A lost medieval city
that thrived on a mist-shrouded Cambodian mountain 1,200 years ago has been
discovered by archaeologists using revolutionary airborne laser technology, a
report said Saturday.
SYDNEY: A lost medieval city that thrived on a
mist-shrouded Cambodian mountain 1,200 years ago has been discovered by
archaeologists using revolutionary airborne laser technology, a report said on
Saturday.
In what it called a world exclusive, the Sydney
Morning Herald said the city, Mahendraparvata, included temples hidden by
jungle for centuries, many of which have not been looted.
A journalist and photographer from the newspaper
accompanied the "Indiana Jones-style" expedition, led by a
French-born archaeologist, through landmine-strewn jungle in the Siem Reap
region where Angkor Wat, the largest Hindi temple complex in the world, is
located.
The expedition used an instrument called Lidar --
light detection and ranging data -- which was strapped to a helicopter that
criss-crossed a mountain north of Angkor Wat for seven days, providing data
that matched years of ground research by archaeologists.
It effectively peeled away the jungle canopy using
billions of laser pulses, allowing archaeologists to see structures that were
in perfect squares, completing a map of the city which years of painstaking
ground research had been unable to achieve, the report said.
It helped reveal the city that reportedly found the
Angkor Empire in 802 AD, uncovering more than two dozen previously unrecorded
temples and evidence of ancient canals, dykes and roads using satellite
navigation coordinates gathered from the instrument's data.
Jean-Baptiste Chevance, director of the Archaeology
and Development Foundation in London who led the expedition, told the newspaper
it was known from ancient scriptures that a 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 for
sure connected by roads, canals and dykes," he said.
The discovery is set to be published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.
Damian Evans, director of the University of Sydney's
archaeological research centre in Cambodia, which played a key part in
developing the Lidar technology, said there might be important implications for
today's society.
"We see from the imagery that the landscape was
completely devoid of vegetation," Evans, a co-expedition leader, 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."
The Herald said the trek to the ruins involved
traversing rutted goat tracks and knee-deep bogs after travelling high into the
mountains on motorbikes.
Everyone involved was sworn to secrecy until the
findings were peer-reviewed.
Evans said it was not known how large Mahendraparvata
was because the search had so far only covered a limited area, with more funds
needed to broaden it out.
"Maybe what we see was not the central part of
the city, so there is a lot of work to be done to discover the extent of this
civilisation," he said.
"We need to preserve the area because it's the
origin of our culture," secretary of state at Cambodia's Ministry of
Culture, Chuch Phoeun, told AFP.
Angkor Wat was at one time the largest pre-industrial
city in the world, and is considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.
It was constructed from the early to mid 1100s by King
Suryavarman II at the height of the Khmer Empire's political and military
power.
- AFP/fa
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