This article analyses the walled defensive system of the Khmer city centre of Vimayapura (modern Phimai, Thailand) to evaluate the theoretical level of military effectivity of both the walls and the moats against potential attackers, considering their technical characteristics and the enemy’s weapons. We also study the layout of the urban enceinte, the constructive material, the gateways as well as weakness and strengths of the stronghold and the symbolic, monumental and ornamental functions in the overall role of the walls. Based on comparisons with similar cases, as well as in situ observations of the archaeological remains and a bibliographical research, our study reveals that the stonewalls were not designed primarily to resist military attacks. Instead, the army, the moat, and possibly the embankments and/or palisades would have been the first lines of defence of the city.

This article aims to analyze three significant examples of defensive walls from South-East Asia made of solid stone blocks (both rock as well as stone-like laterite) and provided with different but equivalent functions –a fortified imperial capital-city (Angkor Thom, in Cambodia), a fortified royal citadel (Ho Citadel, in the North of Vietnam) and a royal palace with a partly fortified appearance (Ratu Boko, in Java Island, Indonesia)–, focusing on their constructive and technical characteristics and establishing parallels between them and their closest counterparts, from China and India. We will see how their design and structure can be closely related to the fortifications of neighbouring empires, as places of origin of their strong cultural influences and, at the same time, we will try to identify the local particularities. We will pay special attention to the form of the fortified enceintes, considering the long tradition of the quadrangular plan in the walls of royal capitals, inspired in the ideal model of Chinese and Indian cities. Our research also make us think that the walls of Ratu Boko, despite their functions as symbolic limits or for retaining the soil, could also have had a defensive purpose, no matter if secondary, or at least they could be used to provide protection to the complex in case of external menace.

inmediata dentro de su contexto, considerando las construcciones emprendidas tanto por autoridades chinas como por las primeras confederaciones coreanas. Palabras claveFortificaciones; arquitectura militar; Asia; Corea; China. AbstractThis article aims to analyze archaeologically the fortifications of the protohistoric period of Korea (300 BC -300 AD), comprising the embankments, palisades and moats of the first urban centres as well as possible border walls, in a key moment in the social, political, cultural and architectonic evolution of the peninsula, of transition from villages to cities and from tribal chiefdoms to the confederation of small city-states that eventually formed the first centralized kingdoms. It is taken into account walled sites of the Koguryo kingdom (in the north), of the Samhan tribal confederations like the city-states of Wirye and Saro (in the south), and of the administrative districts of the Chinese empire in Korea (Han commanderies). Given the murky and controversial nationalist interpretations of the different East Asian historiographical traditions (Korea, Japan and China), we will try to situate within its context the emergence of the urban military architecture in the peninsula and the nearby area, considering the constructions undertaken both by Chinese authorities and by the first Korean confederacies. We will try to place the emergence of the urban military architecture of the peninsula and the nearby area within its context, considering the constructions undertaken both by Chinese authorities and by the first Korean confederacies.