FIELD NOTE: DATING OF THE KOH KONG SHIPWRECK
BY NANCY BEAVAN
Introduction:
Nancy Beavan, PhD is a Senior Research Fellow at Otago University, New Zealand. Since 2003 she has been studying the Jar and Coffin Burial ritual of the Cardamom Mountains, Southern Cambodia, to characterise this previously unrecorded burial practice of the 14th to 15th centuries AD in which an unknown people used Maenam Noi storage jars for the secondary burial of human bone (see Radiocarbon Dates From Jar and Coffin Burials of the Cardamom Mountains Reveal a Unique Mortuary Ritual in Cambodia’s Late- To Post- Angkor Period (15th-17th Centuries AD))
Contact:
nancy.beavan@anatomy.otago.ac.nz
Abstract:
The “Koh S’dech Shipwreck” was found by a local fishing trawler in February 2005 about 20 kilometres off the coast of Koh S’dech, Koh Kong province, Cambodia. Between 2005 and 2006, some 900 pieces of pottery consisting mainly of Maenam Noi (Singburi) storage jars of varying sizes, Sawankhalok, Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai ware were recovered. In November of 2011 the authors obtained permissions to examine the shipwreck cargo now stored in Koh Koh city, Koh Kong Province, Cambodia. Two woven-bamboo core lacquered vessels were among the recovered ceramics cargo, and this Field Note reports on the radiocarbon dating and lacquer analysis.
