ANGKOR is an important CLUE to the Ancient

Civilization of Cambodia

One of the reasons why so much of the Khmer empire remained un-
discovered until the use of LiDAR was in part due to the forest cover-
ing much of the former cities. In the next chapter, the effect of nature of
the Angkor Wat will be discussed.

Angkor Wat is the very image many people see when they are asked to
imagine a magnificent lost city in the tropical jungle. Once its history lost to
the world, ongoing efforts by international teams of archae- ologists have
slowly peeled back the jungle which once covered the ruins, revealing the
structures once again to the light of day. Now a UNESCO world heritage
site, tourists flock to the ruined temple in order to experience the artistic
wonders of a faded civilization (Ang- kor, n.d.). However, that’s not all the
temple is, it is the greatest clue left behind about the life and social
structure in the Khmer empire. To this day Angkor Wat continues to
provide insight into the social structure of the ancient Khmer empire which
built and lived in this splendid city and the decline of the Khmer empire
along with its great temples and cities.
While Angkor Wat is remembered for its deep moats and massive stone
temples, these are by far the minority of the buildings at this site. In fact,
most structures of the Khmer empire were wooden construc- tions. From the
humble residences of the temple’s officials to the grand palace housing the
Khmer king, these buildings were all constructed from the jungle which
surrounded the empire (Freeman & Jacques, 2003). The only stone buildings
of the city itself were the two stone libraries: housing holy texts on the north
and south side of the grand causeway. Overtime, as the temple was neglected
the stone temples were overgrown with vegetation and the moats silted up
with mud, the wooden structures decayed so that only their foundations
remain. Even then, much of the areas inside Angkor Wat moat is covered by
dense vegetation and the area outside has been turned into farmland and low-
density residential areas. This makes it very difficult for ar- chaeologists to
gain greater insight into the lives of the average person living at the height of
the Khmer empire.

Due to technological political limitations, until recent decades the

studies regarding Angkor were limited in depth and scale. However,
with modern technologies such as LiDAR and ground penetrating radar,

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more extensive studies into the structure and the surrounding areas
became possible. Already, many unknown details regarding the use of
Angkor Wat over the course of the empire have been discovered, especially
concerning the downfall of the empire (Carter et al., 2019). One can
expect novel technologies to emerge in the future which could find
details which were hidden previously, and perhaps lift the veil on an
ancient civilization.
The general area surrounding the site is also a part of a larger problem of
massive deforestation in southeast Asia. This loss of tree cover could
lead to the site being exposed to a different environment which could impact
its preservation (Liu et al., 2019). It is possible that some of the secrets held
by Angkor Wat would be lost forever.

Angkor Wat as the capital of the Khmer empire probably extended far beyond
the moat surrounding Angkor Wat and the enclosure walls. It is currently
thought that the area inside and surrounding Angkor Wat would have been
covered by low density housing, much like an American suburb. Much of these
housing units would have had access to transportation through roads or canals.
Recent studies using LiDAR have revealed surface structures sur- rounding
Angkor Wat. One of such structures is a 1.5 km long mound, consisting of
rectilinear spirals. This building is situated on the south side of Angkor Wat and
is of unknown purpose as a similar structure has never been seen before. In
addition to this unknown feature of Angkor Wat, LiDAR has also revealed that
inside and outside of the moat there are mounds and depressions on the surface. It
is likely that houses would have been built on top of each of the mounds. There is
also a network of grid roads which separate each of these mounds into “lots”
(Fletcher et al., 2015).
In her article reproduced below titled

How archaeologists found the lost medieval megacity of AngkorAnnalee Newitz

admits that recent technology reconstructs the urban grid of a city overtaken by
jungle.
 

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Angkor Wat today, as viewed across a pond next to the 12th-century Hindu temple to Vishnu built
under the rule of Suryavarman II. Bjørn Christian Tørrissen

The ornate, pinecone-shaped towers of Angkor Wat in Cambodia float above

a vast temple complex of shrines, pools, houses, and a perfectly square moat.
Today, only a small number of monks remain within the temple walls. The
remaining structures have been reclaimed by trees whose roots wind around the
stone like cellulose tentacles. Archaeologists have long wondered what life was
like here when Angkor was the cosmopolitan heart of the Khmer Empire in the
12th and 13th centuries. Why did so many people abandon this place in the
15th century, never to return?
Unlike a majority of archaeological endeavors, the answers didn't come from
digging up the ground. Instead, our first glimpse of Angkor as it once was came
just a few years ago from a sophisticated laser scanning machine mounted on a
helicopter.

Invisible city: For centuries, the Angkor region's wealth of artifacts drew looters,
archaeologists, and looter-archaeologists. They focused their attention, both good
and ill, on Angkor Wat and a few other nearby moated temple complexes. Based
on those ruins, the first European explorers to encounter Angkor in the 19th
century assumed Khmer urbanites lived in what were basically moated cities of a
few thousand people. These European explorers thought Angkor Wat was
something like a medieval walled city in Europe, which typically held fewer than
10,000 people. They explained all the moated complexes in the Angkor area by
suggesting that maybe the royal family and their people were moving from one
moated city to the next over time. But as archaeologists learned more in the
intervening century, something about those population numbers seemed off.
Beyond the moated cities were vast canal systems and reservoirs hinting at
something bigger.

Unfortunately, most of Angkor had become a tangle of jungles and small farms
3
by the 20th century. There was little evidence of medieval settlements beyond the
moats' precise edges. Even if explorers were willing to hack through the dense
growth, there was little to find. In a Khmer city, only the temples were made
from stone. Everything else was built from perishable materials like wood. All
that remained of Angkor's homes and other non-religious structures were the
elevated clay mounds of their foundations, which had been designed to prevent
flooding during Cambodia's intense wet season. Most of the city's dramatic
waterworks for flood runoff and water storage had been reduced to pits and
troughs in the Earth. It was practically impossible to identify a medieval
Angkorian house deep within the jungle.

All that changed when airborne LiDAR (for "Light Imaging, Detection, And
Ranging") came into common use for mapping in the early 2000s. Archaeologists
working in Cambodia immediately seized on it. By scattering light off the surface
of the planet, LiDAR systems can produce maps with accuracy down to the
centimeter even if the ground is covered in heavy vegetation. The system is ideal
for a place like Angkor, where the city's remains are cloaked in vegetation and
characterized almost entirely by elevated or depressed plots of ground.

With funding from the National Geographic Society and European Research
council, archaeologist Damian Evans and his colleagues conducted broad LiDAR
surveys of Angkor in 2012 and 2015. The team's mapping rig
consisted of a Leica ALS70 HP LiDAR instrument mounted in a pod attached to
the right skid of a Eurocopter AS350 B2 helicopter alongside a 60 megapixel
Leica RCD30 camera. It was as if an invisible city suddenly appeared where only
overgrowth and farmland existed before. For the first time in centuries, people
could discern Angkor's original urban grid. And what they saw changed our
understanding of global history.

Archaeological researcher Piphal Heng, who studies Cambodian settlement

history, told Ars that the LiDAR maps peeled back the forest canopy to reveal
meticulous grids of highways and low-density neighborhoods of thousands of
houses and pools of water. There was "a complex urban grid system that
extended outside the walls of Angkor Thom and other large temple complexes
such as Angkor Wat, Preah Khan, and Ta Prohm," he said. With the new data,
scientists had solid evidence that the city of Angkor sprawled over an area of at
least 40 to 50 square km. It was home to almost a million people. The scattered,
moated complexes like Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom were merely the most
enduring features of what we now know was the biggest city on Earth during the
12th and 13th centuries. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/how-
archaeologists-found-the-lost-medieval-megacity-of-angkor/

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 ’

From legend to reality-The city of Angkor has its origins in the ninth century
during the reign of Jayavarman II. He unified large parts of Southeast Asia by
establishing the Khmer Empire across regions we know today as Cambodia,
Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. Inscriptions on temple walls at Sadok Kok Thom
in Thailand describe how he established a city called Hariharalaya, located near
Siem Reap in the Angkor area. But the inscriptions also say that Jayavarman II
declared himself a supreme ruler or "god-king" in a lavish Hindu ceremony held
at his residence on Kulen Mountain in a city called Mahendraparvata. Accounts
of the Kulen Mountain phase in Jayavarman's life are so sparse and fantastical
that debates have raged among scholars about whether he actually lived in
Mahendraparvata at all.

To find out more, archaeologists targeted Kulen Mountain in their latest LiDAR
survey. Last month, Evans published some of the first results from this 2015
survey in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Royal Academy of Cambodia
archaeologist Kaseka Phon explained to Ars via e-mail that the LiDAR has
uncovered an Angkor-like city grid at the abandoned city of Mahendraparvata on
Kulen Mountain. Plus, the LiDAR "shows not only features of the construction,
but also water features" that are clearly versions of Angkor's incredible water
management facilities. The new survey revealed massive stone quarries, now
filled in, that produced the rock used to build some of the temples of Angkor.
Kulen Mountain's role in the birth of the Khmer Empire is no longer a legend—
it's an established historical fact.

5
This transformation of legend into fact has been a theme of the LiDAR surveys.
Angkor's huge population is described in temple inscriptions and reports written
by Chinese travelers who visited the city during the 12th century reign of King
Suryavarman II, who built Angkor Wat. But historical sources are often
exaggerated or incomplete. Plus, it was difficult for Western researchers to
believe that the Khmer Empire's great city was home to almost a million people,
dwarfing European cities of the same era. Now, such facts are impossible to
deny.

City planning of the Angkor City- Angkor reached megacity proportions in the
12th century, when Suryavarman II ordered the construction of Angkor Wat . At
that time, the urban sprawl in Angkor was not only enormous, but it was centrally
planned with rigorous precision. Urban planning affects the transportation
system, infrastructure, the layout, and prescribed densities of our residential,
commercial, and industrial areas and more. Without such planning, our cities
quickly become inefficient and uninviting for residents and businesses alike . It
seems that the shape of roads, walls, moats, mounds, and ponds were probably
made based on urban templates commissioned by the Angkorian rulers while
residents of different neighborhoods probably had different degrees of freedom to
modify those plans.

Grid System: At temples such as Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm, the grid usage was
significantly varied. For example, based on our recent excavations, after the
urban grid was laid out, there is little evidence of modification—if at all—in a
series of habitation mounds inside Angkor Wat. While for Ta Prohm, its
inhabitants seem to have more freedom in modifying parts of their gridded
mounds.

To learn more about everyday life in Angkor Wat, University of Illinois Urbana-
Champaign archaeologist Alison Carter has done excavation work on some of the
residential mounds inside the enclosure. In 2015, she got funding from the
National Geographic Society to excavate one of the residential mounds identified
via LiDAR. Carter discovered what appears to be the remains of a brick stove,
complete with ceramic vessels for cooking. Chemical analysis revealed remains
of pomelo fruit rind, seeds from a relative of the ginger plant, and grains of rice.
This is what archaeologists call "ground truthing," and it's further confirmation
that the mounds we see in LiDAR are actually from households rather than other
structures.

The picture that's emerging of Angkor is much like a modern low-density

city with mixed use residential and farm areas. As Evans put it to Ars, "in the
densely inhabited downtown core there are no fields, but that nice, formally
planned city center gradually gives way to an extended agro-urban hinterland
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 where neighborhoods are intermingled with rice-growing areas, and there is no
clear distinction between what is 'urban' or 'rural'." The city was a miracle of
geoengineering with every acre transformed by human hands, whether for
agriculture or architecture.
Advertisement
Perhaps Angkor's greatest technological achievement was its sophisticated
waterworks, including artificial canals and reservoirs. People strolling through
the city 800 years ago would have passed through neighborhoods whose carefully
arranged homes were built alongside rainfall ponds for families, as well as
enormous canals for the city as a whole. Massive rectangular reservoirs held
water all year around for agricultural use.

 Each neighborhood would have looked slightly different, though all relied
on the same water infrastructure. The city had to survive the floods of the rainy
season and slake the thirst of people and farms in the dry season. For centuries,
it accomplished this incredible feat, which modern cities still struggle with.
Suryavarman II ruled a city whose mythic proportions were enabled by the most
sophisticated engineering techniques of his day.
 Comparison of major temple complexes in the 12th to 13th centuries, all
at the same scale. Later developments (right column) show more variable grids
than earlier ones (left column), with areas within the moat divided neatly into
~100x100 m "city blocks." 6a: Angkor Wat. 6b: Beng Mealea. 6c: Preah Khan of
Kompong Svay. 6d: Preah Khan of Angkor. 6e: Ta Prohm. 6f: Banteay Chhmar.
 Damian Evans / Journal of Archaeological Science
 "Mound fields" across Cambodia. Panels a,b are in the Phnom Kulen
area. Panels c,d are immediately to the north of the main temple complex at
Sambor Prei Kuk. Panels e,f are Immediately to the west of Banteay Srei temple
at Angkor. Panels g,h: Near the exit of the East Baray reservoir at Angkor, new
archaeological mapping (3g) based on the 2012 ALS data has added further detail
to a ~10x10 grid of mounds (3h) and revealed a second mound field to the south
of the exit. Panels 3a,c and e are conventional aerial imagery acquired in the
2015 campaign. Panel 3g is based on archaeological maps by Damian Evans,
Christophe Pottier and Pelle Wijker.
 Damian Evans / Journal of Archaeological Science
 Unexplained, rectangular coil patterns associated with major temples
across northwest Cambodia, revealed in LiDAR maps.

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Mysterious coils and mounds
Plenty of unknowns remain at Angkor, and the LiDAR surveys have revealed
two previously unseen structures that nobody has been able to explain so far. The
first is a complicated rectangular maze pattern dubbed the "coils," "spirals," or
"geoglyphs." These were first spotted outside the moat at Angkor Wat during the
2012 survey, but the 2015 survey revealed similar coils outside the enclosures at
Beng Mealea and Preah Khan. At first glance they appear to be waterworks, but
Evans and his colleagues dismissed that idea because they are too shallow and
are cut off from the city's general waterworks.
Currently, the reigning hypothesis is that these rectilinear coils were specialized
gardens for growing plants used in temple rituals. The often-flooded channels
might have contained lotus, while the raised areas could have supported
"aromatics such as sandalwood trees."
More mysterious are the so-called "mound fields" found near some of Angkor's
largest reservoirs and canals. Unlike the residential mounds excavated by Carter
and her colleagues, these mounds aren't packed with ceramics and food remains.
They are just mounds, clearly the foundations for an elevated structure or
structures. Their locations suggest that they may have been related to the city's
waterworks, but of course correlation does not equal causation. Further research
is needed to unlock the secrets of the coils and mound fields.
Abandonment
One of the most intriguing questions about Angkor is why this once-incredible
megacity is now inhabited mostly by trees and small, scattered farms. According
to many archaeologists Ars spoke with, that mystery has been largely resolved by
the LiDAR data. First of all, said Evans, we have to let go of the idea that the city
was abruptly abandoned by hundreds of thousands of people at once. As he put it
in an e-mail:
The standard narrative of the so-called "collapse of Angkor" was that there was
an invasion by the Siamese in 1431 which basically laid waste to Angkor in
1431, and that the kings and their populations moved en masse to capitals near
what's now Phnom Penh. [The LiDAR data shows] that the cities that came after
Angkor were actually very sparsely inhabited... which either means that (a) this
great diaspora from Angkor didn't happen and that Angkor endured a relatively
8
prolonged demographic decline (rather than a sudden "collapse") or that (b)
people migrated elsewhere (which I doubt).
What the LiDAR reveals is that there were no mass migrations from Angkor to
other areas. We don't see enormous urban grids springing into existence near
Angkor after the 15th century. Instead, as Heng says, "collapse of a civilization is
a long-term process, and it did not happen abruptly." Heng adds that many parts
of the city were never abandoned at all, though the gridded regions outside
Angkor Wat's enclosure slowly emptied out after the 15th century. "Angkor Wat
has never been abandoned," he said. "The temple was still functioning when the
French explorers came to visit, and it is still functioning today."
Invasion didn't drive hundreds of thousands of people away instantly. Evans
suspects that poor water management and urban planning were ultimately the
culprits. In an interview with Next City, he said, "In medieval Angkor, for
instance, the standard response to the failure of one part of the water management
system was not to do things differently, but rather, to re-engineer the same thing
in a different location, only larger."
So after decades of mystery, Angkor's abandonment proved to be more
complicated than archaeologists thought—the story isn't of dramatic demise,
nor a sudden reversal of fortune. Angkor's slow decline was caused by the types
of urban problems that still plague our cities today. It simply required a
helicopter-mounted laser to find out

LiDAR surveys of the surrounding area show low density earthen

structures spread along the historic coast of the Tonle Sap, meaning
‘great lake’. This suggests that Angkor Wat existed as a sort of large
low-density city with urban sprawl, which spread out from the tem- ple
along the historic shoreline of the lake, with smaller temples and ponds
of their own, much like the modern suburb.

To use the analogy of the modern city, the temple and the palace would
have likely only served as an equivalent of a downtown rather than
having the entire city contained within its walls .Angkor most likely
reached its maximum population and size during the 13th century, with
an estimated 900000 residents, spread over the surrounding land at a
density of roughly 1000-3000, roughly equiva- lent to an American
suburb. However, since the study area is limited, and the LiDAR
images show the settlement likely extended beyond the current study
area. In addition to the rapid urban development oc- curring in the area.
Judging the exact size of Angkor Wat would likely be impossible

Conclusion
After a century of excavation, Angkor Wat has become a world-famous
tourist attraction. One would like to think that we have learned all one
9
could from this site. Yet, many new discoveries are still being un- earthed at
Angkor Wat every year. With the recent development in LiDAR technology
alone, archaeologists were able to learn a signifi- cant amount about the
infrastructure of the Khmer empire (Fletcher et al., 2015). In addition, the
combination of satellite imagery and Li- DAR was able to reveal the wide
distributed extent of the Angkor Wat settlements, allowing for a better
understanding of the infrastructure network of Angkor Wat (Klassen et al.,
2021). More traditional tech- nologies such as soil core samples have also
resulted in excellent data being generated regarding the events which
occurred during the de- cline of Angkor Wat. By combining physical
observation, LiDAR, and core samples, archeologists were able to make
novel connections such as the existence of doorways which have been
blocked at a later date and discover the embankment connecting Angkor
Thom and Ta Prohm (Brotherson, 2015).
While it would appear that the current understanding of the site is much
better that of a few decades ago, there could also be a great many number of
things which remain buried or hidden, waiting to be discovered in the future.
One day when the technology becomes suffi- ciently advanced, it would be
possible to find a better answer regarding the mysteries of Angkor Wat. But
for now, the goal should be to pre- serve the site in the best possible
condition, so that if the opportunity arises archaeologists can quickly get to
work.

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ANGKOR- The greatest clue TO life and social structure in the Khmer empire
Angkor Wat - Exploring the Art, Science, and History Behind one of the
World's Greatest Religious Monuments of altTimes
By Si Cong (Sam) Zhang Book · November 2021

How Did the City Come to be Abandoned?

Until relatively recently, the general consensus in archaeology is that Angkor
Wat collapsed suddenly after a military invasion by the Siam- ese kingdom
of Ayutthaya in 1431, during which the city was sacked. However, in light of
new evidence, this version of the city’s fall is being debated (Carter et al.,
2019). Given that no written records of the fall survives to this day,
information must be deduced using existing archaeological clues and new
theories will likely emerge when new evidence is found (Rod-ari, n.d.).
The older view of the fall of Angkor is the one which cites the grow- ing
power of the kingdom of Ayutthaya, and military invasion of the Khmer
empire. This was the prevalent view in the past century, and it is possible that
11
such a view is perhaps influenced by the history of other nations such as the
barbarian invasions of the Roman empire and the Mongol conquest of China.
However, such a view was not without evi- dence to support it either as at the
time of Angkor’s decline the king- dom of Ayutthaya was growing in power.
The kingdom had absorbed the smaller kingdoms of northern Thailand and
gained territory which was formerly controlled by the Khmer empire
(Polkinghorne et al., 2018).

The traces of military incursion have also been found in the build- ings
of the Angkor itself. Originally, Angkor Wat did not have de- fensive
fortifications, instead opting for large expansive low density urban sprawl
surrounding Angkor Wat. The lack of defensive features is one of the
reasons why it was sacked by the Champa from modern day Vietnam in
1177 and why Angkor Thom was built within a wall and a moat. However,
that is not to say that Angkor Wat did not have any defensive architecture.
When it was originally built, a low enclos- ure wall surrounded Angkor
Wat. These walls remain today and have been examined by archeologists.
two major alterations to the walls, which suggest it was modified for
defensive purposes at one point.

First, horizontal holes were found on the inside and vertical holes
were found along the top of the wall. It is hypothesized that these
holes were added in order to support a defensive structure such as a
wooden palisade. Second, there are currently a total of six gopura
doorways in the enclosure wall, three in the west where the causeway
and the main gate is, and one for each other in the cardinal direction.
However, there are a total of 14 staircases leading up to the raised
foundation of the temple. Six of the staircases are aligned with the
doorways in the wall, 9 are not. Upon examination with LiDAR and
detailed inspection of the stones of the walls, it is possible to see that
there were at one point 12 doorways, but 9 of which were filled in
sometime after the original construction of Angkor Wat. The removal
of these doorways can be deduced from LiDAR images showing
remnants of paved roads which lead from each gateway to an aligned
staircase and earth core samples from around the filled-in gateways
showing a foundation similar to ones found in the other gateways. In
addition to the modification to the walls, LiDAR images also show
the remnants of 2 large embank- ments: one connecting the walls of
Angkor Thom and the walls of Ta Prohm, another connecting the
walls of Angkor Thom and East Baray. This would have created a large,
enclosed area which could be defended (Brotherson, 2015). On the
other hand, there is plenty of evidence which suggests that there was
never a sack in 1431 and the city gradually declined into obscurity
12
overtime due to other reasons. This is suggested by core samples of
the ground taken from Angkor Wat where there were no signs in the
soil which would be indicative of a sack of the city, but instead signs of
steady prolonged decreases in productivity (Climate Change and the
Collapse of Angkor Wat, n.d.).
There are many theories regarding why there was a decline in popu-
lation. First, there was a movement of population to the south, near
the modern-day capital Phnom Penh for better access to the ocean
trade routes with China. During this period, the trade between China
and India increased and the other regional powers of Southeast Asia
were benefiting from this trade. Angkor Wat was far inland and un-
able to benefit from this trade. Thus, people began to migrate south
overtime and Angkor slowly lost its population and importance

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Second, Angkor was a huge city with an estimated population of nearly a million inhabitants
at one time. This city was powered by an extensive system of canals and irrigation systems
which allowed the transport of goods and the growing of rice even during dry seasons.
Because of this irrigation system, Angkor could have 3 harvests of rice every year to support its
massive population. However, this massive irrigation system requires a large workforce and
constant maintenance to function. When population began to decline in Angkor Wat, the
population could no longer service the irrigation system, leading to the silting up of the
canals which in turn led to diminished rice produc- tion and subsequent population decrease.
Because of the scale of the temples and irrigation networks, it required a massive amount of
work to rezone any parts of the city for other purposes. Therefore, the city could have faced
an economic downward spiral (Penny et al., 2019).

Third, during the downward spiral, there were periods of climate instability. There were a
series of droughts followed by floods, then droughts again. While the Khmer were excellent
hydraulic engineers, the hydraulic systems were built over decades. These irregular changes
to the weather pattern resulted in the hydraulic system not being able to adapt fast enough.
This would have led to even greater need for the maintenance of existing infrastructure when
there was possibly a lack of population to complete this task. This theory is supported by tree
ring samples which indicate a massive drought followed by floods and massive droughts
again in the middle of the 14th century.

Lastly, deforestation, burning, and soil erosion may have also contrib- uted to the
demise of Angkor Wat’s hydraulic system. It is possible that as the city expanded or as
the hydraulic system failed. People began to clear surrounding forest and burn
vegetation to claim new land for growing rice. In this process, the plants which
stabilized the ground around Angkor Wat were removed, which resulted in great- er
soil erosion. The soil which eroded during monsoons was washed into the canals,
resulting in the silting of canals and the growth of swamp vegetation. This would have
put a further increased strain on the maintenance of the canal system. This accumulation
of sediment can be shown through core samples of the silt from canals, when the
sediment changed from the siliciclastic materials from excavation to organic

14