The New Loot: Trading Shovels for Stalls through Archaeotourism in Cambodia

Guest Post: Andrew Harris, University of Toronto

I work in Cambodia as a PhD Candidate in archaeology for between three to five months of every year. The jungles that now have socked the land surrounding Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire (802 – 1431 CE), is where you’ll find me from at least January to April, interpreting the Theravada Buddhist remains of the Empire’s later days. January to March also happen to be three of the five coolest months of the year, immediately following the heavy monsoons of July to October but preceding the scorching months of April to June.

Despite these heavy rains and the bountiful rice crops that come with them, Cambodia is a poor country. Not in the sense that beggars litter the streets or crime dominates urban centers – criminal activity occurs in Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh about on par with other Southeast Asian cities of the same size – but because subsistence farming and fishing rules the lives of most of its citizens. The GDP Per Capita of Cambodia is approximately $1,020, rising 6-7% every year, but access to education, the true key to self-empowerment and true accumulation of wealth (alongside nepotism), is limited and not considered a priority by anyone but pontificating government ministers and idealistic NGOs. Years of civil war and mass-executions under the Khmer Rouge have literally removed both generations and genes from the lives of modern families, and local infrastructure as well as social safety nets are all but inexistent or corrupt; people are often more scared than celebratory of police officers and government officials. Despite the growth in GDP that’s been seen from a boost in the manufacturing and textile sectors, only 5% of these companies are owned by Cambodians. The main involvement by Cambodians in these enterprises are, indeed, sweatshop work in garment factories. Children often work alongside their parents for 16 hours/day, and thus education falls by the wayside.

Between the Harvest Season in December and the Planting Season in May, rural Cambodians come in droves to work in the cities, especially Phnom Penh, Siem Reap (the hub for all tourism to Angkor), Battambang, and Kampong Cham. Men will work as unskilled labor wherever it’s needed, as qualified construction workers, drive tuk-tuks or cars, shuffle bags in hotels, or cook in restaurants. Women will work as maids, masseuses, waitresses, in salons, and sometimes even drive tuk-tuks themselves, although work in Cambodia is quite gendered.

But when it is simply too expensive to rent a room in a city for five months during the Dry Season, as has quickly become the case with even rental prices skyrocketing in relation to daily wages, you stay home. And wait until the harvest. And sometimes you don’t make it.

But wait! My village is in the middle of an ancient Khmer temple-complex! And there hasn’t been a security guard posted there since 1974!

A number of Cambodians in rural areas, as has been the case throughout history in a thousand different cases across a thousand different civilizations, loot ancient sites that happen to be unguarded for whatever reason. Like the French before them who littered Parisian museums and salons with Khmer treasures during the first half of the 20th century, Cambodians of the present realize that the value of ancient artifacts, metals, and even architectural features starts at “priceless” on both the global and black markets. In desperate circumstances, profits from an ancient Buddhist bronze or a sandstone statuette of Ganesh doled out by a prowling antique dealer could be the difference between surviving the dry season and having to sell the family farm. With a lack of education on the value of heritage, and (or so I’ve heard) an overall disinterest in the Khmer Empire by Cambodian students living outside of Siem Reap, idols worshipped by long-dead Hindu kings are better in the hands of Thai, Chinese, or Western collectors than left in the ground.

Or are better studied by weird foreigners like me who come halfway across the world to look at piles of laterite, a reddish clay material that when hardened forms the foundations of most Khmer temples, that would be more useful as fertilizer.

My first brush with the aftermath of looting came on an excavation in January 2016 at Preah Khan of Kompong Svay (PKKS) complex, the largest walled Khmer complex in all of Cambodia that sits in the north of the country in Preah Vihear Province. Celebrated in numerous ancient inscriptions, it is thought to have formed one terminus of a royal highway from Angkor, in the Southwest of Cambodia, and served as something of a Summer Palace for various kings. Now, because of two decades of destructive looting, the site is irreparable and, as one archaeologist on our project put it, “broken”. 90% occurred through the haphazard digging of pits; there are now so many looting pits at PKKS that the landscape looks like the surface of the moon. The other 10% occurred through even more destructive means, using high-powered tools to remove physical architectural features and carvings from the central temple complex. This collapsed the central tower, which now forms the centerpiece of a large pile of rubble encapsulating this former ceremonial site.

The off-season farmers we worked with were former – or current, not quite sure – looters themselves, but said to us that working on our excavation made them enough not to have to dig pits. One guy, an older patriarch whose son and wife were digging beside him, commented with a laugh as we were digging through the top layer of black soil,

“This is where we find all the gold”.

The concept of “heritage” and “celebrating the past”, of course, was originally constructed within an Enlightenment-based Western perspective functioning on a linear calendar of past-present-future, but there’s one thing the West also learned how to do along the way: profit from heritage.

It could be argued that archaeotourism – that is, traveling to places for the primary purpose of visiting archaeological sites and ancient ruins – began first with the 18th-19th century Grand Tour between France, Italy, and Greece taken by young noblemen before marriage. In those days, ancient sites were abandoned places of curiosity, education, wonder, and even heathen idolatry (unless they were converted into churches) where it was expected that you would take a “souvenir” back home to begin the construction of your own “curio cabinet” of antiquities. Whether it was a piece of marble, a small bust, or in the case of Lord Elgin the entire frieze of the Parthenon, sites like the Athenian Acropolis, the Roman Forum, Paestum, and Pompeii were gutted for their treasures by amateur collectors and the world’s first generations of archaeologists/tomb-raiders/Napoleon alike. The archaeology (and anthropology) of faraway lands conquered by colonial empires, such lands as India, Egypt, Cambodia, Easter Island, or the Turkic Silk Road, were stripped from the contexts in which they were found and put into museums, libraries, and universities. Only now, reluctantly, are those treasures starting to be returned.

In 1945, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) was formed in the wake of the Second World War. Its aim “to contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of poverty, sustainable development, and intercultural dialogue through education, the sciences, culture, communication and information” included the protection of heritage sites from both colonial and local looters, and in 1979 the first UNESCO World Heritage Site was crowned in a tradition that continues today with enthusiastic international cooperation…in most cases (see South Africa from 1956 – 1994). Angkor, being the world’s largest preindustrial settlement and home to some of the most incredible ritual architecture ever constructed, was added to this list early on and attained UNESCO status in 1985.

This happened to also coincide with the beginning of a massive de-mining effort, one that occurred as a result of Pol Pot’s ruthless retreat towards the Thai border following his oust from Phnom Penh by Vietnamese soldiers in 1979. Angkor was one of the first areas of Cambodia to be demined, and from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s Siem Reap slowly developed into a tourist hub. Slowly.

Angkor and other Khmer temple-complexes were heavily looted by Khmer Rouge soldiers on their retreat west. Like ISIS today in Syria and Iraq, the Khmer Rouge saw antiquities as a source of needed income to finance their activities. NGOs in Cambodia during the 1980s and early 1990s, however, saw the potential of developing Angkor into a heritage-based tourist destination once the area had been thoroughly demined, but often when ancient sites in impoverished parts of the world is given international attention, a grab-bag looting effort often ensues. With so much attention and so little infrastructure to quell/solve the economic desperation of a war-torn people, hell would break loose.

In 1995, the Cambodian government established the APSARA Authority at Angkor, an organization specifically for Angkor and under the direct authority of the President. With the goals of education, preservation, and security, APSARA hired site guards and ticket officers, trained tour-guides, employed drivers, and even taught archaeologists and administrators; as of 2017, all foreign teams interested in excavation or even site-clearance at APSARA-administered sites at Angkor must established a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the organization. Like any all-encompassing organization, APSARA has had its growing pains, including an inquiry by the government in 2014 into misrepresented ticket sales, but APSARA was also the first Cambodian-owned, Cambodian-run organization managing a UNESCO site, a significant step in the right direction.

From an anthropological perspective, infrastructural changes affect the rhythms of life and world-views of local communities. From an archaeological one, they stop looting and protect the archaeological record and its future interpretation. From a heritage point of view, they keep the temples standing. And from a commercial perspective, they make money.

Lots of it.

The establishment of an archaeological park and an authority to administer it meant that perspective looters/off-season farmers simply put down their shovels and joined in the archaeotouristic cash-crazy bonanza that is now the once-sleepy fishing village of Siem Reap. The town, now nearly a city, is constantly transforming and growing, with new hotels popping up every few weeks, restaurants multiplying like rabbits, trinket shops thriving, and a newly-established regional tourism boom from China and South Korea creating infrastructure that is catered to their interests instead of solely to the groups of tanned, malodourous Western backpackers trumping to and from Bangkok.

Every temple, from as large as Angkor Wat to as small as Prasat Kravan in the northeast of the park, is surrounded by foldable shops, stalls, and carts, and off-season farmers living along the road to any temple are now often able to plop a restaurant right in front of their farmland and turn a profit. Tour companies have sprung up everywhere, and now offer trips outside of Angkor to fishing villages on the Tonle Sap lake south of Siem Reap, bringing in a trickle of cash that otherwise wouldn’t exist for the subsistence fishermen and their families and lots of cash for the Phnom Penh businessmen who’ve bought up all the tourist boats and locally hired the drivers.

The benefits aren’t just immediate and financial, either. The quality of education instruction through this Angkorian archaeotourism boom have increased as well, with APSARA training tour guides in multiple languages to fluency, not just reading from a script. The increase of archaeological projects led, not just worked on, by Cambodian archaeologists could spark an increased interest in national history, a tool of empowerment for many people around the world caught in an unambitious cycle of subsistence or poverty. And having haphazardly spoken with members of agricultural NGOs on a recent trip to Laos, I’ve learned that an increase in business acumen stemming from part-time work in the tourism industry can lead to the knowledge necessary to both optimally grow and sell their produce. One family, he said, learned about using pesticides from a French doctor traveling through the countryside outside of Pakse, Laos whose family owned a farm in Burgundy.

Not to mention paved roads, two-lane highways, more schools, more traffic lights, bike lanes, bus services/stations, better sanitation, more efficient waste disposal, recycling, crackdowns on each of child labor, drug trafficking, and prostitution, an airport, sidewalks, new hospitals, a continuous electric supply, increased foreign investment, NGOs aplenty, gas stations, two universities, and KFC.

All of those came to Siem Reap in the last decade. And Cambodians love the Colonel’s chicken.

As a result of all the benefits that archaeotourism has brought to Siem Reap, looting is something that doesn’t really happen at Angkor anymore. Even with the most recent ticket price hike from $20 to $37 for a one-day pass, tourists continue to come and people continue to work – Angkor pulled in $60 million from 2.6 million visitors in 2013 alone. Some in the West choose to criticize the globalization that tourism brings for corrupting local ways of life and hooking people on money, but those same Western critics often champion a large middle class for their own countries; infrastructure and money, along with education, is how you create that.

There still remains the fear that a continuous influx of large tour groups in new, massive hotels might cause strain on both the aquifers that run beneath Siem Reap and the river above. There also worry that too many tourists might damage the steps and bas-reliefs at Angkor Wat. And there’s even a well-pointed criticism that the state only gets $10 of the $60 million in profit because Angkor Wat’s ticketing rights have actually been owned by a private Cambodian conglomerate called Sokimex since 1999. But ticket sales are only part of the equation, and the local economy of Siem Reap is booming with or without those profits.

Last year’s field season at PKKS showed me what happens to an archaeological site in a poor part of any country when the surrounding modern populations have little access to education, infrastructure, or any attempt to build up a local economy. Now, despite the long-awaited employ of a security guard in 2015, illegal logging now runs side-by-side with illegal looting. There will probably never be another APSARA in Cambodia, despite the UNESCO status of another temple by the Thai border, Preah Vihear, but it stands as a lesson for how economies can suddenly flip with a good injection of cash and purpose from their governments. There is always the possibility that archaeotourism as a reason to travel loses ground, and an economy solely based on tourism in turn dries up, and the people invested in that economy turn back to looting to make ends meet as inflation causes prices to continue to rise. But what Angkor’s popularity has granted at least the next generation of Cambodians cannot be taken for granted, and has undoubtedly decreased the prospect of destructive looting in this region of Cambodia to years to come.

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About the author: “Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, I’m currently a third year PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. My focus is on the archaeology of the religious transition of the Cambodian Khmer Empire from Hinduism to Theravada Buddhism, and I’ve decided to undertake this project at the capital of Angkor Thom, pursuing it through the study of the remains of 14th century monasteries . . . I also work in China mapping and 3D imaging channels of ancient Buddhist cave-temples along the Silk Road.”

Read more about Andrew’s experiences researching in Cambodia: https://inbrokenfootsteps.wordpress.com/

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