ABSTRACT
The "changelessness" of Cambodian history was often singled out by the French, who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw themselves as introducing change and civilization to the region. The Cambodians, like other early inhabitants of the region, had domesticated pigs and water buffalo fairly early, and they grew varieties of rice and root crops by the so-called slash-and-burn method common throughout the tropics as well as in medieval Europe. The notion of changelessness dissolves, however, when we discuss the revolutionary changes that suffused Cambodia at the beginning of the Christian era. This was the centuries-long phenomenon known as Indianization, whereby elements of Indian culture were absorbed or chosen by the Cambodian people in a process that lasted more than a thousand years. In the Funan era, Buddhism also flourished in Cambodia, and the Buddhist concept of merit, which still suffuses much Cambodian thinking about society, resembles, in some ways, the notions of prowess and salvation just discussed.
