Mahendraparvata Lost City in Cambodia / Siem Reap

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Ett gäng arkeologer har hittat en ny stad nära Ankor Wat.

 

http://www.smh.com.au/world/lost-horizons-mediaeval-city-uncovered-20130614-2o9p3.html#ixzz2WCx4euXO

 

 

 

WORLD EXCLUSIVE

Archaeologists using revolutionary airborne laser technology have discovered a lost mediaeval city that thrived on a mist-shrouded Cambodian mountain 1200 years ago.

 

The stunning discovery of the city, Mahendraparvata, includes temples hidden by jungle for centuries - temples that archaeologists believe have never been looted.

 

An instrument called Lidar strapped to a helicopter which criss-crossed a mountain north of the Angkor Wat complex provided data that matched years of ground research by archaeologists. The research revealed the city that founded the Angkor Empire in 802AD.

 

 

Hidden city

Archaeologists in the Siem Reap region using new maps acquired using LIDAR have discovered an entire Angkor city where previously only a few isolated temples were known to be.

 

The University of Sydney's archaeology research centre in Cambodia brought the Lidar instrument to Cambodia and played a key role in the discovery that is set to revolutionise archaeology across the world.

 

Archaeologists and exploration and mapping experts have uncovered more than two dozen previously unrecorded temples and evidence of ancient canals, dykes and roads using satellite navigation co-ordinates gathered from the instrument's data.

Fairfax Media recorded the discovery of the first five temples after pushing through landmine-strewn jungle, swollen rivers and bogs with the expedition on a mountain called Phnom Kulen, 40 kilometres north of Angkor Wat in north-western Cambodia.

 

City quest: Damien Evans, centre, leads a team of archaeologists to the Thom Dab temple. Photo: Nick Moir

 

Mahendraparvata existed 350 years before Angkor Wat, the Hindu temple that has captivated interest across the world and is visited by more than 2 million people each year.

In effect the Lidar technology peeled away the jungle canopy using billions of laser pulses, allowing archaeologists to see for the first time structures that were in perfect squares, completing a map of the city which years of painstaking ground research had been unable to achieve.

 

The archaeologists were amazed to see that 36 previously recorded ruins scattered across the mountain were linked by an intricate network of gridded roads, dykes, ponds and temples divided into regular city blocks.

 

Click for more photos

Lost civilization in Cambodia

Bhuddas carved into the mossy rock face. Photo: Nick Moir

 

Damian Evans, director of the University of Sydney's centre in Cambodia, who was a co-leader of the expedition, said there might be important implications for today's society.

 

"We see from the imagery that the landscape was completely devoid of vegetation," Dr Evans 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," he said.

 

French-born archaeologist Jean-Baptiste Chevance, director of the Archaeology and Development Foundation in London, who was also a leader of the expedition, said 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.

 

Over years Dr Chevance and his staff had crossed ancient roads and passed ancient structures they suspected were there but could not see because they were hidden by jungle and earth.

The foundation's exploration and mapping expert, Stephane De Greef, has now confirmed the location of almost 30 previously unidentified temples using the Lidar data.

The discovery, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, will prompt scientific excavation of the most significant sites by archaeologists seeking to discover what life was like for a civilisation about which very little was known, including why it was abandoned to the forest.

 

It will also allow archaeologists and historians to learn more about the evolution of Angkor, the enormous political and religious empire that dominated most of south-east Asia for 600 years.

 

 

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/lost-horizons-mediaeval-city-uncovered-20130614-2o9p3.html#ixzz2WKCmlqMc

 

 

 

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Cambodian lost city not so lost after all  

Cambodian lost city: Researchers clarified that the Mahendraparvata was not lost, but that it was found to be unexpectedly large.

By Elizabeth Barber, Contributor / June 19, 2013

 

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In this photo taken in June 2012, Cambodia's famed Angkor Wat temples complex stands in Siem Reap province, some 230 kilometers (143 miles) northwest Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Airborne laser technology has uncovered a network of roadways and canals, illustrating a bustling ancient city linking Cambodia's Angkor Wat temples complex.

Heng Sinith/AP

Enlarge

on emaResearchers have clarified thatCambodia’s “lost city,” found in the swelter of the country’s northwestern jungles, was not so lost at all. It is, however, bigger than once thought, prompting scientists to revise their previous beliefs about the character – and the eventual collapse – of the Khmer Empire.

Researchers from the University of Sydney's archaeological research center in Cambodia said that they had known about Mahendraparvata – an ancient city from the Khmer Empire some 1,200 years old – for decades, but that before the use of Lidar technology, which allowed them to probe the vast undergrowth with lasers that revealed the buried city’s shape, they had not understood just how extensive the abandoned one-time seat of the Khmer kingdom was. The city had previously been misreported as “discovered" in a "world exclusive" from The Sydney Morning Herald.

“It is an exaggeration to say a lost city has been found because if you’re working in Cambodia you know it’s been there since the 1900s," Jean-Baptiste Chevance, director of the Archaeology and Development Foundation and the project’s lead archaeologist, toldThe Cambodia Daily. "The main discovery is a whole network of roads and dykes that were linking monuments that were already known."

The city's unexpected size suggests that the Khmer Empire, which ruled Southeast Asia from about 800 A.D. to 1400 A.D., was more urban than previously imagined: Mahendraparvata was a planned, well-laid-out city that was formerly linked with a system of roads and canals to theAngkor Wat temples, built some 350 years later also in Siem Reap province. Scientists had previously thought that the kingdom was more a loosely organized collection of population centers. The findings are due to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

"We identify an entire, previously undocumented, formally planned urban landscape into which the major temples such as Angkor Wat were integrated," the researchers wrote in a statement published by NBC.

 

The researchers also offered additional comment on why it was that the Khmer Empire, once decadent in its stone temples ascending toward the clouds, collapsed into ruin, not to be reincorporated into the country’s story again until the French reintroduced the memory to Cambodian national identity. Now, researchers have suggested that periods of megadrought, combined with practices that caused environmental degradation, were to blame for the fall of the empire – a recipe thought to have led to the decline of massive, ancient civilizations elsewhere in the world.

 

“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 researchers wrote. 

 

Once abandoned to time, the royal city was worked to rubble as a millennium of industrious vegetation and monsoon rains did their worst on its stone temples. The mountain, Phnom Kulen, which once observed Cambodia at a cultural peak, would go on to witness one of the country's worst moments, becoming a Khmer Rouge stronghold in the 1970s, when the government murdered about a fifth of its population.

 

Throughout all that, the mountain has remained a spiritual place, host to tens of thousands of pilgrims each year.