The road from Angkor to Phimai reveals the splendor of Khmer civilization under King Jayavarman VII (unlike under the current 2nd fake one)

A path through history

A research project between Thailand and Cambodia sheds light on the ancient Angkor-Phimai road, which has been shrouded in mystery for centuries

Saturday August 18, 2007
SANITSUDA EKACHAI
Bangkok Post

The air was full of mystery and danger as we hiked the lush forest in the no-man's-land along the Thai-Cambodian border looking for archaeological remnants of the long lost Angkor-Phimai royal road.

"Stay on the path," Col Surat Lertlum solemnly warned, pointing to a cluster of what looked like round plastic lids near a thicket two metres away. "The forest is still full of land mines and we can only guarantee your safety if you stay on the path."

Obediently, we followed him along the narrow path until the moist earth under our feet turned rocky as we stepped onto a raised laterite walkway supported by an embankment made of layers of laterite rocks.

We were at the Ta Muean mountain pass on the Phanom Dongrak mountain range, a natural boundary between Surin province in Thailand's northeast and Oddar Meanchay province in northern Cambodia.

"This is where the ancient road, which passed through the plains in Cambodia, climbed up the mountainous forest of Phanom Dongrak to the plateau in Thailand before heading toward Phimai," explained Col Surat.

Apart from the laterite embankment, other archaeological evidence of the ancient Angkor-Phimai route at the heavily-mined Ta Muean Pass includes stone pillars that once lined the road, remnants of decorative sculptures, a small laterite bridge and a laterite cutting site that provided building materials for the road.

This connecting point at Ta Muean is one of the important discoveries made by the Living Angkor Road Project, a Thai-Cambodian joint effort supported by the Thailand Research Fund to explore the 254-kilometre route that linked Angkor and Phimai when the Khmer civilisation reigned.

The road started at the western gate of the Angkor Thom temple and ended at Phimai, an ancient city believed to have had close royal links with the Angkor dynasties.

The knowledge of the route is not new. A 12th century stone inscription from Preah Khan Temple near Angkor Thom states that King Jayavarman VII, a great Mahayana Buddhist king, ordered the construction of 17 temples along the Angkor-Phimai road as rest stops for travellers.

Originally called agnisala, meaning "houses of fire" that travellers could see lit-up from afar at night, these rest houses have become popularly known as dharmasala through L. Finot's studies in the 1920s on the architecture of the rest chapels.

Prior to the Living Angkor Road Project, archaeologists had identified the sites of 15 of the 17 dharmasalas built along the road, but the exact route it took had never been located.

There was a widespread belief among archaeologists that the road passed through the Phanom Dongrak mountain range at the Samed pass, near the famous Prasat Phanom Rung temple. The Living Angkor Road Project has proved this wrong.

By integrating modern technology in remote sensing, geographical information systems (GIS) and geophysics along with conventional studies in archaeology, anthropology and history, the project has identified Ta Muean as the connecting link over the Phanom Dongrak mountains, which leads directly to Prasat Ta Muean, the first dharmasala or rest stop on the Korat Plateau.

The project has also discovered the remains of the two missing dharmasalas on this route, which are called Ampil and Kok Phnov. The discovery of ancient stone bridges, meanwhile, plots a series of dots that has for the first time revealed the outline of the ancient route from Angkor to Phimai.

Equally important, the research has found a large number of iron smelting and ceramics production sites as well as ancient human settlements within a five kilometre radius of the road. These sites were linked to the main road by networks of smaller roads to transport labour, goods, foods and other resources to the centres of the ancient Khmer empire.

Geophysics technologies, said Col Surat, have also been used to accurately locate iron smelting sites, leading to archaeological excavation in Surin's Ban Kruad district earlier this year.

Started in 2005, the joint project to unveil the road's mystery is a collaboration between the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy, the Fine Arts Department, Prince of Songkhla University, Silpakorn University and Cambodia's Apsara authority, which works to protect and manage the Angkor and the Siem Reap region.

Thailand's multi-disciplinary research team is led by remote sensing and GIS expert Col Surat Lertlum of the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy's Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, who is responsible for initiating the project.

The Cambodian team is led by Im Sokrithy, an archaeologist from Apsara.

"I've long been fascinated by ancient Khmer civilisation," said Col Surat, explaining why he initiated the bilateral effort.

"Since the use of remote sensing and geography information systems have helped archaeologists pinpoint archaeological sites around the world, I thought my discipline could help shed some light on the royal road."

Col Surat began exploring the road with remote sensing and GIS in 2001. "I soon started realising that advanced technologies may significantly speed up archaeological studies, but they are not enough."

Remote sensing, for example, cannot help much when the sites are covered with jungle or when the landscape has been drastically changed by modern farming and construction, he explained.

Archaeology and history, said Col Surat, help fill the gaps by guiding scientific work in the right direction to locate possible survey sites.

For ground surveys, however, he has learned that it pays to listen to the locals. For example, scientific studies on topography and the direction of water flows suggested that Ta Muean was the least steep pass and thus the most geographically appropriate for road building.

"But it was an old man in the village who told us about an old walkway he used, which led to the discovery of the laterite royal road," said Col Surat.

Archaeologist Im Sokrithy tells a similar story about his discoveries at Cambodian sites.

When searching for the two missing rest chapels, GIS information only roughly identified an area for ground surveys. "It was the villagers' legends relating to the royal road and names of places such as preah kanlong, which means royal road, that gave us the clues as to where the sites should be.

"And it was their knowledge of their area which has helped us to identify the dharmasalas, which are always near the ancient royal road," he said.

The locals' belief that the road is sacred has helped preserve it for modern-day study, said Sokrithy. Under the scorching sun on our way to see Kok Phnov dharmasala, he pointed to an elevated dirt path flanked by paddy fields. "This part of the royal road still exists thanks to the local belief that damaging it brings bad fortune," he explained.

During the war, recounted Sokrithy, the Cambodian villagers used the little-known road to escape the Khmer rouge. "And it is still being used today to go between villages," he added.

It is also the villagers' knowledge of their localities that has helped the Cambodian team identify 32 ancient stone bridges that together form an outline of the entire Angkor-Phimai royal road.

"Remote sensing technology could never locate this bridge because it is on the same level as the road," said Col Surat while standing on Spean Top, the longest ancient stone bridge on the Angkor-Phimai route.

Measuring 149 metres in length and 10 metres high with 25 arches, Spean Top is still in use until today as part of the modern road from Oddar Meanchay to Siem Reap.

The researchers also found many bonuses in their efforts to locate the royal road.

In Cambodia, where the landscape has been not been damaged as much by modern development as it has in Thailand, they discovered Prasat Chan, another ancient rest house near the border.

"It could be one of the 17 dharmasalas mentioned in the Preah Khan stone inscription if the first rest stop adjacent to Angkor Thom is not counted. Or it could belong to an earlier period," Col Surat explained.

King Jayavarman VII, in an attempt to provide better health care to his people, had also ordered the construction of many arogyasala, or hospitals, during his reign. Three of them have been found along the Angkor-Phimai royal road, said Sokrithy, one of them a new discovery.

A large number of newly-discovered ancient settlements, industrial sites, temple ruins and hundreds of man-made reservoirs that are still in use today can also provide a clearer picture of ancient peoples' way of life and the trade and cultural exchanges that took place between the plateau and the plains.

While conventional archaeology focuses on knowledge acquired from particular sites, the multi-disciplinary approach of the Living Angkor Road Project has placed such knowledge in a systemic perspective to give a complete picture of how these sites are connected and what they meant to the ancient Khmer civilisation, said Silaporn Buasai, deputy director of the Thailand Research Fund.

"This research shows how integration of different disciplines can raise our plane of knowledge," she said. "Integration is key to creativity and innovation. It shows it is important for us step out of our fields of expertise, which yield only fragmented pieces of knowledge, and to link up with other disciplines if we want to create new knowledge."

For remote sensing expert Col Surat, his foray into archaeology has shown him the importance of local villagers' knowledge, be it in the form of folklore, legends, ancient documents or knowledge of their locality and real life experiences.

If the pursuit of knowledge leads to respect for others, can this very pursuit in the Living Angkor Road Project help tackle mutual prejudices that often strain Thai-Cambodian relations and lead to conflict over ownership of archaeological sites?

The fact that the dharmasalas had been altered and used as places of worship by different faiths over the past millennium - from Mahayana Buddhism to Hinduism to Theravada Buddhism - should inform people on both sides of today's national boundaries of the process of cultural evolution that has shaped their present societies.

Apart from developing a web site, Col Surat said the project also plans to bring Thai and Cambodian youths together to learn about the ancient road and peoples' relationships in the past. "So the locals are proud of their ancient cultural roots and common heritage," he said.

"We must remember there were no national boundaries a thousand years ago," he added. "We have to go beyond nationalism and ownership to attain knowledge that helps shed light on our past and our cultural heritage."

Im Sokrithy shares the same conviction. "Culture has no boundaries. Culture is about exchange, relationships and connectedness," he said.

"Culture also stresses similarities and common bonds. So if we want to encourage people go beyond ultra-nationalism, using culture as a tool to foster a sense of common bonds is a good way to go."

More information about the Living Angkor Road Project is available in English at: http://larp.crma.ac.th/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php
and in Thai at http://larp.crma.ac.th/

How to Handle the Most Difficult Person(s) in Your Life

Self-reflection only works when you do it. It never works when you only ask others to do it. - stonepeace

It is a most ironic "illusion" that there are many difficult people in our lives out there, especially while the most difficult person is the most immediate but continually missed one. Now, who is this person so close yet so far? It is none other than you! No, not me, him or her, but you. (Of course, when I read "you" to myself, it refers to me!) Due to the deep-seated tendency to self-rationalise, the person least likely to admit one's mistakes could be oneself. We might think we have got most, if not all things right. But that's self-deception - especially when we are obviously unhappy. If we are so right in the way we see and handle everything, how could it be that we are not happy? Surely, if truth is totally on our side, there would naturally be happiness.

The ones who really make our lives difficult are us - because we choose to react negatively to those around us. Obviously, to react negatively to those neutral or positive to us is downright foolish. So is it not alright to react negatively to those difficult to us? It might be "natural" in terms of force of habit, but it doesn't make it wise or right. When we react negatively, we are hurting ourselves, when our intention is to hurt others. We will definitely succeed doing the first, while there is no guarantee for the latter. Ironic isn't it? Since the one being difficult is suffering, we should focus on being compassionate, not difficult! The truth is, psychologically, no one can hurt us, other than ourselves choosing to let ourselves be hurt. Just as we perceive it wrong for others to hurt us, it is first and foremost wrong to ourselves to hurt ourselves.

Our suffering can be related to our karma in many ways. First, it can be an effect of our past unwholesomeness. Second, it can be an instant effect of the present unwholesomeness of our reaction. Third, it can be a combination of the duo. In other words, at times, we aggravate and perpetuate our own suffering when we react unwholesomely to suffering. It's a vicious downward-spinning spiral. When we mindfully train to sever or reduce the second form of suffering, much suffering is reduced. In fact, when we master the art of not reacting negatively to suffering by realising the unsubstantial transience of suffering, whatever remaining suffering becomes powerless in making you unhappy. When you are less of a difficult person to yourself and others, your world "magically" has less difficult people – because your "difficulty" is the centre of it all. -Shen Shi'an

One attached to personal delusions cannot be liberated by the impersonal truth. - stonepeace

Related Articles: The Most Difficult Person of All

Lack of water doomed Angkor

Computer rendering of Angkor era

Illustrations by Tom Chandler/Monash University

An artist's impression of life in Angkor, Cambodia's medieval capital.

Khmer warriors of Angkor's heyday rode elephants into battle, as seen in this computer illustration based on relief sculptures at an Angkor temple.

Although the city thrived for six centuries, Angkor was no stranger to strife.

A Thai royal document, for example, records the invasion and sacking of the city in the mid-1400s. Modern looting still threatens Angkor temples, many of which are beyond the UN World Heritage site boundaries that protect Angkor Wat.

Suburbia in 13th-century century Angkor was a low-density place, with houses perched on mounds to protect the structures from seasonal floods.

Small artificial ponds stored water that could be use to flood rice paddies.

Neighborhood temples, surrounded by miniature moats, echoed the structure of Angkor Wat.

As Angkor's population expanded, it would have needed to clear forest to create more neighborhoods like this one. Archaeologists speculate that resulting floods and erosion ruined the waterworks the city depended on, possibly leading to its collapse.

------------------------------

Lack of water doomed Angkor

Overpopulation and deforestation filled the Cambodian city's canals with sediment, researchers say.

August 14, 2007
By Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

The medieval Khmer city of Angkor in Cambodia was the largest preindustrial metropolis in the world, with a population near 1 million and an urban sprawl that stretched over an area similar to modern-day Los Angeles, researchers reported Monday.

The city's spread over an area of more than 115 square miles was made possible by a sophisticated technology for managing and harvesting water for use during the dry season -- including diverting a major river through the heart of the city.

But that reliance on water led to the city's collapse in the 1500s as overpopulation and deforestation filled the canals with sediment, overwhelming the city's ability to maintain the system, according to the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The hydraulic system became "not manageable, no matter how many resources were thrown at it," said archeologist Damian Evans of the University of Sydney in Australia, the lead author of the paper.

But during the six centuries that the city thrived, it was unparalleled, particularly because it was one of the very few civilizations that sprang up in a tropical setting, said archeologist Vernon L. Scarborough of the University of Cincinnati, who was not involved in the research.

Just one section of the city, called West Baray, "was 900 times larger than the entire 9-square-kilometer hillock on which sat Tikal, the largest city in Central America," he said.

"The scale is truly unparalleled," added archeologist William A. Saturno of Boston University, who also was not involved. "Forest environments are not good ones for civilizations . . . because they require intensively manipulating the environment. Angkor is the epitome of this, and it is going to be the model for how tropical civilizations are interpreted."

Old and new technologies

The new data come from an unusual agglomeration of both old and new technologies. The core data came from a synthetic aperture radar unit flown on the space shuttle in 2000 and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

The radar pierced low-lying clouds and vegetation to give an accurate picture of soil density, local structures and moisture in soil, which reflects growing conditions. The images revealed, for example, the characteristic moat-enclosed local temples and artificial ponds used for water storage and irrigation.

This information was supplemented with photographs taken from ultralight aircraft flown over the city at low speeds and altitudes.

Finally, the researchers used motor scooters to traverse the city and closely examine sites revealed on the radar images. But so many sites have been revealed, Evans said, that the researchers are only partway through this process.

The group, collectively called the Greater Angkor Project, released a partial map three years ago. The new one released Monday contains, among other things, an additional 386 square miles of urban area, at least 74 long-lost temples and more than 1,000 newly recognized artificial ponds.

Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire, which got its start in AD 802 when the god-king Jayavarman II declared the region's independence from Java. At its height, the empire covered not only Cambodia but also parts of modern-day Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

It is perhaps best known for Angkor Wat, the magnificent temple built by King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century.

Angkor has been studied for more than a century, but early scholars were so overwhelmed by the artworks and architecture, as well as the political successions, that they ignored the archeology, said coauthor Roland Fletcher of the University of Sydney.

In the late 1960s, French archeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier began a more formal study of the ruins, but that work was halted for more than 20 years by the war that broke out in 1970.

After the war, archeologist Christophe Pottier of the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient in Siem Reap, another coauthor, renewed the work, beginning what eventually grew into the current project.

Disputes over history

In the process, the researchers have begun solving many of the disputes that have arisen over the city's history, Evans said.

"The debate has always been . . . was it large enough, was the manipulation of the landscape intensive enough to cause environmental problems?" Evans said. "The answer is definitively yes."

Other arguments have been based on the assumption that Khmer hydraulic engineering technology was rather rudimentary, he said. "What our research has shown is that it was extremely sophisticated and highly complex," he said.

Many of the reservoirs and walls of canals were constructed of compacted earth, he said, but junctions and other crucial points in the system were "quite sophisticated stone structures."

The Khmer built, for example, a massive stone structure to divert the Siem Reap River from its old bed through the center of the city. Other sites have stone structures built into the walls to manage the inflow and outflow of water, he said.

The system was complex enough that the Khmer could have grown rice throughout the year and not just during the rainy season, Evans said. It is not yet clear if they did so, however.

"The intentional movement of earth to create the whole water system is just really mind-boggling," Saturno said. "It was an enormous undertaking" that required not just administrative skills, but also engineering know-how and massive amounts of physical labor.

But in the end, maintenance became too labor-intensive, Evans said. As trees were removed from the landscape, sediment began accumulating in the canals at a rate more rapid than it could be removed. Many dike walls collapsed, although it is not yet known when that occurred.

"We're going now and excavating [the sites] on the ground, and trying to get a grip on when they happened -- whether they were a precursor of the decline, a symptom or the system gradually falling into ruin after they left," he said.

thomas.maugh@latimes.com

-----------------------------------

Urban Sprawl Might Have Doomed Angkor Wat

Artist's impression of settled areas in and around Angkor Wat complex. Credit: Tom Chandler, Monash University

13 August 2007
By Ker Than,
LiveScience Staff Writer

A new map made from satellite data reveals Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple was the center of one of the largest cities of the pre-industrialized world.

The research also sheds light on the extent of the city's sprawl and on its mysterious downfall, factors that could be linked in a way that bears on today's extensive and suburbanized metropolises.

Using ground-sensing radar provided by NASA, researchers found evidence that the ancient Cambodian capital took up an area of nearly 400 square miles (1,000 square kilometers). For comparison, Philadelphia covers 135 square miles, while Phoenix sprawls across more than 500 square miles, not including the huge suburbs. Each has about 1.5 million residents in the city limits.

"In terms of population, however, Angkor would only have had a few hundred thousand people," said study team member Damian Evans, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. "There were cities with much larger populations—for example, in China—before, during and after the Angkor period."

The new radar technique, which senses differences in plant growth and soil moisture content created by topographical differences, also identified more than 1,000 new manmade ponds and more than 70 long-lost temples.

The work, detailed in the Aug. 14 issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides fresh evidence for an idea put forward more than 50 years ago— that Angkor relied on a complex irrigation system consisting of linked ponds and that the city's downfall might have been the result of land overexploitation.

The Khmer capital

Angkor was the capital city of the Khmer empire from the 9th to the 16th centuries. The now-crumbling and decadent temple, Angkor Wat , was constructed in the 12th century at the bidding of one of its kings.

The new maps show that Angkor's water system consisted of canals in the North that funneled water into massive reservoirs in the city's center where the temple resided. "From there, a series of distributor canals dispersed the water through the southern parts of Angkor and down towards the lake," Evans explained.

In the 1950s, the late archaeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier speculated that traces of a hydraulic network were part of an ancient irrigation network that ferried water to farmers in the city's suburbs. Groslier also argued that the breakdown of the network, triggered perhaps by overexploitation of the landscape, was implicated in Angkor's downfall.

Supporting Groslier's hypothesis, the new maps and excavations reveal breaches in dykes and attempts to patch up the system. Whether such phenomena were the cause, a symptom or a result of Angkor's decline remains to be determined, Evans said.

Modern lessons

"Our research shows that Angkor was certainly extensive enough, and that land-use was certainly intensive enough, to have impacted profoundly on the regional ecology," Evans told LiveScience.

Angkor was surrounded by a vast expanse of rice fields that would have required extensive forest clearance. Over time, the intense farming could have led to serious ecological problems, including those associated with deforestation, overpopulation, topsoil degradation and erosion.

The consequence of overexploiting the environment isn't the only lesson Angkor's fate has for modern society, Evans said. Angkor required a massive infrastructural network of canals and roads to keep it running.

"This increasingly complex elaborate system would have been very difficult and expensive to maintain," Evans said. "This is obviously something to bear in mind, considering that many cities in our contemporary world are expansive, low-density urban sprawls as Angkor appears to have been."

-----------------------------

Vast ancient settlement found at Angkor Wat

Aerial photos of remnants of Angkor settlement. Occupation mounds and ponds (upper left). Canals and embankments (upper right). Roadway and canal (lower left). Village temple area (lower right) (Image: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) - Click on the photo to zoom in

The new map of Angkor Wat combines data from ground-sensing radar with aerial photographs and extensive fieldwork (Image: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) - Click on the photo to zoom in

13 August 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Emma Young, Sydney, Australia

A huge urban sprawl once surrounded Cambodia’s famous Angkor Wat temple, according to a newly created map. The scale of the settlement makes it more plausible that the inhabitants of Angkor brought on their own society's collapse through environmental degradation.

The new map uses data from high-resolution, ground-sensing radar and aerial photographs to augment extensive fieldwork. By detecting slight variations in vegetation and ground moisture due to underlying ruins, the radar reveals in unprecedented detail the location of temples - including 94 newly identified temple sites plus another 74 that have yet to be checked on the ground - ponds, roads and canals.

Researchers in the Greater Angkor Project at the University of Sydney in Australia, together with colleagues in Australia, Cambodia and France, used the techniques to survey the entire watershed of the Angkor region.

The area covers nearly 3000 square kilometres, most of which is now blanketed with dense vegetation. Earlier maps suffered from problems with the resolution of aerial photographs and radar data, and from difficulties with accessing remote regions.

Urban sprawl

The researchers found that about two thirds of this region was once occupied, making it by far the biggest pre-industrial settlement yet documented. The main urban district of about 1000 square kilometres was surrounded by suburbs that seem to spread far beyond the north-western and south-eastern borders of the study site.

In fact, says Damian Evans of the University of Sydney, “there is just no obvious boundary” for the settlement. The population of the area was probably around half a million, he adds, though earlier estimates of a million inhabitants - suggested in the 1970s - could still be correct.

Such extensive settlement may help explain why Angkor, which thrived between the 9th and 16th centuries, had been overwhelmed by vegetation by the time European explorers first encountered the site in the 1860s.

The main theory for Angkor’s abandonment is that the creation of an extensive water management system caused environmental damage that ultimately led to the failure of the system, leading to food shortages. That scenario now seems even more likely.

Canal system

“This new map lays out definitively what the system would have looked like - and shows that it was capable of significantly impacting on the local environment,” says Evans.

Local people cleared land, creating a complex system to move water from a region of high ground spanning about 500 square kilometres to storage reservoirs in the centre, and on, via canals, to irrigate about another 500 square kilometres of land to the south. This system would have allowed the society to produce surplus rice to feed workers engaged in building monuments such as Angkor Wat.

The new map also reveals apparent failures of the canal system, with multiple dykes at certain sites. “There is massive redundancy in the canal network - and that gives us an indication that things were going wrong,” says Evans.

Researchers have not yet dated these sites to confirm that they coincide with Angkor’s collapse, however. Nor is it clear what exactly might have gone wrong. “We have evidence of a huge water-management system that had the capacity to impact significantly on the environment," says Evans. "But at the moment, the actual evidence that it did so is pretty thin on the ground.”

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0702525104)

Ancient urban sprawl surrounded Cambodia's Angkor

Sprawling Angkor engineered its own end

August 14, 2007
Leigh Dayton, Science Writer
The Australian

A NEW archaeological map confirms that Angkor in Cambodia was the biggest pre-industrial city ever founded and provides tantalising clues about its mysterious demise 500 years ago.

Sprawling about 1000 sq km out from its central religious heart with its legendary temples and reservoirs, known as Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, the vast city was roughly the size of Singapore, or greater Sydney from the coast to Parramatta.

Angkor itself was the capital of a sparsely settled agricultural empire that stretched from Thailand in the north, across the flood plains, and southwards towards the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

"Like the modern world there was a vast expansion of the urban environment out into the rural world," said Sydney University archeologist Roland Fletcher, founder and co-director of the Australian, French and Cambodian Greater Angkor Project.

A goal of the project was to nail down the geographical extent of the city. According to GAP deputy director Damian Evans, a Sydney University doctoral student, the new map does just that.

"This is the culmination of about 15 years of mapping work," said Mr Evans, who led the effort to integrate the data into the map, revealed overnight in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sources included hand-drawn maps, ground surveys and airborne photography provided by GAP members and ground-sensing radar images provided by the US space agency NASA.

Not only does the map reveal the extent of Angkor -- a Khmer kingdom from the 9th to the 15th centuries -- it pinpoints over 1000 new water storage ponds and more than 74 long-lost temples. In its heyday, as many as 500,000 people may have lived in the sprawling low-density city. The map will allow scientists to tighten population estimates.

According to Mr Evans, the map also provides hard evidence backing the controversial hydraulic hypothesis.

This states that Angkor was linked by a vast network of irrigation channels, storage ponds and reservoirs. As the city grew, land was cleared, causing soil to clog the channels. Eventually, it became too expensive and complicated to keep the system free-flowing and it collapsed, taking Angkor with it.

The city, in essence, engineered its own demise by disrupting the environment.

"We can certainly see there were problems in the hydraulic networks," said Mr Evans.

"There's evidence of water courses punching through dykes and inadequate attention (to maintenance)."

Said Professor Fletcher: "It's a cautionary tale for the modern world."
-----------------------------------------

Ancient urban sprawl surrounded Cambodia's Angkor

August 13, 2007
By Tan Ee Lyn
REUTERS

HONG KONG – Archaeologists have published a new map showing an extensive ancient settlement surrounding Cambodia's Angkor Wat that supported large numbers of inhabitants before and after the famous temple was built.

Now obscured by vegetation and low-lying clouds, the ruins spread over 1,000 sq km and were made up of thousands of houses, roads, manmade ponds and canals, researchers from Australia, Cambodia and France said in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

'We now know that instead of being just (a collection of) temples, Angkor was actually a continuous and interconnected network of temples and small scale residential features like small village ponds, small village temples as well,' Damien Evans of the Archaeological Computing Laboratory at the University of Sydney told Reuters in a telephone interview.

'Very little remains now, they are just piles of brick ... a thousand years ago (it) would have been a huge and popular city, full of life, rather than this image of temples in a jungle.'

Angkor Wat was built in the early 12th century, while the settlement existed between 500 AD and 1500 AD, Evans said.

'What we can see, even on a preliminary basis, is that several hundred thousand people must have lived in the Angkor area ... which is defined by the infrastructure, the roads, the canals, huge embankments,' he added.

Using hand-drawn maps, ground surveys, satellite imagery, aerial photography and ground-sensing radar provided by NASA, the researchers identified what they believed to be more than a thousand former manmade ponds, temples and moats – all of which were now replaced by vegetation.

Ranging from 20 metres to 8 km long, the ponds were used for drinking, irrigation, livestock and other domestic purposes and were especially crucial for the dry season.

'The slightly lower elevations of the rice fields in the former moats and reservoirs ... result in different stages of rice maturity and in differential levels of soil moisture content, which strongly affect the returned radar signal,' Evans said. 'You get more mature rice in these wetter areas.'

The researchers believe the settlement was abandoned around 1500 AD because of overexploitation and deforestation.

'What our work proved for the first time was that Angkor certainly was large enough and its water management system was complex and extensive enough to have created very serious environmental problems,' Evans said.

'In such situations, infrastructure becomes very important and increasingly complex and difficult to maintain.'

Future studies will look at how serious these problems were and if the inhabitants were able to deal with them.
---------------------------------------

Radar discovers temples in ancient city

Tuesday, 14 August 2007
University of Sydney (Australia)

Australian researchers using NASA technology to map the medieval city of Angkor have discovered at least 74 new temples.

"We've mapped a huge settlement beyond the main temples at Angkor using radar imaging and other satellite data," said Damian Evans, a deputy director of the University of Sydney-based Greater Angkor Project.

"This is the first time a complete, detailed and comprehensive map of Angkor has been presented," he said.

The research and images will be published this week by the PNAS, the world's most-cited general science journal, published by the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

Carpeted with vegetation and obscured by low-lying cloud, the ruins spill over 1,000 square kilometres outside the World Heritage site, located in present-day Cambodia, and are linked by a complex water management system.

Mr Evans and colleagues from Australia, Cambodia, and France have worked for years to integrate information from hand-drawn maps, ground surveys, airborne photography, and ground-sensing radar provided by NASA.

"The radar can sense differences in plant growth and moisture content that result from topographical variations of less than a meter," Mr Evans said.

"We have identified over a thousand new man made ponds and at least 74 long-lost temples, by correlating the radar data with on-the-ground sampling."

One single hydraulic system links the entire network, which appeared to provide Angkor's citizens with a stable water supply despite the unpredictable monsoon season.

The system, thought to be purely decorative and ceremonial by many scholars for the past 30 years, may actually have been used for irrigation and the intensification of rice agriculture.

Mr Evans said there "are also signs that the large-scale city engineered its own downfall by disrupting its local environment by expanding continuously into the surrounding forests and exposing the water management system to increased sedimentation and erratic water flows."

This caused a radical re-engineering of the landscape, and increased reliance on a massive and delicately balanced infrastructural network.

Trilogy takes viewers along on Buddhist pilgrimage

Saturday, August 11, 2007

By David Yonke

Toledo Blade Religion Editor (Toledo, Ohio, USA)

In this fast-paced world with frenetic media activity and TV shows blitzing viewers with quickly shifting scenes, filmmaker John Bush opted to step back and slow down with his three-part documentary, Journey into Buddhism.

“A pilgrimage is designed to make an inner journey for the participant,” Mr. Bush said in an interview this week. “Basically what we’re doing is using pacing deliberately designed to, and calibrated to, induce an inner journey on the part of the viewer.”

The trilogy, delving deeply into Buddhism in southeast Asia and Tibet, is now available on DVD through Boston PBS station WGBH and will be released to stores Sept. 4.

The series features cameras lingering on Buddhist temples, statues of Buddha large and small, the rugged terrain of the Asian jungles, the golden ripples of the Mekong River, and the majestic peaks of the Himalayas.

Throughout all these scenes we see the spiritual devotion of the people, who are filmed prostrating themselves in prayer, chanting, lighting candles, meditating, and walking in pilgrimages.

The third episode, centering on Tibet, includes the mountainous country’s troubled history since its takeover by Communist China in 1949, and the forced exile of its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

And yet it dwells more on the people’s resilience and their devotion to faith and tradition than on the political strife.

“It was a fine line,” Mr. Bush said, “because we wanted to preserve this feeling of a pilgrimage and journey with the film, but there was no way of ignoring the political situation. It would have been untruthful. It was a matter of finding a way to balance those two things. And I think it set up a nice tension in the film that tells the story.”

The Dalai Lama gave his blessing to Mr. Bush’s documentary, writing a message that said, “I wish this film every success.”

The Dalai Lama said he believes that “as people become more aware of the reality of the situation in Tibet, they will naturally lend their support to our efforts to resume a dialogue with the Chinese authorities aimed at improving the lot of Tibetans in their homeland.”

Narrating the Tibet episode is Tenzin L. Choegyal, a nephew of the Dalai Lama who was raised within the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India.

“He’s not a professional narrator, but he has a sonorous voice and he obviously has a lot of feeling for the subject,” Mr. Bush said.

The filmmaker did not interview Tibetan monks, for fear that the government would punish them.

The stunning Tibetan scenery features the temples built on rocky Himalayan peaks, with azure skies and cotton-white clouds in the backdrop as robed monks study, pray, and meditate in the monasteries.

“I wanted to show the majesty of this tradition in its environment, and what remains of it,” Mr. Bush said.

A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Mr. Bush runs the independent film company Direct Pictures, based in Greenwich Village, New York City.

The filming for the series began in 2001, Mr. Bush said, with the first two segments filmed simultaneously.

The opening episode, Dharma River is set in Laos, Thailand, and Burma, and follows the Mekong River as Mr. Bush and crew explore the rich history and the current state of Buddhism in that region.

Prajna Earth was filmed in Cambodia and centers on the lost civilization of Angkor, including spectacular images of Angkor Wat, the largest Buddhist temple in the world. That segment is narrated by actress Sharon Stone.

The final film in the trilogy, titled Vajra Sky Over Tibet, was filmed in 2002.

All told, Mr. Bush said, the three 90-minute documentaries in Journey into Buddhism were edited down from more than 80 hours of film.

“You know what you want to do when you set out to make a documentary, you have the idea, but it isn’t until you get back in the studio and see what you have that the story starts to reveal itself,” he said.

Journey into Buddhism was a project of special meaning for Mr. Bush, who has a personal interest in the subject matter.

“I’ve been a practicing Buddhist since I first went to Indian in 1970, so it’s something I’m quite comfortable with,” he said. “But I was interested in making it for people who weren’t interested in becoming Buddhists or who were just curious. My feeling is that we can find the most universal themes and extract those — things that would relate to somebody else’s spiritual life or spiritual practice.”

Vajra Sky Over Tibet has been shown in theaters in limited release, in 30 cities, and the trilogy is being discussed for broadcast by PBS stations next year, Mr. Bush said.

The DVD series includes several bonus features including an “ambient sound mix with music,” eliminating the narration and offering only natural environmental sounds with background music by regional artists.

“When I originally conceived of this piece, I was really anticipating doing it without any voiceover, just a direct experience of the place” Mr. Bush said.

“When I showed the initial cuts to people, I found they were creating their own stories, their own ideas of what was happening. And it was not as interesting as the real thing. So it had to be shown with narration.

“But after you’ve seen the DVD once or twice with narration, you’ve probably got it. And it’s a whole different experience when you can watch it with the music and ambient sound. It allows the places to speak even more strongly to the viewer.”

More information on “Journey into Tibet” is available online at www.directpictures.com, where DVDs of the individual episodes or the boxed-set trilogy can be ordered. The documentary also will be available in stores starting Sept. 4.