Iron and the Khmer empire (9th to 15th c.): a multidisciplinary (sourcing and dating) approach to evaluate the iron procurement during the Angkorian period

International audienceA century of research at Angkor, in Cambodia, has generated an invaluable record of the political and religious aspects of Khmer society but has yet to provide direct insight into the functioning of its exchange system. Iron, with its dynamic technological characteristics, is viewed as an ideal medium to investigate the organization of production and exchange networks. This paper represents a pilot study of an ANR project IRANGKOR (2015-2018) that aims to provide direct insight into the functioning and complex interaction of cultural and technological variables within the Angkorian production-distribution network and identify evolution(s) in iron production and distribution. The foundation of this study is an integrated methodology capable of characterizing the origin of iron to enrich knowledge of production-exchange systems from the range of available evidence and determining absolute chronological markers of finished products that has the potential to impact our understanding of iron's origin, production, distribution and use over the last three thousand years. This research has included hundreds of excavated materials from production sites and iron ore sources, 50 crampons from four of Angkor's most important temples; and involved major methodological breakthroughs based on an integrated approach (technological characterisation, macroscopic and microscopic compositional investigation, ad-hoc multivariate analyses, 14C dating of iron). We provide here the first clues of reconstruction of iron procurement during the Angkorian period and demonstrate the first direct evidence for the life history of the temples. In addition to expose these results, this paper will review key methodological aspects linked to such an interpretation