Angkor Angkor Cambodia, airlines Cambodia, anchor Cambodia,  Angkor,   12th century, Cambodia  Angkor,  Angkor. -Angkor, temples, floating villages and more. On my recent trip to Angkor Cambodia I was blessed to spend three days exploring the ruins collectively known as Angkor Wat. We experienced sunrise and sunset, as well as the noonday heat, in this magnificent complex of temples, many built more than 900 years ago. Angkor Cambodia is full of relics of past splendor, these shrines were created with stones carried from far away; many were built without mortar, and all were built without modern technology. Yet the structures have withstood the ravages not only of time and weather, but also of mankind. Over the centuries Angkor Cambodia temple figures sacred to one religion (Buddhism) have been removed or destroyed by followers of another religion (Hinduism), only to be replaced by the original worshipers (Buddhists). Just as destructive were souvenir hunters at Angkor Cambodia who have taken pieces from the carvings and sold them to collectors and museums. Lastly, bullet holes and bomb damage mar many of the Angkor Cambodia temple walls — a legacy of lunatic Khmer Rouge. Like the pyramids in Egypt and the Mayan ruins in Central America,   Angkor Cambodia is the relic of an ancient civilization that was far advanced for its time. Today many of the   Angkor Wat temples are still in daily use. I saw monks and worshipers kneeling in the temples, burning incense and praying, truly a profound experience. -On my last evening in Cambodia, I took a boat ride through Chong Khneas, a floating fishing village. This loose collection of more than 700 families of fishermen and a complete support community

live on boats and travel Tonlé Sap Lake following the fish and the rainy season. To reach the floating village we drove through the town of Siem Reap and several smaller villages. The further from Siem Reap we traveled, the more primitive living conditions became. Homes went from cinder-block and concrete structures to wooden houses to one-room bamboo shacks supported on spindly bamboo poles to protect them from flooding. I would have been afraid to roll over in my sleep in these houses, much less raise a family or ride out a monsoon in one. Electricity was nonexistent, and the only running Water was the stream we were following to the lake.The only nod to the 21st century was televisions, running on car batteries and prominently displayed in the glassless windows. The floating village consisted of hundreds of boats, some no bigger than 20 feet by 6 feet. Entire families lived on each boat. Cages suspended underneath the boat served as impromptu fish farms. The back of the boat held a primitive outhouse.

What caused such an advanced civilization like the Khmer to revert to a shadow of its former self? And what lesson can we learn from this study in contrasts? To paraphrase George Santayana's famous line, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to forget it." Somehow the people of that floating village have forgotten the grandeur of Cambodia's past. They have lost touch with the creativity and spirit that made   Angkor Wat possible. Instead of moving forward, they either stayed the same or moved backwards — and perhaps that amounts to the same thing. Once we cease to learn, build, create and stretch, we not only stop gaining or growing, we allow the rest of the world to pass us by. This is the equivalent of moving backwards. We must ask ourselves each day, "Am I moving forward or simply standing still?" In our lives and at our work we all know people who refuse to change with the times. To our computer-savvy children watching us struggle to retrieve our email, we may look like slow-moving dinosaurs. We cannot afford the luxury of standing still. To do so allows the world to move past us. More importantly from a business standpoint, it allows our competition to move easily past us.

Do you risk becoming a relic of the past or a dinosaur whose fate is extinction? If you have any amount of doubt coursing through your veins, commit today to education, growth and constant improvement, both personal and professional. And know that if up until now you've been a bit lax, you're never too old or too young to make this commitment to yourself. The lesson I learned in Cambodia is that I want to be the one who builds monuments for the future — not the one who wonders how the monuments of the past were built. Author Vickie L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD is the founder and president of Vickie Milazzo Institute.

("Great Lake"), a dozen Khmer rulers of the ninth to the twelfth centuries built seven capitals containing many temples. Some are hidden in the jungle, where they are even more inaccessible because of the presence of the Khmer Rouge, who after holding power from 1975 to 1978 and killing upwards of a million Cambodians, took refuge in this region near the Thai border. The Cambodian temples are all that now remains of the ancient capitals, for only the gods had the right to stone or brick buildings. The Khmer palaces and dwellings were built of wood, and they have since disappeared without trace.

-Tourism and Angkor Conservation

Nature, not human wrath, has destroyed these marvelously rich monuments at   Angkor Cambodia. The heat and humidity of the tropical climate encouraged the unbridled growth of kapok and "strangler fig" trees, popularly associated with rains because their roots destroy monuments.

Today the principal temples of   Angkor and elsewhere in Cambodia have been freed of the vegetation that held them in its grip. Only the Ta Prohm temple has deliberately been left in the midst of the thickets in which the French missionary Charles Bouillevaux and, later, the naturalist Henri Mouhot found it in the mid-nineteenth century. Since 1898, the year in which the French Far Eastern School (the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, or EFEO) was founded, a steady stream of archaeologists have worked on the site. They patiently cleared away the undergrowth, dismantled and then reassembled the monuments, and in 1908 created the "Conservation d'  Angkor" to which the most threatened statues were taken.

According to Bernard Philippe Groslier of the EFEO, a former curator of the site, "There is hardly anything in the world comparable to the   Angkor complex in terms of the number, size and perfection of its buildings." But this masterpiece is in grave danger, and in 1989 the four main Cambodian political parties asked UNESCO to assume the coordination of international activities for the preservation of the monuments of   Angkor. In December 1992   Angkor was placed on the World Heritage List.

In view of the scale of the conservation problems involved, UNESCO'S World Heritage Committee placed a number of

conditions on   Angkor's inclusion on the List, insisting that a legal framework for conservation work and a management plan should be drawn up, and that an authority should be established with the resources to manage the entire   Angkor area. UNESCO'S first task was to help the government to set up a Cambodian Authority for the Protection of the National Heritage, which was formally approved in February 1993. UNESCO has also worked with the Cambodian government and a group of international experts on a Zoning and Environmental Management Plan (ZEMP) for the authorities, donors and local people as well as visitors. This comprehensive document takes into account   Angkor's assets as well as the dangers threatening the site.

-The archaeological treasures of   Angkor and Cambodia in general are particularly at risk from lichens, microscopic algae and bacteria

that proliferate in the guano of the many bats living in the ruins. The ZEMP also cites the destructive effects of monsoon rains, the vegetation, and variations in the underground aquifer that influence the stability of the buildings. Other factors include uncontrolled agricultural development after deforestation, the influx of thousands of tourists and the construction of hotels to replace existing facilities that are not up to international standards. The region badly needs revenue from tourism, but there is also a risk that it may suffer from it.   Angkor is a "new" destination that travel agencies are now adding to a circuit that includes Thailand, Laos and Viet Nam.To avoid desecration while permitting sustainable development of the region, the ZEMP suggests dividing the site into zones.

The  Angkor Parks, comprising five of the ancient capitals including   Angkor Wat,   Angkor Thom and Preah Khan, would be given maximum protection. They would be located within an   Angkor Cultural Reserve. On the other hand there would be no restrictions on new residents coming to join the 350,000 people already living in the area, nor on their techniques of farming or forest management. Author is France Bequette

-The transition to states in mainland Southeast Asia began during the first centuries AD,

and has commonly been ascribed to the adoption of Indian religious and political ideas which arrived on the maritime silk route. Recent research on the Cambodian Khmer language inscriptions dating from 611 AD has revealed strong local traditions underlying the Indic veneer. In assessing these trends to increased social complexity, however, we have lacked insight into late prehistoric culture.
In order to redress this situation, we investigated the Iron Age communities of the Mun Valley in Northeast Thailand, an area in which relevant sites are densely distributed. Our objective was to excavate a sufficiently large area to illuminate prehistoric culture on the eve of the transition to the state. We focused in particular upon the social organization, the evidence for technological innovation, craft specialization, innovations in the economy, expansions in exchange networks, warfare and the possibility that prehistoric communities were involved in water management. Following an intensive site survey in the study area, we identified two sites for excavation. Most Iron Age sites comprise large mounds, covering up to about 50 hectares, ringed by what have been interpreted as moats. Noen U-Loke was the principal focus of excavations. An area of 210 sq. m was opened to a depth of 5 m. The sequence in the excavated area covered nearly a millennium from 400-500 BC, the beginning of the Iron Age. We recovered 126 inhumation graves within five mortuary phases together with abundant evidence for local industrial activity, the economy, palaeo-environment and exchange relationships.

The mortuary record changed markedly over time while retaining the established practice of inhumation. Even the earliest graves included iron tools, weapons and ornaments, but a recurrent feature was the proliferation of bronzes. By the fourth mortuary phase, which is dated within the first few centuries AD, burials were disposed in clusters, each containing the remains of men, women, infants and children. There was a marked increase in ritual energy: the skeleton lay within a thick bed of silicified rice, enclosed within clay-lined and lidded graves. Some men and women were very rich, two men wearing three or four elaborate bronze belts, up to 150 bronze bangles, bronze toe and finger rings, glass beads and silver ear coils covered in gold. A woman was found with a necklace of gold and agate beads. It is also intriguing to note that clusters had their own individuality, one having nearly all the carnelian but no pots, another most of the spindle whorls and many pottery vessels. One young man was buried prone with an arrowhead lodged in his spine, and towards the end of the occupation we find a proliferation of iron points which may well indicate more friction.

Bronze casting was undertaken by specialists, the pottery was of the highest quality and some glass beads were probably locally made. Moreover, these Iron Age sites were foci for the production of salt on an industrial scale.