Early Theravāda Place-making in the Shadow of Mount Meru: Negotiating the Architecture, Space, and Landscape of “Buddhist Terraces”/Praḥ Vihār at Angkor Thom, Cambodia c. 13th-16th Centuries

This Dissertation explores the material remains of the religious transition from Brahmano-Buddhist practice to Theravāda Buddhism of the Angkorian Empire (802-1431 CE) which occurred within and surrounding the urban citadel of Angkor Thom between the 14th-16th centuries. The study of this major social and political transformation is based on an analysis of the remains of wooden prayer halls, called “Buddhist Terraces” or praḥ vihār, emblems of less centralized religious practices and the institutionalization of a Theravāda-aligned saṅgha in Cambodia. In the absence of inscriptions following the end of the 13th century, anthropological approaches to landscape, memory, ritual, and place-making provide the analytical framework for the interpretation of Angkor Thom’s Theravāda Buddhist constructions and the resulting politico-religious changes across the urban landscape. Two seasons of survey and one of excavation revealed an architecturally diverse array of over seventy praḥ vihār within Angkor Thom alone, built in reference to previously constructed urban infrastructure such as roads, canals, city blocks, and earlier ritual complexes of unidentified affiliation. In turn, my analysis identified that certain architectural forms and the functions they afforded directly correlated with pre-Theravāda ritual practices and building technologies. Significant Brahmano-Buddhist temples such as the Bayon and Western Prasat Top were also architecturally and ritualistically transformed by the founding of praḥ vihār in the immediate vicinity of these monuments, as well as by the carving of new iconography reflective of growing Ayutthayan geopolitical influence. This reformation of the landscape created new ritual centers within the old and endowed earlier structures with new religious purpose, establishing “foci of memory” across the landscape. Such strategies of place-making maintained the sacrality of Angkor Thom as an integraed cosmographic urban center. The remaking of Angkor Thom’s Theravāda religious landscape, however, was the negotiated outcome of competing factions such as centralizing state institutions and quasi-independent monastic communities. My thesis posits that regardless of the societal and material changes that accompanied Theravāda Buddhism, the “temple” tradition which materialized Angkor’s religious pre-eminence witnessed considerable continuity through time. This tradition is believed to have transcended key epochal breaks including the gradual dissolution of Brahmano-Buddhism as an imperial institution. Ultimately, this Dissertation provides the first systematic investigation of a distinctive Theravāda Buddhist landscape that reinvented Angkor Thom beginning in the late-13th century.Ph.D