The Lost City of Cambodia
Deep in the jungles of southeast Asia, archaeologists have rediscovered the remains of an invisible kingdom that may have been the template for Angkor Wat
On a remote plateau, researchers reveal a royal
capital whose splendors prefigure the glories of the Angkor complex.
(Chiara Goia)
By
/ Smithsonian Magazine
|
Jean-Baptiste Chevance senses that we’re closing in on our
target. Paused in a jungle clearing in northwestern Cambodia, the French
archaeologist studies his GPS and mops the sweat from his forehead with
a bandanna. The temperature is pushing 95, and the equatorial sun beats
down through the forest canopy. For two hours, Chevance, known to
everyone as JB, has been leading me, along with a two-man Cambodian
research team, on a grueling trek. We’ve ripped our arms and faces on
six-foot shrubs studded with thorns, been savaged by red biting ants,
and stumbled over vines that stretch at ankle height across the forest
floor. Chevance checks the coordinates. “You can see that the vegetation
here is very green, and the plants are different from the ones we have
seen,” he says. “That’s an indication of a permanent water source.”
Seconds later, as if on cue, the ground
beneath our feet gives way, and we sink into a three-foot-deep muddy
pool. Chevance, a lanky 41-year-old dressed in olive drab and toting a
black backpack, smiles triumphantly. We are quite possibly the first
human beings to set foot in this square-shaped, man-made reservoir in
more than 1,000 years. Yet this isn’t merely an overgrown pond we’ve
stumbled into. It’s proof of an advanced engineering system that
propelled and sustained a vanished civilization.
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.”
**********
Nothing ignites an archaeologist’s imagination like the prospect
of a lost city. In the late 19th century, French explorers and scholars,
pursuing fragmentary clues about the existence of Phnom Kulen, hacked
their way through the jungles of Southeast Asia. Inscriptions found on
temple doors and walls made mention of a splendid hilltop capital called
Mahendraparvata (the mountain of the great Indra, king of the gods),
and its warrior-priest monarch, Jayavarman II, who organized several
independent principalities into a single kingdom in the beginning of the
ninth century.
Another French archaeologist, Philippe
Stern, trekked to the top of the Phnom Kulen plateau in 1936, and in
five weeks of excavations he and his co-workers uncovered the ruins of
17 Hindu temples, fallen carved lintels, statues of the Hindu god
Vishnu, and remnants of a great stone pyramid. Stern believed that he
had located Mahendraparvata. But the temples of Angkor, built on a more
accessible flat plain and visible on a larger scale, were more
compelling to archaeologists, and the excavations at Phnom Kulen never
advanced much beyond Stern’s initial dig. Then came decades of neglect
and horror.
In 1965, at the height of the Vietnam War, Norodom Sihanouk
allowed the North Vietnamese to set up bases inside Cambodia to attack
the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese Army. Four years later, President Nixon
escalated a secret bombing campaign of Cambodia, killing tens of
thousands and helping to turn a ragtag group of Communist guerrillas
into the fanatical Khmer Rouge. This radicalized army marched into
Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, in April 1975, declared the Year Zero,
emptied out cities and herded millions into rice-growing communes. About
two million people—nearly one-quarter of the population—were executed
or died of starvation and disease before the Vietnamese toppled the
Khmer Rouge in 1979. Phnom Kulen became the last sanctuary of the Khmer
Rouge, and their leader, Pol Pot, known as Brother Number One. The last
of the guerrillas didn’t surrender and descend from the plateau until
1998—Pol Pot died that year near the Thai border, not far from Phnom
Kulen—leaving behind a traumatized population and a landscape strewn
with unexploded ordnance.
Chevance reached Phnom Kulen in 2000, while conducting research
for advanced degrees in Khmer archaeology. “There were no bridges, no
roads; it was just after the end of the war,” Chevance says as we eat
steamed rice and pork with members of his staff, all of us seated on the
wood-plank floor of a traditional stilted house, their headquarters in
Anlong Thom, a village on the plateau. “I was one of the first
Westerners to go back to this village since the war began,” Chevance
says. “People were, like, ‘Wow.’ And I had a coup de foudre—the feeling of falling in love—for the people, the landscape, the architecture, the ruins, the forest.”
It wasn’t until 2012, though, that Chevance marshaled high-tech
evidence for a lost city, after he teamed up with Evans, who is based in
Siem Reap with the French School of Asian Studies. Evans had become
fascinated by Lidar (for Light Detection and Ranging), which uses lasers
to probe a landscape, including concealed structures. Mounted on a
helicopter, the laser continually aims pulses toward the ground below,
so many that a large number streak through the spaces between the leaves
and branches, and are reflected back to the aircraft and registered by a
GPS unit. By calculating the precise distances between the airborne
laser and myriad points on the earth’s surface, computer software can
generate a three-dimensional digital image of what lies below. Lidar had
recently revealed details of the Mayan ruins of Caracol in Belize’s
rainforest, and exposed La Ciudad Blanca, or The White City, a legendary
settlement in the Honduran jungle that had eluded ground searches for
centuries.
The jungles of Kulen presented a problem, however: Rampant
illegal logging of valuable hardwoods had stripped away much of the
primary forest, allowing dense new undergrowth to fill in the gaps. It
was unclear whether the lasers could locate enough holes in the canopy
to penetrate to the forest floor. Despite skepticism, Evans, with help
from Chevance, raised enough money to survey more than 90,000 acres in
both Phnom Kulen and Angkor. “The whole thing was pulled together with
chewing gum and duct tape,” Evans says.
The ruins at Angkor Wat have been left pretty much as they were found when they were discovered in the 1860s. Here, a tree grows from the temple of Ta Prohm, which was constructed by Khmer King Jayavarman VII as a Buddhist monastery and university. (Chiara Goia)
In April 2012, Evans joined Lidar technicians as they flew in a
helicopter at 2,600 feet in a crosshatch pattern over Phnom Kulen. About
two months after the overflights, Evans, awaiting the processing of
visual data they had collected, switched on his desktop. He stared “in
astonishment,” he says, as the ghostly legendary kingdom resolved before
his eyes into an intricate cityscape: remnants of boulevards,
reservoirs, ponds, dams, dikes, irrigation canals, agricultural plots,
low-density settlement complexes and orderly rows of temples. They were
all clustered around what the archaeologists realized must be a royal
palace, a vast structure surrounded by a network of earthen dikes—the
ninth-century fortress of King Jayavarman II. “To suspect that a city is
there, somewhere underneath the forest, and then to see the entire
structure revealed with such clarity and precision was extraordinary,”
Evans told me. “It was amazing.”
Now the two archaeologists are using the Lidar images to
understand how Mahendraparvata developed as a royal capital. The early
water-management system they now saw in detail demonstrates how water
was diverted to areas on the plateau that lacked a steady flow, and how
various structures controlled supplies during rainless periods. “They
employed a complex series of diversions, dikes and dams. Those dams are
huge, and they required huge manpower,” Chevance says. At the dawn of
the Khmer Empire, he goes on, “They were already showing an engineering
capacity that translated into wealth and stability and political power.”
The Lidar imagery also has revealed the presence of dozens of
ten-foot-high, 30-foot-wide mounds in symmetrical rows on the jungle
floor. Chevance and Evans at first speculated that they were burial
sites—but, in succeeding excavations, they found no bones, ashes, urns,
sarcophagi or other artifacts to support that hypothesis. “They were
archaeologically sterile,” says Evans. “They are a mystery, and they may
remain a mystery. We may never know what those things are.” Lidar
surveys of Angkor also detected several mounds that are virtually
identical to those at Phnom Kulen—just one of many startling
similarities of the two cities. Indeed, as the archaeologists studied
the images of Mahendraparvata, they realized with a flash of insight
that they were looking at the template for Angkor.
**********
Chevance and I set out on dirt bikes, bouncing over rickety
wooden bridges that cross silt-laden streams, groaning up steep hills
and plunging down switchback trails hemmed in by dense stands of cashew
trees (grown illegally in this reserve). In one large clearing we come
across the discarded remnants of huge mahogany trees that have been
felled with a chain saw, cut into pieces and dragged out in ox carts.
Chevance suspects the culprit is an affluent resident in the village of
Anlong Thom, but says that fingering him will be pointless. “We will
send a report to a government minister, but nothing will change,” he
says. “The rangers are on the take.”
At the highest point on the plateau, Chevance leads me on foot up
a slope to a monumental five-tiered platform made of sandstone and
laterite (a rusty-red rock): the mountaintop pyramid of Rong Chen. The
name translates as Garden of the Chinese, and refers to a local myth in
which Chinese seafarers smashed their ship against the mountaintop at a
time when an ocean supposedly surrounded the peak. It was here, in A.D.
802, according to an inscription in Sanskrit and ancient Khmer found in
an 11th-century temple in eastern Thailand, that Jayavarman II had
himself consecrated king of the Khmer Empire, at that time a dominion
probably a bit smaller than contemporary Cambodia. And it was here, too,
that the king created a cult of divinely ordained royal authority. More
than 1,200 years later, in 2008, Chevance had arrived at the
mountaintop with a team of 120 locally hired laborers. Government
experts demined the area; then the team began digging. The excavation
suggested that it was the centerpiece of a royal metropolis—a conviction
later confirmed by the Lidar overflights. “You don’t build a pyramid
temple in the middle of nowhere,” Chevance tells me. “It’s an
archaeological type that belongs to a capital city.”
Today Rong Chen is a darkly numinous
place, where the glories of an ancient Khmer civilization collide with
the terrors of a modern one. Unexploded mines still lie buried here—the
result of Khmer Rouge efforts to protect their mountain redoubt from
assault. “We saw a few mines at the last moment when we were doing the
excavations,” Chevance tells me, warning me not to venture too far from
the pyramid. “Most of the villages on Phnom Kulen were mined. The road
between the villages was mined.”
The hilltop camp afforded the Communist fighters a sanctuary near
the strategic city of Siem Reap, then in government hands, and served
as the base from which the Khmer Rouge carried out acts of
sabotage—including blocking a spillway that carried water from Phnom
Kulen into the city. “They prevented water from reaching Siem Reap, and
the Cambodian Army knew that.” The result, Chevance says, was that the
mountain was bombed. “You can still find B-52 bomb craters here.”
Chevance and I get back on our dirt bikes and bounce down a path
to the best-preserved remnant of Jayavarman II’s capital: an
80-foot-high tower, Prasat O Paong (Temple of the Tree of the Small
River), standing alone in a jungle clearing. The facade of the Hindu
temple glows a burnished red in the setting sun, and intricate brickwork
reaches to the apex of the tapered column. Ceramics inside this and
other temples excavated on Phnom Kulen prove that they remained
pilgrimage sites as late as the 11th century—an indicator that the
structures continued to influence the rest of the Khmer Empire long
after Jayavarman II moved his capital from Phnom Kulen to the Angkor
plain and the city’s original population had disappeared.
**********
Angkor—which Chevance and Evans describe as “an engineered
landscape on a scale perhaps without parallel in the preindustrial
world”—is a place that inspires superlatives. Achieving its apogee in
the late 12th and early 13th centuries, the site, at its peak, was an
urban center extending over nearly 400 square miles. Chevance leads me
up the near-vertical stone steps of Pre Rup, a soaring tenth-century
structure with a platform made of laterite and sandstone. It represents a
transition point, a synthesis of the two extraordinary temples we
explored on the plateau, Prasat O Paong and Rong Chen. “It is a pyramid
with three levels,” Chevance tells me, as we clamber among the deserted
ruins in the heat. “On top you also have five towers similar to the ones
we saw on the mountain. It is a combination of two architectural
styles.”
As has now become clear, thanks to Lidar, Phnom Kulen, faintly
visible on the horizon 25 miles away, influenced far more than the later
city’s sacred architecture. To support Angkor’s expanding population,
which may have reached one million, engineers developed a
water-distribution system that mirrored the one used on the plateau.
They collected water from the Siem Reap River, a tributary of the
Mekong, that flows from the plateau, in two enormous reservoirs, then
built an intricate series of irrigation channels, dams and dikes that
distributed water evenly across the plain. Although Angkor’s soil is
sandy and not highly fertile, the masterful engineering allowed farmers
to produce several rice crops annually, among the highest yields in
Asia. “The secret to their success was their ability to even out the
peaks and troughs seasonally and annually, to stabilize water and
therefore maximize food production,” Damian Evans tells me.
A jungle yields up its
long-buried secrets: When archaeologists conducted Lidar overflights on
the Phnom Kulen plateau, the technology effectively stripped away dense
forest to produce a new 3D model of sites including the Rong Chen temple
(raised rectangles, center of image). The relationship between Phnom
Kulen and Angkor Wat—where urban centers are defined by a monumental
temple at the center—suddenly became apparent: “They have the same
fundamental elements,” says scientist Damian Evans.
(5W Infographics. Research by Nona Yates)
Angkor was at its height during the reign of Jayavarman VII
(circa 1181-1220), regarded by scholars as the greatest king of the
Khmer Empire. Two days after my arrival in Angkor, I’m standing with
Evans on the highest platform of the king’s masterpiece, the temple
known as the Bayon. Evans gestures across a stunning tableau of
sandstone terraces, pillars and towers, as well as galleries carved with
bas-reliefs depicting warriors marching into battle. “No king who came
afterward ever built on this scale again,” says Evans. Jayavarman VII,
who made Mahayana Buddhism the Khmer Empire’s state religion, grafted
what are commonly believed to be his own features onto a serenely
smiling Buddhist divinity. Its massive stone face beams in dozens of
iterations throughout this complex, radiating compassion and kindness
across the four corners of the empire.
It is here, in the heart of Jayavarman VII’s capital, that the
histories of Angkor and Mahendraparvata converge most powerfully. “You
are looking at cities that are widely separated in space and time,”
Evans tells me. “But each has an urban core defined by a grid of streets
and a central state temple—the Bayon here, Rong Chen there—at the
center.”
Yet the Lidar data show that the cities followed divergent paths.
While Mahendraparvata was a masterpiece of urban planning, with temples
and dwellings carefully laid out by Jayavarman II around wide
boulevards—a Khmer version of Haussmann’s Paris—Angkor developed
haphazardly. Densely populated neighborhoods of wooden houses squeezed
against the edges of the Bayon. Evans describes Angkor as a “messy
aggregation of centuries of development, with features superimposed one
on top of another.”
Beneath the jungle canopy south of the city, Evans’ Lidar surveys
have detected huge spirals inscribed into the landscape, covering one
square mile, reminiscent of the ancient geoglyphs discovered in the
Nazca Desert of southern Peru. Like the mystery mounds, the spirals
contained no artifacts, no clues about their function. “They could have a
meaning encoded in them that may never be known,” Evans says.
**********
The sheer ambition of the Khmer kings, their re-engineering of a
jungled landscape into an urban one, sowed the seeds of destruction. New
research has provided a clearer picture of the sequence of events that
may have doomed Mahendraparvata. The Lidar data revealed that its
population didn’t engage in terraced rice farming in their mountain
metropolis—which meant that they almost certainly relied on
slash-and-burn agriculture. That would have depleted the soil rapidly,
and probably contributed to the decline and fall of the city. The
evidence backs up research conducted by Chevance and a colleague, who
analyzed soil samples taken from a reservoir on Phnom Kulen. Evidence
showed that vast amounts of soil and sand “got washed down the valley,
indicating deforestation,” says Chevance. Soil from a later date
contained a high concentration of jungle vegetation, which suggests that
the land had been abandoned and taken over again by the tropical
forest.
In the case of Mahendraparvata, this process likely occurred more
rapidly than at Angkor—a major population center for about 600
years—where decline came more slowly. Over time, the artificially
engineered landscape almost certainly led to topsoil degradation,
deforestation and other changes that drastically reduced the capacity to
feed the population and made Angkor increasingly difficult to manage.
Leaders of the rival kingdom of Ayutthaya, in what is now
Thailand, sacked Angkor in 1431. It was abandoned and left to decay,
doomed to the same fate as its predecessor, Mahendraparvata. “There are
in the kingdom of Cambodia the ruins of an ancient city, which some say
was constructed by Romans or by Alexander the Great,” the Spanish
explorer Marcelo de Ribadeneyra wrote when he chanced upon Angkor nearly
two centuries later. “It is a marvelous fact that none of the natives
can live in these ruins, which are the resorts of wild beasts.”
“There are still many questions to answer,” Chevance tells me.
“We know more about temples and kings than everyday life.” When it comes
to the inhabitants of Mahendraparvata, Chevance adds, a fundamental
question underlies his work: “How did they live?”
Answering that query will be difficult, because few traces of
ordinary Khmer life remain: While temples —built for the ages—endure,
Mahendraparvata’s population constructed their dwelling places out of
wood, which rotted away long ago. Even the royal palace, which probably
employed thousands of people, has been reduced to a few crumbling
platforms, pavements, gutters, dikes and roof tiles.
Last year, as part of the Cambodian Archaeological Lidar
Initiative, Evans and Chevance conducted a new series of helicopter
surveys of Phnom Kulen to take in “the entire mountain range,” says
Evans—more than 100 square miles encompassing archaeological sites, rock
quarries and traces of ancient cities. The CALI project also included
overflights to investigate ancient provincial centers of military and
industrial significance, as well as the Khmer capital of Sambor Prei
Kuk, 100 miles south of Angkor. The city endured from the seventh to the
ninth centuries, declining just as Angkor was on the rise. In total,
the CALI campaign covered more than 700 square miles.
Ten ground teams worked alongside the aerial survey teams in
remote areas, and in extreme heat, refueling choppers, conferring with
local authorities, collecting precision GPS data at ground stations, and
persuading local people to stop burning off forest, so that flights
relying on aerial sensors would not have the ground obscured by smoke.
The result of this ambitious effort, funded by the European
Research Council, was a “unique archive,” says Evans, of the ways that
human beings transformed the natural environment and shaped Khmer
history over 2,000 years. The results will be published in a
peer-reviewed journal later this year. Further surveys are planned using
drones and satellites. Evans’ teams are currently on the ground across
Cambodia, investigating surface remains shown by Lidar. This ambitious
effort, he believes, eventually will reveal the entire mosaic of
Southeast Asia’s greatest civilization, only now beginning to come into
focus. Ultimately, he believes, what will emerge is a dazzling, nuanced
understanding of a “complex hierarchy with an unmatched scale.”
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