Stoo said:
The New Age of Exploration, indeed.
This is pretty cool, especially the animations which show the area as a living city. Very interesting, Sabo, as were all the other articles that you linked to. Thanks.
I've been in D.C. for the past little bit where I caught an ad (technically a poster) for something called
Angkor Revealed. Staff at the Smithsonian weren't up to speed unfortunately, but it appeared to be a joint production between the Beeb & the Smithsonian Channel. Then when I fire up the ol' computer today this was brought to my attention --
Jungle Atlantis, a two-part(?) documentary series following an archeological team as they uncover even more of Angkor Wat's past using Lidar. Part 1 airs on BBC2 tomorrow(?) at 2000. Check local listings as always!
You can find a couple of clips from the premiere episode
here as well.
If you can get past the shoddy formatting there's a brief write up on the expedition
here. You won't learn much since it's basically a fluff piece for the show, but there are a couple of nice images.
Ben Lawrie said:
By the time the royal capital moved south to Angkor around the end of the 9th Century, Khmer engineers were storing and distributing vast quantities of precious seasonal monsoon water using a complex network of huge canals and reservoirs.
Harnessing the monsoon provided food security - and made the ruling elite fantastically rich. For the next three centuries they channeled their wealth into the greatest concentration of temples on Earth.
One temple, Preah Khan, constructed in 1191, contained 60t of gold. Its value today would be about £2bn ($3.3bn).
But despite the city's immense wealth, trouble was brewing.
At the same time that Angkor's temple-building programme peaked, its vital hydraulic network was falling into disrepair - at the worst possible moment.
The end of the medieval period saw dramatic shifts in climate across south-east Asia.
Tree ring samples record sudden fluctuations between extreme dry and wet conditions - and the lidar map reveals catastrophic flood damage to the city's vital water network
Hate the teevee? The Beeb's iPlayer will have the episode two days later. For those of us stateside, the Smithsonian Channel will be airing both episodes on the 5th of October under the title
Angkor Revealed.
In the meantime, you can check out the nifty documentary
Angkor: Land of Gods: Empire Rising
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/P7MGHMjOWmI?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Embedding has been disabled, but the full episode can be viewed
here.