Lost city unearthed in cambodia

Photo credit: Evans et al. / PNAS (via NBC)

The intrepid bunch trekked through the land mine-laden jungle of the Cambodian mountains to find Mahendraparvata, a 1,200-year old city that predates the nearby site of Angkor Wat by almost 350 years.

The team used Lidar technology to send ultraviolet laser signals from a helicopter, the Sydney Morning Herald announced, allowing them to see through the undergrowth to the city beneath.

“With this instrument - bang - all of a sudden we saw an immediate picture of an entire city that no one knew existed which is just remarkable,” explains Damian Evans, directory of the University of Sydney’s archaeological research Centre.

A one-legged local, a former Khmer Rouge soldier, led them through the perilous landscape to find the city: an urban sprawl of Canals, roads, caves and what they suspect to be tombs.

“There may be implications for society today,” continued Evans. “For example, we see from the imagery that the landscape was completely devoid of vegetation.”

“One theory we are looking at is that the severe environmental impact of deforestation and the dependence on water management led to the demise of the civilisation,” he suggested. “Perhaps it became too successful to the point of becoming unmanageable.”

The city, thought to be part of a vast urban network with Angkor Wat, is thought to be a formally planned landscape, with city blocks noted by researches, according to NBC News, that suggest the temples were nodes in an “increasingly concentrated medieval cityscape”.

The question TheMoveChannel.com’s researchers are hoping to one day work out: how much were the houses?