Angkor Borei () is a district located in
Takéo Province, in southern
Cambodia
Cambodia, officially the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country in Southeast Asia on the Mainland Southeast Asia, Indochinese Peninsula. It is bordered by Thailand to the northwest, Laos to the north, and Vietnam to the east, and has a coastline ...
. According to the 1998 census of Cambodia, it had a population of 44,980.
Administration
The district has 6 communes, 34 villages (as of 2019).
History
This ancient city was an important settlement of the
Kingdom of Funan
Funan (; , ; , Chữ Hán: ; ) was the name given by Chinese cartography, Chinese cartographers, geographers and writers to an ancient Khmer-Mon Greater India#Indianized kingdoms of South East Asia, Indianized state—or, rather a loose netwo ...
and may have been its capital. It may have been the Thinae, or Sinae Metropolis located by
Claudius Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy (; , ; ; – 160s/170s AD) was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were important to later Byzantine, Islamic, and ...
as the farthest known city to the east in his ''Geography''.
The site was first excavated in 1996 and was again excavated in 1999 as part of the Lower Mekong Archaeological Project. During the 1996 excavation, the
University of Hawaii
A university () is an educational institution, institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several Discipline (academia), academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly ...
and the
Royal University of Fine Arts initiated the excavation and focused on the sociopolitical complexity from 500 BC to 500 AD. This first excavation, however, was just preliminary research. The first objectives were:
1) Documentation of the site's layout and the range of its archaeological features
2) Evaluation of the integrity of subsurface materials and description of the site's stratigraphy
3) Collection of samples for dating portions of the archaeological site
4) Reconstructing the hydrology and natural environment of the early historic period in this region
In this site various archaeological methods were used such as surface survey and mapping, test excavations, auger sampling and coring, and trenching with a backhoe.
Unfortunately, the archeological project was disturbed by looting and illicit trafficking of Khmer antiquities, which continues as a serious problem into the 21st century.
[Miriam T. Stark and P. Brion Griffin, “Archaeological Research and Cultural Heritage Management in Cambodia's Mekong Delta: The Search for the ‘Cradle of Khmer Civilization,’” in ''Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past'', ed. by Yorke Rowan and Uzi Baram, Walnut Creek, California: Altamira Press, 2004, 117–141.]
It is the birthplace of
Norodom, King of Cambodia from 1860 to 1904.
See also
*
Angkor Borei and Phnom Da
References
{{Districts of Cambodia
Funan
Districts of Takéo province