far older and far stranger. Luna: Stranger how? Lucas: I mean literal stone jars — some weighing three or four tons — scattered across the uplands of Cambodia and the Khorat Plateau. They look like the famous Plain of Jars in Laos, but these are in Cambodia, and they're tied directly to the Khmer Empire's expansion into the forests. Luna: I always thought those jars were a Laotian thing. How many are we talking? Lucas: Hundreds, maybe thousands. The best-known site is Sre Ruessei, in Mondulkiri province — that's the eastern highlands, near the Vietnamese border. Surveys there have found over a hundred jars, plus dolmens — those are table-like stone structures — and even stone alignments that look like miniature Stonehenge setups. Lucas: Now, these aren't Angkor-period. Carbon dating on charcoal found near the jars puts them between 600 and 800 CE — that's before Jayavarman II even founded the empire at Phnom Kulen. So we're looking at a megalithic culture that the Khmer either absorbed or coexisted with. Luna: So the Khmer didn't build them — they inherited them? Lucas: That's the big question. The jars are carved from sandstone, and the nearest source is Phnom Kulen — the same mountain that supplied Angkor's temples. So someone was quarrying that rock centuries before Suryavarman II used it for Angkor Wat. That suggests a continuous tradition, not a separate people. Lucas: But the style is totally different. These jars are rough — no carvings, no inscriptions. They're just big cylinders with a rim, like a cooking pot the size of a car. And they're always found in clusters of ten to thirty, usually on hilltops overlooking rivers. Luna: Quick honest thing — do you ever wonder why this stuff isn't better known? I mean, you've been digging into archives for the last few months, and I know the show takes real time. Lucas: Yeah, it's funny you say that. A handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what funds making this many of these. Without that, I'd have to cut the deep dives — the ones that take a week of reading. Luna: No ads, no corporate backing — it's just people who care about history. I think that's why we can do episodes like this, on the weird stuff. Lucas: Exactly. So back to the jars — what were they for? The leading theory is burial. Some jars have been found with lids, and inside there are human bones, but not full skeletons — more like secondary burial, where the body is left to decompose and then the bones are placed in the jar. Luna: So it's like an ossuary. Did the Khmer do that too? Lucas: Not typically. Khmer elites were cremated, and their ashes were placed in urns — often gold or bronze. But the upland jar sites don't have any Khmer-style grave goods. No bronze, no pottery with Angkorian glaze. So it's likely a different cultural group, maybe the ancestors of today's Bunong people, who still live in Mondulkiri. Lucas: There's also a site called Kbal Spean — that's the 'River of a Thousand Lingas' — which is famous for its Hindu carvings. But just a few hundred meters upstream, there's a cluster of dolmens that predate the carvings by four centuries. So the Khmer were literally building on top of an older sacred landscape. Luna: Wait, really? So the river that Jayavarman VII's engineers carved lingas into was already a holy place? Lucas: Exactly. And it gets weirder. The dolmens at Kbal Spean are aligned with the solstice sunrise. Someone was doing astronomy up there before the Khmer arrived. That's a level of sophistication we don't usually associate with the pre-Angkorian highlands. Lucas: Then there's the Cardamom Mountains in the southwest. In 2019, a survey found over a dozen jar sites there, some with jars that had been recycled by Khmer settlers — they'd carved Buddha images into the sides. That's a direct link: the Khmer didn't destroy these stones, they re-sanctified them. Luna: So the Khmer saw them as powerful objects worth keeping? Lucas: Right. And that's the key to understanding the empire's religious flexibility. They absorbed local spirit cults, what we call neak ta, and integrated them into the Hindu-Buddhist framework. The jars might have been seen as abodes of local spirits, so they were left in place and sometimes even decorated. Lucas: But the jars also tell us about economics. To move a three-ton sandstone jar from Phnom Kulen to Mondulkiri — that's about 200 kilometers over mountains — you need a serious transport network. And the Khmer were masters of roads and canals. So even if the jars predate the empire, the Khmer almost certainly moved some of them. Luna: Why would they go to that trouble? Lucas: Status. If you're a local chief in the uplands, having a jar that came from the sacred mountain of the king — that's a big deal. It ties you to the center. And in exchange, the Khmer got what the highlands produced: iron ore, cardamom, benzoin resin, and above all, elephants. Luna: So the jars are like markers of a trade network? Lucas: Exactly. And there's one more piece: the Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, who visited Angkor in 1296, wrote about the upland people. He says, 'In the mountains, there are tribes who do not know how to build houses. They live in caves and eat snakes.' He never mentions jars. But then he adds, 'They make stone vessels of great size.' That's our only textual mention. Luna: One sentence in a 700-year-old travelogue. That's all we have? Lucas: That's it. No Khmer inscription mentions them. No later chronicle. So these jars — hundreds of them, some weighing as much as a car — were completely invisible to written history until French archaeologists stumbled on them in the 1920s. Lucas: And even now, most are still unexcavated. The Mondulkiri sites were only systematically documented in 2018. The Cardamom sites, in 2021. So there's a real chance that in the next decade, we'll learn something that completely changes our understanding of how the Khmer Empire interacted with its hinterlands. Luna: It makes you wonder what else is out there, hidden under the jungle. Lucas: That's the thing about Southeast Asian history — the forest doesn't give up its secrets easily. Every time a logging road cuts through a new area, or a drought lowers a reservoir, something old appears. And if we're lucky, it's not just another temple — it's something we never expected.