CAMBODIA’S CAVE OF BRIDGES
WHEN FRENCH RESEARCHERS Cécile Mourer-Chauviré and her husband, Roland Mourer, landed in Cambodia in 1964, they never expected to change history. She was trained as a paleornithologist and he, while stationed under the French military “coopération” program to teach in a local school, was finishing a Ph.D. in prehistoric ceramics and modern pottery making in the province of Kampong Chhnang. Both had worked on excavations of Paleolithic cave sites in France. Although Mourer’s initial posting was for 20 months, the couple ended up staying for six years. Along the way, they made a discovery that transformed not only their lives, but also the accepted record of Cambodian prehistory.
Shortly after they arrived, the Mourers began looking for potential archaeological sites to explore. They visited the far western province of Battambang, where the governor told them about a cave among limestone massifs near a village called Sdao. A local guide led them to a rural area near the cave, formerly forested but newly planted with crops. The couple traveled by oxcart—no cars could make the rugged trip. “It was a true frontier,” Mourer-Chauviré says. “It seemed very few people had been in the cave before.”
The vast and airy shelter sits about a 10-minute walk up the side of a mountain called Phnom Teak Treang. In a report published in 1970, the Mourers wrote that the chamber is “lit by numerous vents separated by natural vaults in the form of arches.” Those arches give the site its name, Laang Spean, which means “Cave of Bridges.” The scene today is not so very different. Far from the pavement, traffic, and noise of cities, Phnom Teak Treang
