Yale archaeologist Piphal Heng grew up in Cambodia's Siem Reap, a city about five miles south of Angkor, the remnant of the vast former capital city of the Khmer Empire that ruled much of mainland Southeast Asia between the 9th and 15th centuries.
The site is best known as the home of Angkor Wat, the famous Hindu-Buddhist temple complex and the world's largest religious structure. As a child, Heng often visited Angkor Wat with families to make religious offerings at the pagodas there.
His relationship with the temple complex eventually led him into archaeology. Today, his research focuses on better understanding how people lived in Angkor. Specifically, he studies settlement patterns - where and how people arranged themselves in the landscape - and the ancient city's political economy, seeking insights on how people sustained themselves and how economy and religion shaped the society and vice versa.
Heng, who joined Yale in July 2025, is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He recently spoke to Yale News about his approach to archaeology, discoveries he's made in the region, and why characterizations of Angkor as a "lost city" are inaccurate. The interview has been edited and condensed.
| Title | Assistant Professor, anthropology |
|---|---|
| Research Interest | The archaeology of Southeast Asia, with a focus on the emergence and transformation of Angkorian states in Cambodia |
| Prior Institution | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Started at Yale | July 1, 2025 |
How does your research differ from prior archaeological work at Angkor?
Piphal Heng: There has been intense attention paid to Angkor Wat, which is just one section of a larger city, but there has been very little focus on habitation in Angkor City. My research partners and I aim to better understand life in the ancient city by moving beyond identifying monumental architecture, roads, and other infrastructure, and to figuring out how people arranged themselves in the urban landscape.
Archaeological research on Angkor has been dominated by analyses of the many inscriptions found there. From an archaeological standpoint, we can provide a more balanced view of the civilization using material culture - the objects, spaces, and resources the ancient society created and used. That's where I come in.
How do you approach uncovering evidence of life in the ancient city?
Heng: I take an archaeological approach that combines analyses of spatial patterning and material culture with a close reading of texts. Ceramics, including utilitarian earthenware like cooking pots, are an important indicator of residential activity. We use geo-chemical analyses of ceramics to trace their elemental composition - which indicates where the stoneware came from - and compare that data with known production centers. This allows us to trace the relationship between production and consumption centers. Then we try to explain how, why, and when these artifacts came to be where we excavated them.
We also study biological remains. Animal bones provide evidence of what people ate. One of my colleagues looks at plant remains, which help us identify species - such as rice, citrus, and cotton - that people relied on to live. We can combine all this evidence with a description of habitation in Angkor by a Chinese traveler in 1,296 C.E. and compare and contrast it with 20th century Cambodian households. This way, we can offer an explanation of what life was like in the 10th or 12th century. This approach started in just the past a decade or so, so a lot of these pieces are still coming together.
What is an example of a discovery you've made at Angkor?
Heng: The areas surrounding Angkor Wat are mostly overgrown by forest. By doing a ground survey under the forest canopy, we discovered mound features that could be the remnants of dwellings and a depression that we identified as a pond where people fetched water for household use. When we started excavations, we found ceramics with burn marks, which is usually an indication of cooking pot, and we found earthenware and stoneware.
Later, members of our research team analyzed the site using light detection and ranging technology [LIDAR], which allowed them to peel off the forest canopy and get a clear view of the topography. Not only were the features clear, but this new map allowed us to identify patterns among them. Using this map, I performed another ground survey and discovered that Angkor Wat is both a monumental religious site and, in a sense, a section of the wider city. People lived there: I calculated that if one mound equaled one house, and one house accommodated a family of five, then there could have been at least 2,000 to 2,500 people living within Angkor Wat.
You challenge the idea that Angkor is a lost city. What fault do you find with that popular caricature of the site?
Heng: When we view a city or civilization as "lost," what does that mean for the people who live there now? The common assertion is that Angkor was abandoned in the 15th century. Our research provides multiple lines of evidence that people continued to live there, albeit in smaller numbers. It was never abandoned.
Older Angkor temples and statuary were built and dedicated to the worship of Hinduism. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the state religion changed to Buddhism, and the role of temples and statuary changed accordingly. We have statues from the later period all the way to the French colonization in the 19th century, and we have inscriptions from the 16th to 18th centuries - well after the collapse of the Angkor Empire - which indicate that people from across Cambodia, Japan, Thailand, and Myanmar came to the site to pray. We also have accounts from Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese travelers who visited Angkor in the 16th and 17th centuries, demonstrating that it was very much alive. It had become a religious center in the region.
How did the change from Hinduism to Buddhism affect life in Angkor?
Heng: My current research is exploring this question. Did that urban grid from the 12th century remain occupied or did the pattern change? I'm continuing to excavate within Angkor Wat but I'm also excavating outside the Angkor region because you can't understand the city without knowing the surrounding area.
The idea is to understand how these people responded to the religious change and the collapse of the central power. How did they adapt? The evidence I've gathered suggests there was not much change in terms of habitation; people stayed where they were. But there was significant change to Angkor's temples and their supporting communities. Many temples, whether Hindu or Buddhist, in the peripheral zone were no longer functioning despite continuing habitation around them. Major settlements now began to concentrate around a few religious sites corresponding with both newly built Buddhist pagoda or modified Angkorian temples. The settlements became more centralized and form the modern Siem Reap town. That's the hypothesis I'm currently pursuing. We've got a long way to go.
