Something About Angkor Wat No Longer Makes Sense

Something About Angkor Wat No Longer Makes Sense For three hundred years, researchers walked through the jungle between the temples of Angkor and saw trees. The city was under their feet the whole time. In April twenty twelve, Damian Evans put a laser scanner on a helicopter and flew twenty hours over the canopy, and what came back was not empty forest, it was grid-pattern streets, canals, residential blocks and drainage running for hundreds of square kilometres. In this one I go through what that changed. Population estimates went from around a hundred or two hundred thousand to somewhere near a million, spread over a thousand square kilometres, at a time when medieval London held about eighty thousand and Paris about two hundred thousand. The reason it stayed invisible is almost embarrassingly simple. The temples were tall enough to break the canopy and the houses were not, and for three centuries the difference between what could be seen and what existed got confused for the same thing. Then the water. The West Baray alone is eight kilometres long and took forty eight million cubic metres of earth moved by hand, and the LiDAR shows the whole network was rebuilt and patched and rerouted for centuries. And it shows how it ended, which is not the Thai sack of fourteen thirty one. Silted channels, breached embankments, repairs on top of repairs, a system degrading for decades against alternating extreme drought and severe flooding. The invasion was the consequence, not the cause. There are also coil-shaped embankments covering several hectares near the temple that match no known Khmer architecture at all.