General Monthly Meeting
The Archaeology of Angkor
Professor Roland Fletcher, Sydney University
Date: Wednesday, 6th August, 2003
Time: 6:00 for 6:30 pm
Venue: Search & Discover Room, Australian Museum,
Collins St., Sydney (William St. entrance)
Professor Roland Fletcher will speak next month on his archaeological studies of the ancient city of Angkor in Cambodia. While Prof. Fletcher conducts an excavation each year, some areas cannot be investigated because of the danger of landmines. Archaeology in the twenty first century uses satellite information to track subtle changes in the landscape which have revealed a much larger ancient city than previously thought.
Using detailed aerial radar survey information, the researchers were able to compile a 1 metre contour interval map of the region. It now seems that the Angkor complex which flourished between the 12th and 16th Centuries AD, covered more than 1,000 square kilometres and that a great deal of forest was cleared for rice cultivation. The failure of the civilisation at Angkor may be in part because of environmental damage. The experience of Angkor could have a message for us reaching out over five hundred years.
Associate Professor Roland Fletcher is in the Archaeology Department of Sydney University. His area of interest is in settlement archaeology - the growth and decline of pre-industrial cities and theoretical archaeology. He holds a Masters degree and PhD from the University of Cambridge. His book "The Limits of Settlement Growth: a theoretical outline" was published in 1995 by Cambridge University Press.
Report on the General Monthly Meeting
by Karina Kelly.
Angkor was the largest pre-industrial city in the world. Set in modern Cambodia, it flourished between the 8th and 14th centuries AD. Prof. Fletcher has been excavating at Angkor for a number of years. But he is also utilising the latest information technology available to him. Apart from using radar information obtained from specially designed planes, he has also been mapping Angkor using what the local Cambodians call a wind motorbike (an ultralight plane) with American, Donald Cooney at the controls.
Professor Fletcher's talk was beautifully illustrated with coloured pictures of the site and surrounding areas and by dramatic images of radar information obtained in collaboration with NASA and other US agencies.
This area is both monsoonal and desert depending on the time of the year. The city of Angkor which had a population of around three quarters of a million people at its peak, is set on the edge of a great lake called Tonle Sap (which means the lake in Khmer). This lake is flooded during the monsoon each year. The area taken up by this lake is staggering. During the dry it occupies 3,000 square kilometres. But during the great wet 7,000 square kilometres are flooded bring the total area up to 10,000 square kilometres. In South East Asia at this time and perhaps for most of the time since, control over this flooding area brings power and wealth, due to its rice productivity.
The city of Angkor was in a position to control an important pass into the mountains. So its location between the lake and the mountains was strategically important. Because all of the rain for the year fell at one time, the people of Angkor built the most remarkable system of canals, sandbanks and giant reservoirs called Barays. Two of these reservoirs, built in the 11th Century were 8 kilometres long and 2 kilometres wide and could hold 50 million cubic meters of water.
While Angkor is famous for its wonderful temples, most notably Angkor Wat, Fletcher argues that they tell us little about how the city of Angkor actually worked. The temples were not public institutions, but rather more like private royal chapels. The purpose of his research is not to study the temples but rather to learn more about how the city functioned and where and how people lived. The views we get of Angkor today show the romantic stone temples nestled in forest. Fletcher says the city in its heyday would have been very different, surrounded by miles and miles of timber buildings and rice fields. Down at the lake there are giant arrow shaped fish traps projecting into the water. These trap fish as the lakes waters recede and supply 60% of the protein eaten by the people of Cambodia today.
By using the right radar frequency, Fletcher and his colleagues are able to see below the surface and locate ancient rice paddies underneath the modern ones. His illustrations clearly showed the much smaller more irregular fields beneath the larger modern ones.
This 3-D data has revealed remarkable structures designed to assist water movement and utilisation during the monsoon. The sand banks were massively over-engineered - being 100 metres wide to guide the floodwaters in the desired directions. As the ground sloped very gradually down to the south, the north of the citys system collected and slowed the water. The centre was for storage in the giant reservoirs. The southern citys structures were for dispersal. The whole network, covering thousands of square kilometres, was a giant mechanism for harnessing water.
They have shown that the city of Angkor was a pre-industrial equivalent of our modern low-density cities. In fact Angkor was about the size of Sydney. Fletcher pointed out that conserving such a large area is now a huge problem for Cambodia, which is one of the poorest countries in the world.
What caused the downfall of this great city? Was it the cutting down of surrounding forests to make way for rice fields? Or could it have been the gradual conversion of the population from Hinduism to Buddhism causing changes in the way the priests administered and allocated water for rice farming?
A vote of thanks was moved by Jak Kelly and carried by acclamation by the capacity audience