Laser technology reveals secrets of hidden cities in the jungle – Daily News – Lisbon

Findings will be released tomorrow, June 12, the Australian archaeologist Damian Evans and promise to rewrite the history of Cambodia.

Several cities of centuries VII to XV, especially the Mahendraparvata, rivaling in size with the current capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, were discovered through the use of a new laser technology. And if some already suspected that exist, others had never been referenced. The size and location of these cities and the elaborate network management and treatment of detected water by the scanner the Cambodian jungle laser around the Angkot Wat temple promise news of the Khmer empire and its decline.

the news was released by the British newspaper the Guardian, and the main data research Damian Evans team will be presented by the very Australian archaeologist this Monday, June 12, at the Royal Geographic Society in London and published in the Journal of Archaelogical Science that day.

the Guardian, the archaeologist has revealed that “were discovered whole towns that were hidden in the forest and no one knew were there.” The work of this team, funded by the European Centre for European Union Research, started a few years ago and, in 2012, the first results were presented.

In 2015, a laser scanner, carried by a helicopter, “read” an area of ​​about 1900 square meters, emitting 16 laser beams per square meter during flights. The thus collected information was used to build 3D models when there is on the ground. “In 2012 we identified Mahendraparvata, but this time we can see it in all its dimensions, and it is huge, the same size of Phnom Penh,” added the archaeologist British newspaper.

The reading laser allowed even identify an elaborate water system dating back to a much earlier time than that on which it was thought that this technology had been used for the first time. “Our knowledge of the post-Angkor Wat capital [founded in the first half of the twelfth century] also gives us new perspectives on its collapse,” says Evans. “There is the idea that, somehow, the Thais invaded the area and the entire population fled to the south. But it did not happen because there are no cities [revealed by the laser scanner] to where he could have run away. And this knowledge puts in because all existing theory about the collapse of Angkor, “said the Australian archaeologist.

Several experts from different nationalities, contacted by the Guardian shared the enthusiasm given the new information provided by the work of Damian Evans team with Michael Coe, anthropology professor at Yale University in the United States and specializes in the Angkor history and Khmer civilization, to consider that “these decobertas mean the biggest breakthrough of the last 50 or even 100 years of our knowledge of civilization Angkor “.