A team of archaeologists from Australia has found an ancient city buried for more than 1,000 years beneath Cambodia's soupy jungles.
Hidden in the depths of the Cambodian jungle lays an ancient city, undiscovered until now (News2242).
If at seems at times that our globe is already thoroughly mapped and
explored, all its corridors charted and its mysteries explained, then
the latest news out of Southeast Asia
is solacing – there are, it seems, still lost worlds to be discovered,
combed out from beneath a millennium of accumulated jungle in remote Cambodia.A team of archaeologists from Australia has found an ancient city
that has for more than 1,000 years escaped detection – not even looters
had found the mysterious place, buried in Cambodia’s otherwise heavily
trafficked Siem Reap province, which sees about a million tourists each
year, Australia's The Age reported.
Known
as Mahendraparvata, the lost world is some 1,200-years old, about 350
years older than the Angkor Wat temple complex, also in Siem Reap. Like
Angkor, it was part of the Hindu-Buddhist Khmer Empire that from about
800 A.D. to 1400 A.D. ruled Southeast Asia, using slave labor to
construct opulent, arrestingly beautiful stone temples.
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Damian Evans, director of the University of Sydney's archaeological
research center in Cambodia, and a small group of colleagues working in
Cambodia’s northwestern corridor first mapped the area, Cambodia’s Phnom
Kulen mountain, using airborne Lidar, a remote-sensing technology that
uses lasers. The Lidar data revealed structures hidden beneath
Technicolor green of rural Cambodia’s thick jungles, giving scientists
the basic outline of the almost mythical place — as well as the wish to
know more.
Weeks later, guided by an ex-Khmer Rogue soldier
familiar with the terrain, the team hacked their way to the remnants of
this once-booming cosmopolis: abandoned, overgrown temples, as well as
evidence of roads and canals.
Scientists are unsure why
Mahendraparyata was abandoned — possibly, the area had suffered too
much environmental degradation to support the empire’s burgeoning
population. Turned over to time, the royal city was worked to rubble as a
millennium of industrious vegetation and monsoon rains did their worst.
The mountain itself, once home to the peak of Cambodian culture, would
go on to witness one of its worst moments, becoming a Khmer Rouge
stronghold in the 1970s.
Throughout all that, the mountain has remained a spiritual place, host to tens of thousands of pilgrims each year.
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