History
The mountains contain many 15th-17th century AD sites containing 60 cm exotic ceramic jars and rough hewn log coffins set out on remote, natural rock ledges, which are scattered around the mountains The jar burials are a unique feature of the mountain, and are a previously unrecorded burial practice in Khmer cultural history. Local legends suggest the bones are the remains of Cambodian royalty.
This range of mountains formed one of the last strongholds of the Khmer Rouge, and many parts are largely inaccessible. The inaccessibility of the hills, however, helped to preserve the area.
Tourism is relatively new to the area. In 2008, Wildlife Alliance launched a community-based ecotourism program in the village of Chi-Phat, marketed as the "gateway to the Cardamoms". However the number of international visitors remains very small in comparison to the tourism development of Siem Reap (home to Angkor Wat) or Phnom Penh.
Read more about this topic: Cardamom Mountains
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)