Laser-scanning technology has shown that the lost city of Mahendraparvata in Cambodia, which dates back to a time before Angkor Wat, was a much more extensive city than previously thought, according to NBC News.
Archaeologists have known about the city, which was influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism, for decades. It's located approximately 25 miles north of the Angkor Wat temple.
"We're talking about a city that is more than 1,000 years old and is all underground," Stephane De Greefe, the lead cartographer of the archaeological project, told Cambodia Daily. "If you didn't know, you might think it's natural."
The Khmer Archaeology Lidar Consortium set up an aerial survey. Looking at the map provided a "eureka moment," according to Damian Evans, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney. The survey reading revealed dozens of temple sites, hundreds of mysterious mounds that may represent burial sites and traces of canals and roads crisscrossing the area.
A ground expedition followed the aerial survey, where the archaeological team found two temple sites that may still be intact, as well as a cave with centuries-old carvings that may have been a refuge for hermits during the Angkor period.
"We see from the imagery that the landscape was completely devoid of vegetation," Evans told Fairfax Media. "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 civilization.
"Perhaps it became too successful to the point of becoming unmanageable," Evans continued.
There is also the suggestion that Mahendraparvata, as well as Angkor Wat, were part of a vast urban network.
"We identify an entire, previously undocumented, formally planned urban landscape into which the major temples such as Angkor Wat were integrated," the researchers write in their paper, which was published in the National Academy of Sciences. "Beyond these newly identified urban landscapes, the lidar data reveal anthropogenic changes to the landscape on a vast scale, and lend further weight to an emerging consensus that infrastructural complexity, unsustainable modes of subsistence and climate variation were crucial factors in the decline of the classical Khmer civilization."
The mapping reveals a pattern of "city blocks." These cityscapes existed in Angkor, as well as in the Phnom Kulen region and Koh Ker, a region farther northeast.
"For several centuries at Angkor, episodic renovation of the water management system offered a series of provisional solutions that were adequate for mitigating the risk of low rainfall on an annual scale," Evans write in the paper. "Eventually, however, the civilization was confronted with decadal-scale mega droughts in the 14th and 15th centuries."
The researchers believe the droughts led to the downfall of the megacities.
A report on the findings.
An Australian report.
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