Lost cities #7: how Nasa technology uncovered the 'megacity' of ...

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/16/lost-cities-6-ang...

Lost cities #7: how Nasa technology

uncovered the 'megacity' of Angkor
Recent laser surveys have revealed traces of a vast urban settlement, comparable in size
to Los Angeles, around the temples of Angkor in the Cambodian jungle. The ancient
Khmer capital was never lost it just got a bit overgrown
Oliver Wainwright
Tuesday 16 August 2016 07.30BST

lusters of gigantic stone pine cones poke above the dense forest canopy in
Cambodia, looking like ancient rocket ships poised for take-o, their distinctive
silhouettes reected in the mirror-calm moat below. Tree root tentacles roam
along crumbling cornices, winding their way around door frames and strangling
the serene stone faces of smiling god-kings, oblivious to the fact that their empire has
long succumbed to the natural world.
When youre exploring the enigmatic temples of Angkor, along with the two million
other tourists who come here each year, it can still feel like youre uncovering this lost
kingdom for the rst time. Whats harder to imagine as you roam between the ruined
sites, each set apart in the depths of the jungle, is that these monuments were once part
of the largest, most sprawling city on the planet.
Its a hunch that archaeologists have had for decades, but which was only recently
conrmed in astonishing detail by an aerial laser survey, which cut through the foliage
for the rst time a few years ago to reveal the grid of a vast urban settlement stretching
for miles around the moated compounds. It showed that the ancient Khmer capital,
which ourished from the ninth to 15th centuries, had more in common with Los
Angeles than this series of temples standing in splendid isolation in the jungle might
suggest.
The laser technology has been a total game-changer, says Damian Evans, the
Australian archaeologist who has been leading the airborne scanning survey at the cole
Franaise dExtrme-Orient, working with Cambodian APSARA National Authority and
the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts. Our surveys have revealed the pattern of a
settlement comparable in size to LA or Sydney, with an urban form that resembles the
kind of dispersed low-density megacity characteristic of the modern world.
For centuries, explorations of Angkor had been preoccupied with the temple compounds
themselves, focusing on the religious symbolism of the structures and the cosmological
worlds depicted in their intricate bas reliefs. And its not hard to see why.
Grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome, was the judgment of young
French explorer Henri Mouhot, when he rst stumbled across Angkor Wat in 1858, a

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complex he described as a rival to [the temple] of Solomon, erected by some ancient

Michelangelo. This central temple alone, built by King Suryavarman II in the early 12th
century, remains the largest religious complex in the world, four times larger than
Vatican City, its ve conical towers rising above a 160-hectare precinct.
As the only surviving structures in the area, it was assumed that the temples must have
operated like medieval walled towns, each inhabited by sta of a few thousand people.
Perhaps they had been built by successive kings, as the royal family and their retinue
moved from one complex to the next, leaving a series of separate cities dotted across the
plain, each bordered by a defensive moat.
The reality, it turns out, was nothing of the sort. The laser surveys, conducted in 2012
and 2015, revealed that these sacred walled precincts didnt contain much at all. They
were instead surrounded by a sprawling urban network, a grid of boulevards, streets and
canals that extended far into the surrounding landscape, covering an area larger than
modern-day Paris. What archaeologists had been studying for generations was simply
the equivalent of a European city with everything wiped away except for the churches
and cathedrals.
At its peak in the 12th century, when London had a population of 18,000, Angkor was
home to hundreds of thousands, some estimate up to three-quarters of a million people.
So what form did this megacity in the rice elds take?
Im reluctant to use the word city, says Evans. Angkor doesnt follow the usual
pattern of an ancient walled city with a clearly dened edge. Instead, we discovered a
very densely populated downtown urban core, covering an area of 35-40 sq km, which
gradually gives way to a kind of agro-urban hinterland. It slowly dissolves into a world of
neighbourhood shrines, mixed up with rice elds, market gardens and ponds. It was the
prototype of modern-day suburban sprawl.
Thanks to technology developed by Nasa, all of this could be gleaned from a few hours of
helicopter ight, as opposed to generations of hacking through the undergrowth with
machetes (while keeping a lookout for landmines). Shooting a million laser beams every
four seconds from the bottom of a helicopter, the lidar technology (which stands for
light imaging detection and ranging) allows a kind of virtual deforestation to take place,
stripping away the tree canopy to reveal what lies beneath on the forest oor.
The ndings were a revelation. The scanning exposed a topography inscribed with a
precise network of furrows and mounds, the bones of the city etched into the landscape.
On the ground you just see lumps and bumps, says Evans, but this aerial view shows
a very sophisticated system of road networks, planned neighbourhoods and intricate
waterworks. Angkor was a work of geoengineering on an unparalleled scale.
Any evidence of these neighbourhoods on the ground has long since rotted away. In
Khmer society, stone was reserved exclusively for religious monuments, built of great
blocks oated here from quarries 30 miles away along specially dug canals (as the wider
laser survey revealed last year). Everything else even the royal palaces was made of
wood and thatch, with homes raised up on stilts on top of earthen mounds, designed to
keep them above the oodwaters in the rainy season.

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The Khmers mastery over the natural landscape was perhaps their greatest
achievement, and the lidar mapping has exposed complex levels of terraforming and
water management systems that were way ahead of any other settlement of the era.
Once again, earlier archaeological studies focused on the symbolic role of water in
Angkors cosmological order, reading the vast reservoirs as symbols of the mythological
oceans surrounding Mount Meru, home of the Hindu gods. While the watercourses
evidently played a part in the sacred geography of the city, they were fundamentally
there to irrigate the rice elds, the source of the empires great wealth. Success in a
tropical climate ultimately depended on the ability to mitigate ooding during the
summer monsoon and store enough water to irrigate the elds during dry season
something the Khmer rulers had clearly mastered.
Residential neighbourhoods were arranged around thousands of communal rainfall
ponds, while the elds were irrigated by a pair of great reservoirs, or barays, the whole
system connected by an extensive network of canals and channels. The West Baray,
which stretches ve miles by one mile to the west of downtown Angkor, remains the
largest hand-cut body of water on earth. Contained by tall earthen dikes, it stands as the
pinnacle of the Khmer ability to harness the landscape for its own ends.
But this hydrological virtuosity, Evans and his team now believe, might also have been at
the root of Angkors undoing, shedding new light on the ultimate reason for this
magnicent citys decline.
Archaeologists have long speculated on why the Khmer capital descended into ruin. One
theory is that the city was sacked by a Siamese invasion in 1431, prompting the kings
and their people to ee en masse to an area near present-day Phnom Penh. But there is
little evidence of the kind of settlements indicative of a mass migration.
Others argue that the transition from Hinduism to more placid Buddhism, following the
reign of Jayavarman VII, sapped the Angkorian civilisation of its war mongering,
monument-building vitality. Yet that conveniently ignores the violent expansions of
other Buddhist rulers elsewhere in the world at the time. Another tenuous suggestion is
that the Khmer exhausted themselves with all the building projects and nally collapsed
from monument fatigue.
Evans, however, now believes that environmental factors played a signicant part.
Looking at the sedimentary records, there is evidence of catastrophic ooding, he says.
In the expansion of Angkor, they had devastated all of the forests in the watershed, and
we have detected failures in the water system, revealing that various parts of the
network simply broke down. With the entire feudal hierarchy reliant on the successful
management of water, a break in the chain could have been enough to prompt a gradual
decline.
While it might be tempting to dwell on the colourful vision of a mass exodus, Evans is
keen to emphasise that there was no dramatic collapse at all. There is a lot of evidence
for continued vitality in Angkor, he says. When Portuguese traders visited in the 16th
century, and French explorers came here in the 19th century, they encountered
communities of several thousand people living in and around the temples. It might
have disappeared from the consciousness of Europeans for a time, he adds, but Angkor
was never a lost city. It just got a bit overgrown.
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