Beyond the Greater Angkor Region (BGAR)” addressed issues of water management and agricultural production in urban and regional contexts through an archaeological case study of cities in the Khmer Empire (9th – 14th centuries C.E.). We are now seeking to understand the resilience of networks of urban centers through existing archives of archaeological data, along with new data acquired with cutting-edge remote sensing instruments.
Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire and emerged as one of the most extensive low-density urban complexes in the preindustrial world.1 Khmer inscriptions indicate that Jayavarman II founded the imperial kingdom in 802 CE after unifying the extended Khmer world within a single socio-political system. After unification, urbanization was rapid and expansive. By the 12th century C.E. the empire covered most of mainland Southeast Asia and continued to flourish until the 13th century C.E. before entering a period of decline. Despite Angkor’s longevity, some scholars, beginning with Groslier (19792), have argued that the collapse of an unsustainable hydraulic network, the extensification of the agro-urban periphery of agricultural communities, changing precipitation patterns, and the emergence of a densely-populated urban core were significant factors in the abandonment of medieval Angkor as the center of the Khmer state. This work is similar to other studies highlighting human-environmental interactions over an extended scale.
Angkor had a large population of agriculturally unproductive people living within the central urban area. Much of the surplus required to provide for them was produced by the network of community-based temples in the peripheral regions of Greater Angkor. Inscriptional evidence suggests that these peripheral temples were integral administrative, economic, and religious centers for communities, regulating most aspects of Khmer life. This included orchestrating and designing local water infrastructure (e.g. moats and reservoirs). Remote sensing projects have identified spatial associations among temples, hydraulic features, and rice fields that have substantiated the relationship between temples and rice production. Archaeological excavations have also revealed stratigraphic coherence between temples and water management features with hydraulic infrastructures, such as laterite (stone-lined) channels leading from the temple moats to adjacent ricefields. Over a thousand temple communities have been identified and mapped in the Greater Angkor Region.
This work has resulted in four peer-reviewed publications and four book chapters. The peer-reviewed publications synthesize and compile all known information about temples in the Greater Angkor Region as well as provide diachronic population estimates for the area; discuss the evolution of agro-urbanism using Angkor as a case study; analyze the agricultural system of medieval Angkor and suggest that there were increasing returns to agricultural intensification at Angkor; and, assess engineering at the nexus of climate and social challenges as related to the “collapse” of Angkor. The book chapters detail Angkor’s local temple communities and suburban settlement patterns; perspectives on the ‘collapse’ of Angkor; the trajectories of urbanism in the Angkorian world; and how deep learning can be used to map archaeological features in lab-based settings. Finally, one paper with the results from the automatic large-scale mapping of Khmer Empire reservoirs in satellite imagery using Deep Learning should be submitted for peer-review publication in early 2023.
