Quite a variety of apparel was worn, and successive styles can be seen on the sacred statures. Males and females usually wore skirts knotted at the hips leaving the upper body naked , except for ceremonial occasions when it was clothed in a separate length of more or less richly decorated cloth, When working the fields or in combat, the farmers or soldiers would hitch the skirt up over the waist for ease of movement.
Cambodia is in thee monsoon zone of Asia and consequently has a sharply contrasting rainfall pattern. The rainy season lasts from June to November and the land is practically bereft of precipitation for the other six months of the year.
It was therefore essential to provide reservoirs of various sizes throughout the country. Two methods were devised: the trapeang, which were ponds dug into the ground, usually on a small scale, and the baray, The latter were a proliferation of vast reservoirs, no dug out but contained within more or less massive embank-ments, thus allowing water to flow out into distribution canals by the simple force of gravity. They were often up to a kilometres in length. The largest of all was the western baray at Angkor which was no less than 8 kilometers long and 2.2 kilometres wide. Its embankment, 10 metres high and about 200 metres broad at its base, involved shifting some twenty million cubic metres of earth.