The Archaeology of Angkor Wat

Cambodian World Heritage Site Still Has Secrets to Uncover

Nov 12, 2008

After more than a century of research, archaeologists at Angkor, once the capital of the mighty Khmer Empire, are still making new discoveries.

The French naturalist and explorer Henri Mouhot is usually credited with the discovery of the lost city of Angkor in the eighteenth century. This is not strictly accurate. While Angkor was abandoned when the Khmer Empire fell in the fifteenth century, it was never lost. Even as the jungle reclaimed its territory, some people continued to live there, and Angkor Wat remained a place of worship.

Explorers and Archaeologists Arrive at Angkor

Intrepid Portuguese explorers such as Diego de Couto were the first outsiders to come across the jungle-sheathed temples in the sixteenth century. Unfortunately De Couto’s report was fated to languish in the Lisbon archives, unpublished until 1958.

It was Henri Mouhot’s travel notes, published posthumously in Paris and London in 1863, which brought the temples to the attention of the wider world. He described one temple as “a rival to that of Solomon, ...... erected by some ancient Michelangelo,” and in so doing fired the imaginations of a public fascinated by the mysteries of the east.

More explorers and researchers followed in Mouhot’s wake, their explorations becoming ever more official as Cambodia came under French control. The need to safeguard and study the temples was clear, and the Ecole Francaise d’Extreme Orient (EFEO), founded in 1900, took on responsibility for the conservation of the monuments in 1907.

Uncovering the History of Angkor

The first surveys undertaken in the area documented over 250 archaeological sites, which included bridges, reservoirs and roads in addition to the temples. One such inventory, a three-volume work by Etienne Lunet de Lajonquiere, remains the most important reference work on Angkorian sites to this day, according to Dr Damian Evans, of the University of Sydney, writing in the March-April issue of Touchstone Magazine.

By the 1930s, EFEO had added aerial archaeology to their arsenal. From the sky researchers noticed a network of earthen mounds, small ponds and linear traces which looked like canals criss-crossing the landscape. This tied in neatly with the few surviving historical records detailing life at Angkor. One such work by the Chinese emissary Zhou Daguan, who lived at Angkor in 1296-1297, records the abundance of ponds. Portuguese and Spanish accounts indicate that at least some of Angkor was covered by a network of canals.

It was clear that a rich archaeology lay beyond the temples of Angkor, but the advent of civil war and the rise of the Khmer Rouge meant that it remained out of bounds. The EFEO had to leave the country when the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, only returning in 1992.

Angkor became a World Heritage Site in December 1992, and an International Coordinating Committee was established the following year to oversee restoration at Angkor. Today international teams are working on various temples, while the Cambodians have set up APSARA (Authority for the Protection of the Sites and Administration of the Region of Angkor).

Using the latest technologies, including remote-sensing radar images taken by NASA in 1994 and 2000, archaeologists working on the Greater Angkor Project (GAP) have produced a detailed map of the Angkor area. It identifies more than 1000 archaeological sites, a far cry from the 250 surveyed at the beginning of the twentieth century. It would appear that Angkor has many more secrets yet to be discovered.

Sources

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