REMOTE SENSING TECHNOLOGY AND ANGKOR WAT

Damian Evans, University of Sydney

The remote sensing project of Angkor Wat has revealed that beyond the well-known temples was a vast collection of interlinked water management devices such as canals, reservoirs interspersed with small local temples and occupation features such as mounded areas and ponds. It is through radar and aerial photography that we have been able to build a detailed new picture of an intricately designed settlement stretching for many miles around the temples. This work was accomplished through the collaboration of Australian, Cambodian, and French researchers who used hand-drawn maps, ground surveys, airborne photography, and ground-sensing radar provided by the U.S. space agency NASA. From this data, we have identified more than a thousand previously undetected man-made ponds and 74 long-lost temples. For over one hundred years the research focus at Angkor has been on the magnificent temples, and on the sandstone inscriptions that are often found with them. It has only been with the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1990s and the opening up of local research centers that people started to look beyond these great structures to investigate where people lived and how they maintained themselves. We now know that the medieval settlement surrounding Angkor—the one-time capital of the Khmer empire that flourished between the ninth and 14th centuries—covered a 3,000 square kilometer area.  The urban complex was at least three times larger than archaeologists has previously suspected and was the largest pre-industrial urban area of its kind, eclipsing comparable developments such as the Mayan city of Tikal on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. It remains to be seen whether the engineering feats of Angkor were a cause, a symptom, or a result of the city's decline. The new map at least tells us where we ought to be looking for the answers.