Ancient urban sprawl surrounded Cambodia's Angkor
- From: Chim <ChimS1@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:00:46 -0700
By Tan Ee Lyn
REUTERS
3:57 a.m. August 13, 2007
HONG KONG - Archaeologists have published a new map showing an
extensive ancient settlement surrounding Cambodia's Angkor Wat that
supported large numbers of inhabitants before and after the famous
temple was built.
Now obscured by vegetation and low-lying clouds, the ruins spread over
1,000 sq km and were made up of thousands of houses, roads, manmade
ponds and canals, researchers from Australia, Cambodia and France said
in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
'We now know that instead of being just (a collection of) temples,
Angkor was actually a continuous and interconnected network of temples
and small scale residential features like small village ponds, small
village temples as well,' Damien Evans of the Archaeological Computing
Laboratory at the University of Sydney told Reuters in a telephone
interview.
'Very little remains now, they are just piles of brick ... a thousand
years ago (it) would have been a huge and popular city, full of life,
rather than this image of temples in a jungle.'
Angkor Wat was built in the early 12th century, while the settlement
existed between 500 AD and 1500 AD, Evans said.
'What we can see, even on a preliminary basis, is that several hundred
thousand people must have lived in the Angkor area ... which is
defined by the infrastructure, the roads, the canals, huge
embankments,' he added.
Using hand-drawn maps, ground surveys, satellite imagery, aerial
photography and ground-sensing radar provided by NASA, the researchers
identified what they believed to be more than a thousand former
manmade ponds, temples and moats - all of which were now replaced by
vegetation.
Ranging from 20 metres to 8 km long, the ponds were used for drinking,
irrigation, livestock and other domestic purposes and were especially
crucial for the dry season.
'The slightly lower elevations of the rice fields in the former moats
and reservoirs ... result in different stages of rice maturity and in
differential levels of soil moisture content, which strongly affect
the returned radar signal,' Evans said. 'You get more mature rice in
these wetter areas.'
The researchers believe the settlement was abandoned around 1500 AD
because of overexploitation and deforestation.
'What our work proved for the first time was that Angkor certainly was
large enough and its water management system was complex and extensive
enough to have created very serious environmental problems,' Evans
said.
'In such situations, infrastructure becomes very important and
increasingly complex and difficult to maintain.'
Future studies will look at how serious these problems were and if the
inhabitants were able to deal with them.
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