Now, thanks to an extremely detailed map, researchers can say with "certainty" that the remains covered with dense vegetation on Mount Kinkulun actually came from the ancient city 1000 years ago. This ancient city has never really disappeared, because Cambodians have been making religious pilgrimages here for hundreds of years.
"People have always suspected that the city of Mahendraparvata mentioned in the inscription is really somewhere on the mountain," said Damian Evans, co-author of the study, who works in the French Far East School in Paris. Now, "we can say for sure that this is a place." KDSPE“KDSPs "Related: Photo: Medieval cities" kdspe "and" kds PS "hidden under the vegetation near Angkor Wat cooperated with the national authorities of EGEO, Foundation for Archaeology and Development and ApSaSA (the organization responsible for protecting Angkor Wat). In Cambodia, researchers combined airborne laser scanning with ground investigation and excavation to fabricate the story of the development and demise of this ancient city.
This technology is called light detection and ranging (lidar), which creates a map of an area by letting an airplane emit laser light to the ground, and measures the amount of reflected light. Based on this information, researchers can calculate the distance from the laser on the plane to the solid objects on the ground. (For example, the measuring distance of temples is shorter than that of highways. )
Evans' team combined the lidar data collected on 20 12 and 20 15 with the previously collected digital survey and excavation data. The researchers also combined these data with the characteristics of nearly 600 new records discovered by archaeologists on the ground. These features include ceramic materials, as well as brick and sandstone bases that usually represent temple sites.
The researchers used light detection and ranging (lidar) to create Mahendraparvata maps. Evans told Life Science that one of the most remarkable revelations of a well-planned city is that it is neatly arranged in a huge grid spanning dozens of square kilometers. He said that the city is a "place where people sit down on the top of this mountain to make large-scale planning and elaboration". This is "not what we will definitely expect at this time."
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Mahendraparvata's amazing discovery can be traced back to about the end of the 8th century and the beginning of the 9th century, which is several centuries earlier than archaeologists thought that Angkor Wat had such an organized city. He said that urban development at that time was usually "organic" and there was not much state control or central planning.
More importantly, urban residents use a unique and complex water resources management system. Evans said: "They didn't build this reservoir with walls like the famous Angkor Wat Reservoir, but tried to cut it out of the natural bedrock." . These ancient residents carved a huge basin with stones, but for unknown reasons, it was semi-complete.
Evans said that the unprecedented scale and layout of this ambitious project provided a prototype for "infrastructure development and water resources management projects, which will later become typical of the Khmer Empire, especially Angkor Wat".
Surprisingly, there is no evidence that this huge reservoir is related to the irrigation system. This may mean one of two things: the city will not be complete until the residents try to provide water for agriculture, or the lack of irrigation is one of the reasons why the city was not built.
According to Evans, Mahendraparvata "is not a particularly suitable place for rice agriculture". "This can explain why this city has not been the capital for a long time. Rice was the main crop in the Great Angkor area at that time. According to the inscriptions found, Jawaman II claimed to be the king of the Khmer King, but the city only became the capital in the late eighth and early ninth centuries.
Although most archaeologists don't think these inscriptions have high historical accuracy, Evans said that this special story is consistent with the age of research and lidar data.
"Now that we have a very complete understanding of the larger Angkor Wat area and finally determined the map of the whole area, we can start some very complicated modeling of population and growth," Evans said.
He hopes that future research can clarify what happened between the birth of this ancient city, the prevalence of new ideas and its demise. When it disappeared into the dense leaves,
The findings of this study were published in the journal Antiquities.
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