By Scott Neuman
June 14, 2013
Australian archaeologists using remote-sensing technology
have uncovered an ancient city in Cambodia that has remained hidden for more
than a millennium under dense jungle undergrowth.
The discovery of Mahendraparvata, a 1,200-year-old lost
city that predates Cambodia's famous Angkor Wat temple complex by 350 years,
was part of the Hindu-Buddhist Khmer Empire that ruled much of Southeast Asia
from about 800 to 1400 A.D., during a time that coincided with Europe's Middle
Ages.
Damian Evans, director of the University of Sydney's
archaeological research center in Cambodia and a small group of colleagues
working in the Siem Reap region mapped an area using airborne Lidar, a remote
sensing technology utilizing lasers. It showed them the outline of the ancient
city.
The Australian newspaper that the group of archaeologists
first found a collapsed temple and then:
" ... hacked
through ... landmine-strewn jungle and waded through swollen rivers and bogs to
discover the ruins of five other previously unrecorded temples and evidence of
ancient canals, dykes and roads.
...
Guided by the
GPS loaded with the lidar data, they stumbled across piles of ancient bricks.
They found two temple sites where no carved rocks or ancient bricks could be
found scattered nearby, indicating they have never been looted."
Evans says it's not yet known how large Mahendraparvata
was because the Lidar search covered only a small, circumscribed area.
"Maybe what we are seeing was not the central part
of the city, so there is a lot of work to be done to discover the extent of
this civilization," he told the Age.
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