ABSTRACT
The sovereigns of Angkor appear to have followed an ideologically mandated sequence for the construction of the main royal foundations that included, when possible, large hydraulic installations, an ancestral temple, and a state mountain temple. The commissioning of repetitive if less ostentatious royal foundations throughout the empire accompanied the establishment of these spectacular monuments, and they formed an integral component of state building projects. Among such repetitive foundations, we will present here recent research on one of the most famous of these, the āśramas of Yaśovarman I (889–910 CE), which occupy a special place in understanding the history of religious place-making and infrastructural campaigns among the ancient Khmer. Ordered by the founder of the city of Angkor, their establishment territorially delimited and mapped out the empire as a means to materialise the centralised power of the sovereign, practice which will be reproduced by the successors of this sovereign, notably the most famous of them, Jayavarman VII.
