CAMBODIA, November 28, 2013 (The Diplomat by Damian Evans): In June of this year, along with sixteen of my colleagues, I published an academic paper on the use of airborne laser scanning (“lidar”) for archaeology that made front-page news across the world [see above article]. In it, we described how we had used lidar technology to uncover and map elements of the medieval urban landscape around the famous temples of Angkor, in Cambodia, that had previously been obscured by vegetation. The release of that paper was the culmination of many years of meticulous planning and painstaking research, but there was one thing for which we found ourselves completely unprepared: the storm of attention devoted to something that was almost a footnote in that paper, the discovery of the so-called “lost city” of Mahendraparvata on a mountain plateau at the northern periphery of Angkor.
I’d also like to think that the findings we describe in that publication are significant – but for a totally different set of reasons than you’ll hear about in the media coverage. To begin with, we shouldn’t imagine that archaeologists have such an abundance of research funds that we would gamble a quarter of a million dollars laser-scanning a random stretch of forest in the hope that we might accidentally find a city lying on the forest floor. In most areas (including Mahendraparvata, as we clearly explained in the paper), a century or more of prior scholarship had lent considerable weight to the theory that urban areas extended between and beyond the well-known temples. But to know those cities by way of actually seeing them for the first time is an entirely different thing, at least for archaeologists, and that is why the University of Sydney brought together and led a consortium of institutions to undertake the lidar program.
Perhaps more important than that is the fact that Cambodians and their ancestors have been living in this part of Southeast Asia, apparently without interruption, for thousands of years. The temple-cities of greater Angkor are immensely important national icons, and the sense of shared history that they underpin lies at the very heart of Cambodian nationhood. They have never been “lost” or “abandoned” by Khmer people, who in fact have shown a remarkable resilience in the face of historical forces that have sometimes seemed bent on their destruction.
More at source.