Mined land in Cambodia possesses hazardous potential for those willing to risk its inhabitation, but this potentiality is commingled with threat and uncertainty. Mined terrain creates sites where the affordances of place clash with its dangerous materialities. Village residents in this study were engaged in ongoing efforts to physically alter the place they inhabited, but these tectonic processes were not always successful. The presence of military waste transformed the landscape into an unfamiliar ecological terrain of intermingled organic and potentially explosive inorganic elements. By 2009, large swathes of village land had been cleared of both mines and wild vegetation, giving villagers a hard-earned sense of safety. However, ongoing uncertainty remained about the state of the ground and the things buried within it. Amidst the struggle to reclaim the landscape for agriculture, mines sometimes interposed themselves, their detonations damaging bodies and lives and unsettling residents’ sense of place.

柬埔寨的矿区对于那些愿意冒险居住的人来说具有危险的潜力，但这种潜力与威胁和不确定性交织在一起。开采的地形创造了场所，在这些场所，场所的可供性与其危险的物质性发生冲突。本研究中的村民一直在努力改变他们居住的地方，但这些构造过程并不总是成功的。军事废物的存在将景观变成了一个由有机元素和潜在爆炸性无机元素混合而成的陌生生态地形。到 2009 年，大片村庄土地已经清除了地雷和野生植被，让村民有了来之不易的安全感。然而，关于地面状态和埋在其中的事物的持续不确定性仍然存在。