The Secrets of Angkor

Le Saboteur

Active member
This month's National Geographic Magazine has an excellent article on the history of Angkor Wat. If you can find the dead tree edition at your local newsstand, I would recommend picking it up.

For those of you out of the country, check out this interactive feature. You can follow it up with the "Secrets of Angkor" programme on the National Geographic Channel. It seems there's plenty of new evidence: remains of outlying settlements, at least 74 additional temples and a vital, complex water system.

Now here's an environ that Indy needs to explore.
 

dr.jones1986

Active member
Le Saboteur said:
This month's National Geographic Magazine has an excellent article on the history of Angkor Wat. If you can find the dead tree edition at your local newsstand, I would recommend picking it up.

For those of you out of the country, check out this interactive feature. You can follow it up with the "Secrets of Angkor" programme on the National Geographic Channel. It seems there's plenty of new evidence: remains of outlying settlements, at least 74 additional temples and a vital, complex water system.

Now here's an environ that Indy needs to explore.

I saw this at the new stand the other day, interesting place...would love to go someday. Maybe i could do it as a side trip from Thailand.

Actually speaking of Indy and visiting Angkor, i was just reading Phillosphers stone again the other day and noticed it mentioned that Indy had a skull from Angkor in his classroom at Princeton...so perhaps he already visited this site on some adventure we have yet to here about...
 

Stoo

Well-known member
Le Saboteur said:
Now here's an environ that Indy needs to explore.
Oh, absolutely. A friend of mine was there a couple of years ago and said he couldn't get Indiana Jones out of his head while walking around. His photos were stunning.
dr.jones1986 said:
Actually speaking of Indy and visiting Angkor, i was just reading Phillosphers stone again the other day and noticed it mentioned that Indy had a skull from Angkor in his classroom at Princeton...so perhaps he already visited this site on some adventure we have yet to here about...
In the 1933 version of "King Kong", the character of Jack Driscoll mentions having once been at Angkor so maybe he was there with Indy!:)
Le Saboteur said:
It seems there's plenty of new evidence: remains of outlying settlements, at least 74 additional temples and a vital, complex water system.
4 years minus 9 days after you posted this, a brief article appeared in the International Herald Tribune (The Global Edition of The New York Times) on Wednesday, 19 June, 2013:

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"AIRBORNE LASERS REVEAL NEW VIEW OF ANGKOR WAT IN CAMBODIA

New data from airborne laser scanning has uncovered a network of roadways and canals linking the Angkor Wat complex of temples in Cambodia, indicating a bustling ancient city.

The discovery was announced Monday in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The scanning shows a previously undocumented formal urban landscape integrating the 1,200-year-old temples, which are now obscured by dense forest.

The data indicated that the civilization there eventually collapsed because of deforestation and broken reservoir systems.

(Associated Press)"
 

Le Saboteur

Active member
Stoo said:
Oh, absolutely. A friend of mine was there a couple of years ago and said he couldn't get Indiana Jones out of his head while walking around. His photos were stunning.

:hat:

Here's a thread I had long since forgotten about. But since Angkor Wat (& SE Asia by extension) are logical choices to expand the series via the all important palette swap, it will never happen. Never.



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Stoo said:
4 years minus 9 days after you posted this, a brief article appeared in the International Herald Tribune (The Global Edition of The New York Times) on Wednesday, 19 June, 2013:

I really hate that subtle re-branding of the IHT, but I'm glad that you found the article! I would have missed it! But since you brought it up, I went digging around and Science Now has a pretty decent write up.

angkor_wat.jpg


Science Now said:
To get a better understanding of Angkor?s urban landscape, Fletcher?s colleague at Sydney, Damian Evans, turned to LiDAR, an instrument that a few years ago mapped hidden features of medieval Mayan ruins in Central America. Using a helicopter for just 20 hours of flight time in April 2012, a consortium put together by Evans imaged 370 square kilometers of terrain, encompassing Angkor and two nearby temple complexes, Phnom Kulen and Koh Ker. LiDAR laid bare the imprints of a 9th century city on the Kulen, known from inscriptions as Mahendraparvata. ?We found the great early capital of the Khmer empire,? Fletcher says. ?The discovery of this early Angkorian city is a very exciting example of LiDAR?s use in the region,? adds Miriam Stark, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, who has recently started to conduct research at Angkor but was not involved in last year?s LiDAR campaign.

Wired gives us a nice overview of how LiDAR works as well! You can read the full article here.

Wired said:
LiDAR is a remote sensing technology. Analogous to radar, a LiDAR array fires light at a target, often via laser. The light can be visible spectrum, ultraviolet, or near-infrared. The time it takes for the light to reflect back to the scanner is measured, with each measurement registered as a data point. In archaeology, the data thus gathered are used to plot differences in elevation and shape; from this data cloud, a picture is built up of the observed area.

The original dead tree article can also now be read on-line!

NatGeo said:
Recent excavations, not of the temples but of the infrastructure that made the vast city possible, are converging on a new answer. Angkor, it appears, was doomed by the very ingenuity that transformed a collection of minor fiefdoms into an empire. The civilization learned how to tame Southeast Asia's seasonal deluges, then faded as its control of water, the most vital of resources, slipped away.
 

time-raider

Member
WilliamBoyd8 said:
Richard Halliburton visited Angkor Wat in 1924.

He said that there were lots of snakes there.

:)



Leading Lady: Your just like Indy...giddy as a school boy.

Richard laughs.

Leading Lady: Wouldn't it be wonderful if he were here now to see this?

Richard: [chuckles] He never would have made it past the snakes! He hates snakes! He's scared to death of them!

:sleep:

[time-raider wakes up]

:confused:

What dreams I have(y)
 

Stoo

Well-known member
WilliamBoyd8 said:
Richard Halliburton visited Angkor Wat in 1924.

He said that there were lots of snakes there.
Now there's the name of a real-life adventurer!(y)
Le Saboteur said:
Wired gives us a nice overview of how LiDAR works as well! You can read the full article here.
Funny because that's Lake Neuchatel in the article's image and it's north shore is a 2 minute walk from where I'm living.:) Gotta love the title, too: "Indy Goes Geek".

The New Age of Exploration, indeed.
Le Saboteur said:
For those of you out of the country, check out this interactive feature.
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.:hat:

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Incidentally, I was watching "Green Hell" (1940) again the other night and when the group finds the ancient temple they've been searching for, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s character says:

"It's fantastic! Like the ruins of Angkor."
 

Le Saboteur

Active member
Stoo said:
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.:hat:

:hat:

It's not much, but I do what I can. Now, I don't know if you remember or not, but a small segment of National Geographic's video on Angkor was shown at the Adventure of Archeology Exhibit. I'll need to watch the entire thing again, but I think this was the same video.

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/1MgoflDGZP8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 

Le Saboteur

Active member
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.:hat:

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.

_77753787_aknicepic.jpg


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

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Embedding has been disabled, but the full episode can be viewed here.
 

Le Saboteur

Active member
Cambodia seems to appear in the news every so often. If it's not about the government declaring tigers functionally extinct within their borders (and wanting to import Bengals from India), then it's about Angkor or something tangentially related.

Joshua Hammer said:
The vast urban center that Chevance is now exploring was first described more than a century ago, but it had been lost to the jungle until researchers led by him and an Australian colleague, Damian Evans, rediscovered it in 2012. It lies on this overgrown 1,300-foot plateau, known as Phnom Kulen (Mountain of the Lychee fruit), northeast of Siem Reap. Numerous excavations as well as high-tech laser surveys conducted from helicopters have revealed that the lost city was far more sophisticated than anyone had ever imagined—a sprawling network of temples, palaces, ordinary dwellings and waterworks infrastructure. “We knew this might be out there,” says Chevance, as we roar back down a jungle trail toward his house in a rural village on the plateau. “But this gave us the evidence we were hoping for.”

Full article: The Lost City of Cambodia


Nicky Sullivan said:
One of the local commune chiefs who had been invited to attend surprised officials when he informed them that there remained some iron slag in the rice fields in his commune. And so the process of surveying and digging began.

Until now, researchers believed that iron used in Angkor came from sites far from the complex. Iron ore smelting is an intensive process that requires a lot of fuel.

Full article: With a little luck, Archaeologists stumble on the forges of Angkor

The Telegraph said:
In the course of the next two hours we visited three temples (brick and sandstone towers with bushy eyebrows of vegetation), a rock shelter covered in carvings and inscriptions, and a place called Sra Damrei, where sandstone rocks have been sculpted into a life-size elephant and lions. At one point we even arrived at the hermitage of a young monk who was swinging in a hammock beneath a tin roof. His hermitical duties did not seem too onerous – he meditated in the bat cave behind his dwelling, but only on full moon days. Chan was bowled over by our secret itinerary on Phnom Kulen. “After 15 years as a guide, you are my first client who comes to these places,” he said.

There is a simple reason for this. The Angkor Archaeological Park acts like a magnet for visitors to Cambodia, drawing them in and leaving them little time to venture farther afield (similarly, Machu Picchu monopolises the tourist experience in Peru). But 2016 is the time to go beyond the stellar triumvirate of Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and Ta Prohm.

Full article: Beyond Angkor: Inside the Lost World of Phnom Kulen

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