Date published: 2007/08/14
The BBC says:
The great medieval temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia was once at the centre of a sprawling urban settlement, according to a new, detailed map of the area.
Using Nasa satellites, an international team have discovered at least 74 new temples and complex irrigation systems.
The map, published in the journal PNAS, extends the known settlement by 1000 sq km, about the size of Los Angeles.
Analysis also lends weight to the theory that Angkor's residents were architects of the city's demise.
"The large-scale city engineered its own downfall by disrupting its local environment by expanding continuously into the surrounding forests," said Damian Evans of the University of Sydney and one of the authors of the paper and map.
...
The team believes it could have covered 3,000 sq km (1,150 sq miles), the largest pre-industrial complex of its kind.Its nearest rival is Tikal, a Mayan city in Guatemala, which covers between 100 and 150 sq km (40-60 sq miles).
...
They also discovered that the city's water supply probably relied on a single complex channel that extended 20 to 25km out from Angkor city.The researchers say that the system, until now thought to be purely decorative and ceremonial, was probably used to support farming, in particular intensive rice agriculture.
In all, the newly mapped terrain could have supported half a million people, the researchers believe.
The new analysis of the irrigation system also sheds light on the civilization's collapse in the 14th century.
"We saw signs that embankments had been breached and of ad hoc repairs to bridges and dams, suggesting that the system became unmanageable over time," Mr Evans told the AFP news agency.
In addition, deforestation, over population, topsoil erosion could have contributed to the population's sudden disappearance.
"Angkor was extensive enough, and the agricultural exploitation intensive enough, to have created a number of very serious environmental problems," he said.
No matter how much the chattering classes like to believe otherwise, almost everything they complain about in life has been seen all before, in this case urban sprawl. And you can just imagine the academic middle class in Angkor Wat devoting their entire lives to denouncing the urban sprawl (how dare the peasants ruin their beautiful city) and claiming that the end is nigh. Of course one of the advantages of continually claiming that the end is nigh, is that sooner or later you are bound to be proven to be correct.
Although the analysis of urban sprawl is interesting enough, the analysis of the causes of the downfall seems to be a bit woolly. In particular they say that certain things "could have contributed to the population's sudden disappearance". Well anybody can play that game, and it doesn't really prove very much. Of course if the downfall Angkor Wat did not happen via conquest, then about the only other plausible explanation is environmental, and needless to say, modern humans would always point the finger at human causes rather than natural ones.
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