Sunday, April 4, 2010
The figure of a young Khmer girl carved in stone at the Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat.
AP / DAVID LONGSTREATH
Floods, then drought, did in Angkor
The Warwick Mall will rise again; Angkor Wat wasn’t so lucky
It turns out that flooding rain, intersperced with decades-long drought, conspired to topple the historic city of Angkor, researchers from the U.S., Australia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam have reported. They studied the ring patterns of millennia-old trees found the Khmer empire’s former capital and found they were subjected to water and food supply-depleting weather events, leaving the city vulnerable to interrelated infrastructural, economic and geopolitical pressures in the 14th and 15th centuries.
The finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds new light on the mystery surrounding Angkor’s demise in 1431. Spanning about 400 square kilometers (98,842 acres) in southwestern Cambodia, Angkor is South-East Asia’s most important archaeological site, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which listed it as a World Heritage site in 1992.
The analysis showed several abrupt reversals from drought to very intense monsoons during the late 14th and early 15th centuries.
The finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds new light on the mystery surrounding Angkor’s demise in 1431. Spanning about 400 square kilometers (98,842 acres) in southwestern Cambodia, Angkor is South-East Asia’s most important archaeological site, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which listed it as a World Heritage site in 1992.
The analysis showed several abrupt reversals from drought to very intense monsoons during the late 14th and early 15th centuries.
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