Ancient urban sprawl
- From: "ALEXANDER HANG," <hangchumnith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:06:04 -0500
Ancient urban sprawl
TAN EE LYN
Reuters
August 13, 2007 at 12:51 PM EDT
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," Mr. 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," Mr. 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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