Monday, 18 February 2008

Archaeologists study Angkor's demise

The famed Angkor Wat temple is seen through branches of a palm tree in front of the monument in Siem Reap province, Cambodia, on Tuesday Jan. 22, 2006. An international research group is now trying to dig up answers to the question about Angkorian hydraulic network as part its quest to shed more light on the puzzles left since the demise of the Angkor city centuries ago.(AP Photo/Heng Sinith)


Australian archaeologists Damian Evans, left, and Roland Fletcher, right, study a map of Angkorian city during a tour of excavation site in Siem Reap province, Cambodia, on Wednesday Jan. 23, 2008. An international research group is now trying to dig up answers to the question about Angkorian hydraulic network as part of its quest to shed more light on the puzzles left since the demise of the Angkor city centuries ago.(AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Associated Press
February 17, 2008

SIEM REAP, Cambodia - By destroying vast tracts of forest to enlarge their farmland, inhabitants of the wondrous city of Angkor lit the fuse to an ecological time bomb that spelled doom for what was once the world's largest urban area.

So believe archaeologists engaged in groundbreaking research into the ancient civilization of Angkor.

And they are warning that history could repeat itself through reckless, headlong pursuit of dollars from tourists flocking to see Angkor's fabled monuments.

"It's just a weird cycle. It seems like Angkor is repeating itself," said Mitch Hendrickson, who recently led an excavation as part of research into Angkor as a human settlement.

Conservationists have long expressed concerns about the state of the monuments, especially the stress from the tourist invasion. They also say the uncontrolled pumping of underground water to meet the rising demand of hotels, guesthouses and residents in the adjoining town of Siem Reap might be destabilizing the earth beneath the centuries-old temples so much that they might sink and collapse.

"There's just so much building going on without any concern about the long term. Things are moving so fast in Siem Reap today that it's going to chew itself up very quickly and become unsustainable," said Hendrickson, an archaeologist from the University of Sydney in Australia.

From their city, Angkorian kings ruled over most of Southeast Asia during their pinnacle between the ninth and 14th centuries, overseeing construction of architectural stone marvels, including Angkor Wat, regarded as a marvel of religious architecture.

While the 1431 invasion from what is now Thailand has long been regarded as a major cause of Angkor's fall, archaeologists from the Australian university's Greater Angkor Project believe earlier ecological forces led to its demise.

Their findings support a theory in the early 1950s by Bernard-Philippe Groslier, a French archaeologist, that the collapse of Angkor resulted from over-exploitation of the environment.

Angkor's inhabitants started rice farming in the low-lying area near the Tonle Sap lake just south of Siem Reap town, said Roland Fletcher, another archaeologist with the project.

But gradually, they cut down natural forest to extend their farmland up to the slope of Kulen mountain, 50 miles to the north, said Fletcher, who led 10 archaeologists to excavate various sites near the Angkor complex.

Flooding ensued, and huge amounts of sediment and sand were washed down to fill up canals - thus probably choking the vital water management system.

Using NASA's airborne imaging radar data, the project has conducted numerous aerial and ground surveys across nearly 1,200 square miles, which revealed that the city - with about 1 million inhabitants - was far larger than previously thought.

It covered 385 square miles and featured a sophisticated hydraulic system that proved too vast to manage.

Angkor was "a huge low-density, dispersed urban complex" comparable to Los Angeles and "by far the most extensive pre-industrial city on the planet," Fletcher said.

Its water network included an artificial canal used for diverting water from a natural river about 15 1/2 miles north of Angkor and two vast, man-made reservoirs called the East and West Barays.

The populace "probably didn't necessarily need any of this extra water ... because just a rain-fed rice agriculture is quite sufficient to feed a very substantial population," said Damian Evans, a project member.
One theory, he said, was that the Angkorian kings built the water system "to demonstrate their power and their authority to rule."

But he said only excavations and soil analysis could tell more.

Armed with a printed digital map of the Angkor area, Evans and Fletcher toured an excavation site at the West Baray where archaeologists dug trenches to seek traces of an ancient channel through the bank. They were trying to determine whether the channel really existed and could have served as both water inlet and outlet.

The reservoir is walled by four banks - now covered with jungle - each 40 feet high, 110 yards wide and about 12 miles in length. It can store up to 1.8 billion cubic feet of water.

Fletcher called it "the single largest artifact and piece of engineering in the pre-industrial world."

"All of this work is aimed at understanding how the water management system of Angkor functioned ... and how it stopped working," he said, adding that forest clearance is "the current key piece of information" about the ecological peril that caused Angkor to tumble.

Although past environmental problems were associated with deforestation, they also underline the menace the tourism boom is posing to the temples, the researchers say.

"The same types of things which we knew were problems of Angkor are essentially being repeated in our modern-day context in the Angkor area - things like unsustainable use of water, massive overdevelopment without any consideration of the long-term effects," Evans said.

"There's definitely lessons to be learned from what happened here before."

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