Over the Christmas/New Year period, I found some time to do site updates and one that I have been wanting to do for some time. I desperately wanted to reduce the amount of time consumed by tracking down historical data. I do love doing what I do, but time is an irreplaceable resource. In some cases, it can take weeks of shuttling between local libraries and online resources, then weeding through those documents of differing languages to establish even a basic background for the historical notes tied to a particular site. That’s then paired with the site visits (the fun part) to create the pages you see on this site. If I can speed that process up, it’s very welcome.
Historical data for Khmer temples is incredibly fragmented, with archeological sites often having been noted under different names, along with the use of numerous independent inventory systems. Some of it is online, some of it is offline, some of it was online and is now offline, and then some is not in the public domain at all. For now, I’ll just focus on the historical data that is in the public domain.
The desire to marry historical site data to a single reference number or name is not new, and it’s something that has been done before by multiple people, I am certain. The problem for me is twofold: not all of these entity resolution efforts are in the public domain, and/or the data was canonicalised back to a single name or ID, dropping the original inventory name. Regardless of those efforts, people continued to use the names from whatever inventory list they were working from, or made new ones.
So, to get maximum search capability, we need all the historical names and inventory numbers as a starting point. The starting point would be the on-the-ground inventories by Aymonier, Lajonquiere, and Parmentier published in the early to mid-1900s. Aymonier never used a reference number, which I would guess he’d later regret, but Lajonquiere, who was hot on his heels, did. In Lajonquiere’s three tomes, he backreferenced Aymonier’s work but not always accurately, something that would be copied over into contemporary efforts. Parmentier would expand upon Lajonquiere’s inventory system (using the IK#), as would many to follow. At the same time, numerous smaller inventories would add their own inventory system.
So, the pseudo process would be to gather the index pages from those historical volumes (Aymonier, Lajonquiere, Parmentier etc.), OCR them, import them to individual spreadsheets; then, export my site listings and import those to its own spreadsheet, then map all the data back to my site ID for reimport. I thought this would take a week. It ended up taking three! The problem was the quality of the OCR, which ended up requiring a lot of manual data entry. I really couldn’t afford that time for health reasons, and for the calling of real work duties, but I am glad that I pushed on anyway.
Now, using the searchbox on the home page (https://helloangkor.com), you and I can now search via historical inventory numbers using the prefixes listed below the search box under “Advanced Search”, or by historical names.
At the bottom of every site page, you’ll now see the reference to those records under “Historical Inventories”, and under “Site Info”, you’ll see an expanded list of alternative names and inventory numbers where you can easily do an expanded search via the adjacent link. That link opens in a new tab and directs you to the custom search engine at search.helloangkor.com.
On the “Other Names” field, there is an extra search icon that opens a new tab with a pre-populated search on EFEO Banyan (the digital library of École française d’Extrême-Orient). The third search icon on the “Other Names” field opens a new tab with a pre-populated search on Gallica (the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France).
With either of those searches, you’ll likely need to do a second level of filtering, but you are at least in the ballpark in terms of possibilities.
You can also see a map of those historical inventories by following the links below, but do note we have not visited every site in those records, so some sites may not yet appear on the map. Sites in the historical Khmer regions, in present-day Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, will be covered and added in the future when time and funds permit those journeys.
| Inventory | # Sites | Visited to date |
| Aymonier I, II, III (1901-1904) | 338 | 213 |
| Lanonquiere I, II, II (1902-1911) | 714 | 386 |
| Parmentier (1913, 1927, 1939) | 240 | 154 |
| Trouve (1934) | 64 | 40 |
| Monuments Historiques (1926) | 667 | 465 |
Other inventories are in process, including those by Dalet, Boulbet, Boulbet & Dagens in the 1970s, and hopefully later inventories by Gaucher, Pottier etc. (if data is in the public domain), through to the most recent being that by the Angkor Vihara Project. I also need to work on historical and contemporary Khmer names to open up more of the brilliant local work, which will surely become more prominent as time goes on.
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