As Angkor’s population left in what archaeologists call an urban diaspora, they returned to village life centered around Theravada Buddhist pagodas. There are parallels here to Çatalhöyük, whose people scattered from a dense urban core into small villages on the Konya Plain. Stark writes that the Lower Mekong Basin filled with a “rural agrarian system of hamlets and small towns whose farmers and artisans continued to pursue their livelihoods: perhaps with less direct state intervention.” What collapsed wasn’t Angkorian civilization, but “the political and urban core of an elite.”
