While excavating the Ta Prohm temple in Angkor in 1927, a team of archaeologists discovered the head (and only the head) of a Buddha statue. They then brought their find—which has been dated to the 12 th or 13 th century—to Cambodia’s National Museum in Phnom Penh, where it has sat by itself for nearly 100 years.

Archaeologists in Cambodia are celebrating an unexpected find at the country's centuries-old Angkor temple complex: the torso of a statue of Buddha that matches a head found nearly a century ago at the same site.

Archaeologists just solved a century-old mystery at Cambodia’s Angkor Temple Complex. They unearthed the long-lost torso of a Buddha statue from the Khmer Empire, the medieval Hindu-Buddhist civilization that once exerted influence over much of mainland Southeast Asia.