The Great London:
South East Asia

Unprecedented new details of medieval cities hidden under jungle in Cambodia near Angkor Wat have been revealed using lasers, archaeologists said Sunday, shedding new light on the civilisation behind the world's largest religious complex.

While the research has been going on for several years, the new findings uncover the sheer scale of the Khmer Empire's urban sprawl and temple complexes to be significantly bigger than was previously thought.

The research, drawing on airborne laser scanning technology known as lidar, will be unveiled in full at the Royal Geographic Society in London on Monday by Australian archaeologist Damian Evans.

"We always imagined that their great cities surrounded the monuments in antiquity," Evans told AFP.

"But now we can see them with incredible precision and detail, in some places for the very first time, but in most places where we already had a vague idea that cities must be there," he added.

Angkor Wat, a UNESCO World Heritage site seen as among the most important in southeast Asia, is considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.

It was constructed from the early to mid 1100s by King Suryavarman II at the height of the Khmer Empire's political and military power and was among the largest pre-industrial cities in the world.

But scholars had long believed there was far more to the empire than just the Angkor complex.

The huge tranch of new data builds on scans that were made in 2012 that confirmed the existence of Mahendraparvata, an ancient temple city near Angkor Wat.

But it was only when the results of a larger survey in 2015 were analysed that the sheer scale of the new settlements became apparent.

To create the maps, archaeologists mounted a special laser on the underneath of a helicopter which scans the area and is able to see through obstructions like trees and vegetation.

Much of the cities surrounding the famed stone temples of the Khmer Empire, Evans explained, were made of wood and thatch which has long rotted away.

"The lidar quite suddenly revealed an entire cityscape there with astonishing complexity," he said.

"It turned out we'd been walking and flying right over the top of this stuff for ten years and not even noticing it because of the vegetation."

Among the new scans already published are a detailed map of a huge city complex surrounding the stone temple known as Preah Khan of Kompong Svay, a series of iron smelting sites dating back to the Angkor era and new information on the complex system of waterways that kept the region running.

The new data also maps out the full extent of Mahendraparvata, information that will make future digs much more accurate and less time consuming.

"What we had was basically a scatter of disconnected points on the map denoting temple sites. Now it's like having a detailed street map of the entire city," Evans said.

Further maps will be published in the coming months, he added.

Long Kosal, a spokesman for the Apsara authority, the government body that manages the Angkor complex, said the lidar had uncovered "a lot of information from the past."

"It shows the size and information about people living at those sites in the past," he told AFP, adding further research was now needed to capitalise on the finds.

While the Khmer Empire was initially Hindu it increasingly adopted Buddhism and both religions can be seen on display at the complex.

Angkor is visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors a year and remains Cambodia's top tourist attraction.

For more information see the >Cambodian Archaeological Lidar Initiative website.

Author: Suy Se | Source: AFP [June 12, 2016]

In Angkor Wat research, the focus has long been on temples and high society. A new project there is taking a different approach, laying the foundation for a new understanding of the iconic empire

A team excavating a dirt mound at Angkor Wat is hoping to shed light on one of the enduring blank spots in archaeologists’ understanding of the Angkorian empire: the lives of its common people.

It’s a fresh direction in the field of Angkorian archaeology, according to the leader of the dig, Alison Carter, 35, an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney.

“We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the temples and inscriptions and the elite members of the society, but there’s still so much that can be learned about the regular people who were contributing to the Angkorian empire. I hope that this project can spark some interest in those regular people,” she said this week.

Carter, an American who has been doing archaeology work in Cambodia for 10 years, said that her excavation was the first of its kind to focus directly on, what she believes to be, an Angkorian-era home.

The project, titled “Excavating Angkor: Household Archaeology at Angkor Wat” which began in early June and will continue through July, is funded primarily by the US-based National Geographic Society, as well as the Dumbarton Oaks institute. It is a part of the larger Greater Angkor Project, an umbrella research initiative managed by the University of Sydney and the APSARA Authority.

“This project is focused on excavating a house mound within the Angkor Wat enclosure. We’re trying to do a horizontal excavation. We’re not opening one huge trench but multiple trenches across this mound, and we’re doing that to try to understand where and how people are living,” Carter said.

“You could [call this] groundbreaking, not just because it is a good archaeological pun, but also because it does signal a shift in how people have been studying Angkor since the French began their research here.”

Carter and her international team are looking for artefacts of daily life – pots, utensils, food remains, gardens – hoping to piece together a picture of what life was like for the non-elite during and after the reign of the Angkor empire from circa 802AD to about 1463AD.

“Basically, anything that anyone does around the house and at home, we’re trying to find material evidence of that,” she added.

The idea for her project stemmed from a 2013 excavation within the Angkor Wat enclosure that found ceramics, cooking vessels, Chinese tradewares and other features that suggested human habitation. It was an important find, said Carter, but one that was largely overshadowed by the published results of another project: an extensive aerial laser surveying – known as lidar – of Angkor and its surrounding temples that was released around the time of the 2013 dig.

Along with evidence of daily activities, Carter and her team are also looking for signs of postholes in their mound.

“It’s a tricky process. It’s hard to study Angkorian houses because the houses themselves were above ground, so we’re using a variety of different strategies to try to pick up as much information as we possibly can,” she said.

Those strategies include methods that have not been used so far in the study of Angkor, such as soil analysis. Through several methods, including analysis of both macro and micro materials, team members can deduce a number of things from the dirt: where there might have been entryways, which areas were used for food preparation and areas where there may have been a garden.

Dougald O’Reilly, a senior lecturer in archaeology at the Australian National University, said that to date, most research of the Khmer empire had examined things mostly from a macro perspective.

“It is encouraging to see this type of work being undertaken to bring to light the subtle nuances of daily life at Angkor at the height of its power. It will bring a far more textured understanding of the past,” O’Reilly said.

Carter said that, due to a binding agreement with National Geographic, she was unable to disclose the specific details of what her team had discovered so far.

However, she did say that the team had discovered a lot of ceramics that seemed to be related to cooking.

“We’re finding evidence of how the mound was constructed and how people might have been living on it,” she said.

Team member Cristina Castillo, from University College London who is studying macrobotanical remains, said they hoped to continue the research in the residential areas to find out more about the local people’s diets and farming systems, which may have included horticultural activities adjacent to their residences.

“After all, rice was the staple, but they were eating a variety of crops, and fish and animals, as well,” she said.

Carter stressed that this excavation was just the beginning of what she hoped would be a renewed focus on the lives of regular Angkorians.

“Once we start getting a bigger data set of house mounds and households then we can really start seeing and saying a lot more about Angkorian society and what the daily lives of people were like,” she said.

“This is the power of archaeological research – to give a voice to these parts of the past.”

Author: Brent Crane | Source: The Phnom Penh Post [July 04, 2015]