Content area
Full Text
Angkor and the Khmer Civilization. By MICHAEL D. COE. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003. 240 pp. $39-95 (cloth).
Michael D. Coe, an anthropologist with long-established expertise in the study of Mayan civilizations, has taken up a new challenge in this study of Angkor. Coe's work synthesizes recent and older scholarship to produce a volume designed for a popular audience seeking a broad-based introduction to Khmer civilization. This is a useful contribution to an expanding body of works on Angkor that finds an important place between photographically rich but text-poor art books and specialist accounts with a more minimalist approach to visual content. Ultimately, however, the general reader might be better served by Charles Higham's recent Civilization of Angkor (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), which, while more sparsely illustrated, contains the insights of an archaeologist with decades of experience working in mainland Southeast Asia.
Reflecting perhaps his archaeological background, Coe begins his narrative with the early French and other European encounters with the complex at Angkor. While problematizing the notion of Henri Mouhot's having "discovered" Angkor, the author's decision to take the French archaeologists of the École Française d'Extrême Orient as his starting point nevertheless casts Khmer civilization as something that has been unearthed and given meaning by Europeans. Thereafter, Coe's account turns to the Khmer themselves, doing an excellent job of establishing the physical and sociocultural setting for his...