Mountainside Mortuary
(Photograph courtesy Nancy Beavan)
Hewn from tree trunks some 700 years ago, several log coffins are pictured lined up like ramshackle piano keys beneath a rock overhang at the Phnom Pel burial site in Cambodia in 2010.
As well as being “a place apart spiritually,” these “nearly inaccessible” burial locations may have been chosen to protect the dead.
Beavan’s team has radiocarbon-dated wood, teeth, and bones from four of the sites to between A.D. 1395 and 1650, placing them smack-dab in the decline of the Khmer Empire, based in Angkor.
