Before explaining our most astonishing discoveries I should tell you who we are, and what we do.
My husband Lang is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide. I asked him to let me write his survivor’s account because it was the most incredible story I had ever heard in my life. He consented because he wanted people to know that what happened in Cambodia can happen again - anywhere. Over a period of ten years we wrote The Smell of Water and the sequel, No Front Line. And that’s all we ever intended to write.
We were going to Cambodia every year. I realized that Cambodian silk was disappearing and wrote A Pocket Guide to Cambodian Silk, a consumer guide intended to increase sales to the millions of tourists who visit Angkor. And that’s the last book I ever intended to write.
I’d been a South Asian Studies major in college and had wanted to see Angkor Wat, but Cambodia had been closed because of the Khmer Rouge. Now, I could go whenever I wanted to. I soon found that most Angkorian scholars had been men studying men; except for Sappho Marchal in the 1920s, no one had studied the women. What little had been written about them was grossly inaccurate; there are seven groups of women at Angkor Wat, and only two had been identified correctly. And then I read what had been written about the queens. Sloppy scholarship, and so disrespectful! I got MAD.
But MAD is good. It gets you going. I identified the other five groups of women, made discovery after discovery, and wrote Through the Eyes of a Queen - the Women of the Royal Court at Angkor. And in the course of all this, something changed…
Sydney Schanberg, the man behind the film The Killing Fields, wrote that once you become a war correspondent, you can never go back. You become so addicted to the adrenaline rush that you can’t do anything else. Working as a researcher is like that. Especially when you’re independent, so can study what you think is important - and publish in a country where free speech is protected. Research is hard work. And in Cambodia, it’s really tough. The relentless heat. The constant threat of disease. The biting insects won’t kill you, but the snakes will. But then you make that once-in-a-lifetime discovery…
I was trying to identify the 8 women who guard the inner sanctum of Angkor Wat. I traced what they’re called today back to the original Sanskrit, and discovered that they’re yakshī. I then compared them to Indian yakshī, and compared their attributes. Positive ID.
And then you make another once-in-a-lifetime discovery. I’d looked at the 6 women following the queens in the Southern Gallery for months, and finally, through nine centuries of erosion, had been able to make out the wheel of a cart. Zhou Daguan’s “Servants in Carts”.
That split second when you realize what you’ve discovered - that’s addictive. I wanted to know what the queens I saw on the walls of the Angkorian temples were wearing, and where it had come from. I applied for a research grant from the Victoria and Albert in London, made two trips to India, and wrote What the Queens Wore - the Silk of Angkor and The Origins of Khmer Ikat - in India, and Beyond.
On to what follows… We want you to read our books, but we wrote those books so that you could learn of our discoveries. This section of our website is a shortcut for you.
Some of our discoveries are concepts. Because these concepts govern our more tangible discoveries, we’ve listed them first.
Next are our most astonishing discoveries. Those that made us suck in our breath when we suddenly realized what we were looking at.
Next are our discoveries that we were able to prove. There’s no greater thrill than to finally learn that you did get it right!
Next are those discoveries that we’re still trying to prove. And if you have information that will help us, please click the Contacts tab and send us an e-mail. If we use your information we’ll credit you, of course!
Next are those discoveries that we will never be able to prove. Those that will remain a mystery forever.
And last is Angkor Unscrambled! It will enable you to see why we keep writing books.