Top-down and bottom-up water management: A diachronic model of changing water management strategies at Angkor, Cambodia Sarah Klassen, Damian Evans To cite this version: Sarah Klassen, Damian Evans. Top-down and bottom-up water management: A diachronic model of changing water management strategies at Angkor, Cambodia. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Elsevier, 2020, 58 (101166), 10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101166. hal-02532789 HAL Id: hal-02532789 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02532789 Submitted on 6 Apr 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 58 (2020) 101166 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Anthropological Archaeology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaa Top-down and bottom-up water management: A diachronic model of changing water management strategies at Angkor, Cambodia T ⁎ Sarah Klassena, , Damian Evansb a University of British Columbia, Department of Anthropology, Vancouver Campus, 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada b École française d'Extrême-Orient, 22 Avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris, France ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Keywords: The Greater Angkor region, in northwestern Cambodia, was home to several successive capitals of the Khmer Water management Empire (9th to 15th centuries CE). During this time, the Khmer developed an extensive agricultural and water Angkor management system characterized by top-down state-sponsored hydraulic infrastructure. Archaeological evi- Cambodia dence now shows that the well-documented state temples and water management features formed the core of an Top-down and bottom-up management extended settlement complex consisting of many thousands of ponds, habitation mounds, and community Agriculture temples. These community temples are difficult to date, and so far, the lack of chronological resolution in surface Geographic information systems fi ’ Lidar archaeological data has been the most signi cant challenge to understanding the trajectory of Angkor s growth and decline. In this paper, we combine heterogeneous archaeological datasets and create diachronic models of the landscape as it was developed for agricultural production. We trace the foundation of new temple com- munities as they emerge on the landscape in relation to the construction of extensive state-sponsored hydraulic infrastructure. Together, these two forms of water management transformed over 1000 km2 of the Greater Angkor Region into an elaborate engineered landscape. Our results indicate that, over time, autonomous temple communities are replaced by large, state-sponsored agricultural units in an attempt by the state to centralize production. 1. Introduction water storage facilities and a sophisticated hydraulic system (Leach, 1959). Similarly, on the island of Bali, Indonesia, water is managed Most societies with water management systems have an institutional through a self-organized, bottom-up system of cooperatives associated locus that acts authoritatively to regulate and ensure proper operation with a network of water temples (Hauser-Schäublin, 2005; Lansing, (Hunt, 1988; Hunt et al., 1976, p. 391; O'Connor, 1995, p. 971). These 2007; Scarborough and Burnside, 2010). social and political institutions are often categorized as top-down or In this paper, we investigate the relationship between top-down and bottom-up. Top-down systems tend to be sponsored by and serve the bottom-up water management strategies for rice irrigation at Angkor, in aspirations of the state, whereas bottom-up systems are sponsored by Cambodia, where a massive and complex state-sponsored hydraulic and prioritize the service of local communities (Morehart and system was developed over many centuries (Fletcher, Pottier et al., Eisenberg, 2010). Some have argued that state-level societies often 2008). The infrastructure re-routed river systems and substantially have top-down organization and are associated with larger and more transformed the natural hydrology of the region. The scale of the hy- complex water management systems (Bushnell, 1957, p. 56; Forbes, draulic system is perhaps unparalleled in the pre-industrial world, and 1955, p. 8; Harris, 1979, p. 104; Linton, 1939, p. 286; Wittfogel, 1957). includes channels 20 km in length and 40–60 m wide, reservoirs with However, archaeological and ethnographic studies show that many surface areas of up to 16.8 km2, and a vast network of walled fields used large irrigation systems are managed through self-organized co- for flooded rice agriculture (Acker, 1998; Evans, 2007; Fletcher and operatives with bottom-up administration (Hauser-Schäublin, 2005; Evans, 2012a; Hawken, 2012). Most prior accounts of agriculture at Hunt, 1988; Hunt et al., 2005, 1976; Lansing, 2007; Lansing and Angkor have focused on major infrastructure associated with top-down Kremer, 1993; Leach, 1959; Ostrom, 1990; Scarborough and Burnside, management because of theoretical preconceptions, scholarly pre- 2010) or a combination of the two (Chase, 2019). For example, in Sri occupation with Angkorian elites, and the prominence of the huge re- Lanka, a bottom-up feudal system of administration managed large servoirs and channels (Van Liere, 1980). However, in addition to the ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S. Klassen), [email protected] (D. Evans). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101166 Received 17 October 2019; Received in revised form 6 March 2020 0278-4165/ © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/). S. Klassen and D. Evans Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 58 (2020) 101166 state-sponsored infrastructure, temple communities with residential 2.2. Epicenters hamlets and a primary temple with associated reservoirs regulated water management and rice production at a local level (Hawken, 2012, Epicenters have often been referred to as “cities” or “temple cities” 2013). At Angkor, therefore, we see two distinct and parallel systems of (Briggs, 1999 [1951], pp. 220,221; Jacques and Lafond, 2007), but state-sponsored/top-down and localized/bottom-up water manage- recent work by Carter et al. (2018) suggests that these areas were not ment. discrete cities, but rather “civic-ceremonial zones” or royal-ritual dis- Archaeological work has now been underway in post-conflict tricts (and/or neighborhoods) within the larger settlement complex. Cambodia for more than two decades, producing archaeological maps Carter et al. base this argument on the absence of evidence of specific and chronological models of development that finally allow us to ask urban components within the temple precincts, like markets and craft more nuanced questions about the relationship between top-down and production areas (Carter et al., 2018). The epicenters are associated bottom-up water management strategies at Angkor (Evans et al., 2013; with large state-sponsored temples with foundation inscriptions that Klassen et al., 2018). Our knowledge of the archaeological landscape at can be used to date both the temples and their associated occupation Angkor is sufficiently developed to assess how the top-down and areas. bottom-up strategies at Angkor interact with and complement each Epicenters were constructed successively across the landscape with other, and also to evaluate whether, and how, this changes over time. If evolving and distinct urban forms, which have been extensively the two systems do not interact, we would expect small-scale temple mapped and surveyed (Evans et al., 2007; Pottier, 1999). Evans et al. communities to be scattered across the landscape without spatial as- (2013) present a general chronological model of urbanization and sociation or functional linkages to state-sponsored hydraulic infra- evolving urban forms, relying on decades of work on inscriptions, ar- structure; we would also expect large-scale, royal temple foundations to chitecture, and art historical styles from the major temples at Angkor be directly associated with hydraulic infrastructure, indicating a clear (Coe, 2003; Coedès, 1928; Stern, 1927). Following Pottier’s model of separation of the two water management systems. If, on the other hand, urban development at Angkor (Pottier, 2000a), Evans et al. suggest that the two systems were tightly coupled, we would expect to see clear early urban centers at Angkor in the 9th to 10th centuries CE were evidence of spatial and functional relationships between top-down and “open cities”, consisting of central state temples that were often bottom-up water management systems. moated, but lacked well-structured urban spaces either inside or outside In this paper, we trace the emergence of temple communities and the moats (Evans et al., 2013). Orthogonal and cardinally orientated infrastructural networks on the landscape at multiple scales of time and grids followed in the 11th and 12th centuries CE at Angkor Wat and space. With these diachronic models, we use geospatial statistical Angkor Thom. The rigidly-structured,