Description du projet
La télédétection au service de l’ingénierie khmère médiévale
Réputée pour ses monuments emblématiques, Angkor fut la grande capitale médiévale de l’Empire khmer. Cependant, des recherches récentes ont révélé que les célèbres monuments du site ne constituaient que l’épicentre d’un vaste complexe d’habitations doté de systèmes élaborés de gestion de l’eau et d’atténuation des pluies de mousson. Des indices suggèrent que d’autres complexes de temples équipés de systèmes hydrauliques similaires ont pu exister. Financé par le Conseil européen de la recherche, le projet CALI utilisera une technologie innovante de balayage laser aéroporté (LiDAR) pour découvrir, cartographier et comparer les paysages archéologiques autour de tous les grands ensembles de temples du Cambodge. Le projet vise à mettre en lumière le rôle de ces systèmes complexes et vulnérables de gestion de l’eau dans la croissance et le déclin des premières civilisations en Asie du Sud-Est.
Objectif
For over half a millennium, the great medieval capital of Angkor lay at the heart of a vast empire stretching across much of mainland SE Asia. Recent research has revealed that the famous monuments of Angkor were merely the epicentre of an immense settlement complex, with highly elaborate engineering works designed to manage water and mitigate the uncertainty of monsoon rains. Compelling evidence is now emerging that other temple complexes of the medieval Khmer Empire may also have formed the urban cores of dispersed, low-density settlements with similar systems of hydraulic engineering.
Using innovative airborne laser scanning (‘lidar’) technology, CALI will uncover, map and compare archaeological landscapes around all the major temple complexes of Cambodia, with a view to understanding what role these complex and vulnerable water management schemes played in the growth and decline of early civilisations in SE Asia. CALI will evaluate the hypothesis that the Khmer civilisation, in a bid to overcome the inherent constraints of a monsoon environment, became locked into rigid and inflexible traditions of urban development and large-scale hydraulic engineering that constrained their ability to adapt to rapidly-changing social, political and environmental circumstances.
By integrating data and techniques from fast-developing archaeological sciences like remote sensing, palaeoclimatology and geoinformatics, this work will provide important insights into the reasons for the collapse of inland agrarian empires in the middle of the second millennium AD, a transition that marks the emergence of modern mainland SE Asia. The lidar data will provide a comprehensive and internally-consistent archive of urban form at a regional scale, and offer a unique experimental space for evaluating socio-ecological resilience, persistence and transformation over two thousand years of human history, with clear implications for our understanding of contemporary urbanism and of urban futures.
Champ scientifique
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringremote sensing
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologyarchaeometry
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringnatural resources managementwater management
- engineering and technologycivil engineeringstructural engineeringhydraulic engineering
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesopticslaser physics
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
75116 Paris
France