Archaeologists in Cambodia have found the remains of medieval cities in the jungle near the famed temple of Angkor Wat. The cities are said to be from the 12th century, and the discovery may put previous assumptions about the empire’s development and global standing to rest.
New laser technology, called a lidar survey, was used to locate the cities beneath the dense jungle floor. An article by the Guardian describes the process used:
“An airborne laser scanner (ALS) is mounted to a helicopter skid pad. Flying with pre-determined guidelines, including altitude, flight path and airspeed, the ALS pulses the terrain with more than 16 laser beams per square metre during flights. The time the laser pulse takes to return to the sensor determines the elevation of each individual data point.
The data downloaded from the ALS is calibrated and creates a 3D model of the information captured during the flights. In order to negate tree foliage and manmade obstacles from the data, any sudden and radical changes in ground height are mapped out, with technicians who have models of the terrain fine-tuning the thresholds in processing these data points. Once completed, the final 3D model is handed over to the archaeologists for analysis, which can take months to process into maps.”
The results of Australian archaeologist Dr. Damien Evans will be published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The 2015 scans will reveal the extent to what remains. They have found cities that range from 900 to 1,400 years old, all of an immense size. Some of these cities even rival the size of the Cambodian capital city of Phnom Penh. Elaborate water systems that were only thought to have existed hundreds of years before historians believed they existed.
They also determined that with the dense populations the cities could have made the Khmer empire the largest one in the world at its peak in the 12th century. It may also give archaeologists clues to how the empire decline in the 15th century.
It was often believed that the empire declined due to a Thai invasion and a subsequent fleeing to cities toward the south. But those cities have never been found. This discovery may completely disprove that theory.
These scans are also great improvements from the ones taken in 2012, which only showed urban centers at the ‘downtown’ area of Angkor Wat.
The results of the scan were published today.
Featured image via Wikipedia
