June 15, 2013
Read the original article and watch the video at The Melbourne Age
Archaeologists using revolutionary airborne laser technology
have discovered a lost mediaeval city that thrived on a mist-shrouded
Cambodian mountain 1200 years ago.
The city, called Mahendraparvata, includes temples hidden by
jungle for centuries that archaeologists believe have never been
looted.
An instrument called a lidar strapped to a helicopter that criss-crossed
a mountain north of the famous Angkor Wat complex provided data that
matched years of ground research by archaeologists, unveiling the city
that founded the Angkor Empire in AD802.
Hidden city
Archaeologists in the Siem Reap region using new maps acquired using LIDAR have discovered an entire Angkor city where previously only a few isolated temples were known to be.- Autoplay OnOff
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The University of Sydney's archaeology research centre in Cambodia took
the lidar instrument to Cambodia and played a key role in the
discovery.
An expedition of Australian and French archaeologists using GPS
co-ordinates gathered from the instrument's data uncovered five
previously unrecorded temples and evidence of ancient canals, dykes and
roads.
The Saturday Age recorded the discoveries by joining
the expedition as it pushed through landmine-strewn jungle, swollen
rivers and bogs on a mountain called Phnom Kulen, 40 kilometres north
of Angkor Wat in north-western Cambodia.
Archaeologists approach the Thom Dab temple in the Siem Reap region. Photo: Nick Moir
French-born archaeologist Jean-Baptiste Chevance, director of the
London-based Archaeology and Development Foundation, a co-leader of the
expedition, said it was known from ancient scriptures that the great
warrior Jayavarman II had a mountain capital ''but we didn't know how
all the dots fitted, exactly how it all came together''.
''We now know from the new data the city was connected by roads, canals and dykes,'' he said.
Mahendraparvata existed 350 years before Angkor Wat, the Hindu temple
that has captivated interest across the world and attracts more than 2
million people a year.
The lidar technology effectively peeled away the jungle canopy by using
billions of laser impulses, allowing archaeologists the first glimpse
of structures that were in perfect squares, completing a map of the
city that years of painstaking ground research had been unable to
achieve.
The archaeologists were amazed to see that 36 previously recorded ruins
scattered across the mountain were linked by a network of gridded
roads, dykes, ponds and temples that were divided into regular city
blocks.
Over a period of years Dr Chevance and his staff had crossed ancient
roads and passed by ancient structures they suspected were there but
could not see because they were hidden by jungle and earth.
The discovery will prompt scientific excavation of the area's most
significant sites by archaeologists seeking to discover what life was
like for a civilisation about which virtually nothing is known,
including why it was abandoned to the forest.
It also will allow archaeologists and historians to learn more about
the evolution of Angkor, the enormous political and religious empire
that dominated most of south-east Asia for 600 years.
The director of the University of Sydney's centre in Cambodia, Damian
Evans, who was another leader of the expedition, said there may be
implications for modern society.
''We see from the imagery that the landscape was completely devoid of vegetation,'' Dr Evans said.
''One theory we are looking at is that the severe environmental impact
of deforestation and the dependence on water management led to the
demise of the civilisation … perhaps it became too successful to the
point of becoming unmanageable.''
1 comment:
Excellent find. This is suppose to be the job of the countrymen not outsider. It is the government job to create a team to explore his own country instead they are too busy humiliating his own peoples. A corrupt government will fall hard when time come.
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