It has been almost ten days since my last update, and I have been travelling through Cambodia moving from Siem Reap toward the south, where I ended in the town of Kep, Kampot province. Kep is a colonial retreat founded in 1908 for the French elite. The Khmer Rouge left us only skeletal remains of what was once a little paradise for those western foreigners who dreamed about uncontaminated exotic shores. Nowadays, the walls of the luxury French maisons, when covered by wood ceilings, host Khmer families of fisherman which grill crabs and squids for the few tourists excaping the beach parties of Sihanoukville.
During the last week, before taking the rusted bus to the south, I had the chance of organizing three different field trips aimed at enriching the bag of samples we already collected with APSARA. Unfortunatey, not all of them could be considered fully successful. I will not mention here the visit to the quarry I couldn’t find a few miles north of the remote temple of Preah Khan. Our motorcycle stopped one hour far away from the phnom I was looking for, and which is supposed to hide a quarry of graywacke on one of its flanks.
Conversely, the second visit to Koh Ker site was unexpectatedly very successful. When we left the site the week before we knew that other quarries were hiding in the site area, as the testimony of the locals reaffirmed. This time we focused on two new sites which could potentially be ancient sandstone quarries, a small river located few hundered meters before the main check point and the file of Veal Thom, literally Vast Field, where the local chief of police once saw stone blocks and cutting marks.
Well, at the end of the morning these two sites turned out not to be the source of any stone building or sculpting material. The first site is in fact a beautiful outcrop of columnar basalt, forming a natural step-like structure which becomes an attractive waterfall during the rainy season. Veal Thom is actually a vast, open field now intensively cultivated, but without any remain of stone.
Our guide, after one hour of walking under a deadly sun, told us that some workers found chieseled stones during the excavation of the fields a few years ago. If a quarry exists, it is now safely protected by a patchwork of rice fields.
On our way back to the jeep we passed by an abandoned wood house where a small sandstone block was lying on the ground and used as a step. We all laughed as that was the only stone we saw that day, and we pointed the found to the local guide. That is what you are looking for? he seemed to say. And to our driver: I know some rivers where there is plenty of that stuff.
That is how we ended to walk on a new quarry, set in a small seasonal creek spotted with remains of blocks and piles of stone chips testifying the ancient chieseling activity. The river is right behind the series of shrines built around massive stone outcrops carved in the shape of linga.
Before leaving Koh Ker with seven kilograms of stones from four different quarry sites, our guide mentioned another big quarry to the west near Prasat Thom. Much more has to be done in Koh Ker, as potential quarries are certainly scattered throughout the entire site. Just beneath the area of Koh Ker there is a vast sandstone terrace which is brought to light in correspondence of riverbed and surface cuts.
