Angkor Wat and Urban Sprawl
Sunset at Angkor Wat. Photo (cc) Cap’n Surly.
The big story catching my eye at the moment is the discovery that there’s a lot more to Angkor Wat than previously thought. To some extent that shouldn’t be too surprising. The site is boasts massive buildings and is carefully planned. There’s some stunning engineering and hydraulics which feeds a network of pools. The problem is finding where the extra settlement is. The discovery of Angkor Wat was in the sixteenth century, but serious work only really started with the reports of Henri Mouhot in the 19th century. The big problem is finding the sites. Angkor is the stereotypical Lost City in the Jungle. The solution is to use radar which the Greater Angkor Project has been doing to look for plant growth and moisture.
You can’t build a massive city without there being some environmental impact, and the trick here is to see how plants grow after the site has been abandoned. Places where trenches were dug and ditches cut stay slightly damper than normal. Soil that accumulates over walls in contrast is better drained. This creates differences in in plant growth and produces images that look a bit like an x-ray or outline of the buildings. The results have been stunning. To quote Damien Evans, the Deputy Director of the project, “We have identified over a thousand new manmade ponds and at least 74 long-lost temples, by correlating the radar data with on-the-ground sampling.” This is mixed news. It’s always better to know more about a site, and the evidence is that the stunning network of pools and canals had a functional purpose as well as being decorative. It also might explain partly why the site came into disuse. Quoting Damien Evans again: “[There] are also signs that the large-scale city engineered its own downfall by disrupting its local environment by expanding continuously into the surrounding forests and exposing the water management system to increased sedimentation and erratic water flows.” But the findings could also bring a major problem to the site.
Photo (cc) Magalie L’Abbé.
Angkor is under attack and the best defence for many of these sites has been their obscurity. A particular target are the heads of statues, but anything sellable is taken. Not only is there the damage in carving the statues, there’s also the damage done to the site caused by rushing the job. If you see a head on a statue at Angkor these days then it’s probably going to be a fake, standing in for the stolen head. Fortunately the mapping will help as it reveals some of the new sites are outside the current boundaries of the World Heritage site. Hopefully archaeologists will be on the scene the same time as the looters, rather than discovering where the looters have already been. But protecting the site will remain difficult. It’s a big place.
Angkor Wat
Angkor Thom
West Mebon
East Mebon
Bantay Samre
Bakong
Angkor on Google Earth
You can read more about this at: The University of Sydney Press ReleaseThe GuardianJetson Green looks at it from the perspective of sustainable development. About.com’s K. Kris Hirst has a report and links. There’s also pages on Angkor at: Google Sightseeing (with a KML file for Google Earth)
Comments