At Its Peak, The Ancient Khmer City Of Angkor Dwarfed The Great Cities Of Europe
By Stephen Luntz
05 MAY 2021, 19:00
The city of Angkor in what is now Cambodia has long been known as one of the world's great former cities. However, just how large it was at its peak has remained debated, with most of the city reclaimed by the jungle and its extent unclear. A new study indicates that at its height in the 13th century, Angkor housed 10 times as many people as London at the same time, far exceeding any contemporary European city.
The Khmer Empire (802 CE to 1431 CE), ruled from Angkor, covered modern-day Cambodia, Laos, and much of Thailand and Vietnam. European visitors to southeast Asia were astonished by the scale of Angkor Wat, the immense temple at the city's heart, thought to be the largest religious structure by land area in the world. They used various methods to attempt to estimate how many people once lived around it. Their techniques were unreliable, however, and came up with wildly diverging figures. The process has continued since, interrupted by the challenges of visiting the area during the Khmer Rouge (1951 –1999) horrors and the civil war that followed.
Dr Sarah Klassen of the University of British Columbia has taken up the task, using modern technology such as helicopter-mounted lidar to expand our knowledge of the city's changing extent, along with traditional archaeological excavation data, to present the first model of demographic growth in Angkor.
“Estimating Angkor’s population has been an enduring challenge, as conventional methods for estimating population size and density in urban areas are not easily applied at Angkor, where nonreligious architecture was composed almost entirely of organic materials that decayed centuries ago, leaving no structural remains,” Klassen and co-authors write in Science Advances.
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https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/at-its-peak-the-ancient-khmer-city-of-angkor-dwarfed-the-great-cities-of-europe/
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New research tracks the famed southeast Asian city’s growth over hundreds of years
At its height in the 13th century, Angkor boasted a population of around 700,000 to 900,000. (Christian Haugen via Flickr under CC BY 2.0)
By Livia Gershon
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
MAY 12, 2021 2:21PM
During the 13th century, the southeast Asian city of Angkor—known for its famed Angkor Wat temple—was home to 700,000 to 900,000 people, new research suggests. This figure makes Angkor one of the largest cities to exist prior to the modern period. It’s also on par with the size of many current-day cities: Boston, for instance, had a population of about 693,000 in 2019.
As Sarah Cascone reports for Artnet News, a new paper published in the journal Science Advances combines 30 years of excavation data with LiDAR (light detection and ranging) scans to reach the new estimate. The ruins of the city, located in what’s now northwestern Cambodia, are renowned for their stone temples, buildings and infrastructure. Thanks to the scanning technology, archaeologists were able to see remnants of structures and landscape features outside of Angkor’s “downtown” area, including buildings crafted from wood and less durable materials.
“When you are on the ground in the main parts of the city center it is quite forested,” says co-lead author Alison K. Carter, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon, in a statement. “As you walk around you can tell there is something in the landscape around you, but you cannot see anything clearly. LiDAR gave us a beautiful grid of mounds and depressions, which we think were little ponds.”
Per Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky, the researchers examined the mounds surrounding Angkor Wat, discovering that the city’s inhabitants built one house on each of the enormous earthworks. These homes probably housed an average of five people.
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/13th-century-angkor-was-home-more-people-boston-today-180977719/
