Author: Megan Gannon / Source: Atlas Obscura
If you visit the remote ruins of Koh Ker today, you might have the ancient Cambodian city to yourself, at least if you wake up before sunrise to beat day-trippers from Siem Reap. From atop the main attraction, a seven-tiered pyramid temple called Prasat Thom, you’ll be able to see dozens more monuments—stone buildings, with inscriptions and intricate carvings that are overgrown with vegetation and, in a few cases, hacked off by looters.
Some are best observed from this distance, since the area hasn’t been entirely cleared of land mines from the Khmer Rouge period of the 1970s.Back in 942 A.D., Prasat Thom was brand new, and probably the tallest building you’d see in your lifetime. It would have been directly in front of you as you approached the city on the main access road. To your right would be water; the wide road was built on top of a four-mile-long embankment, which wrangled the Rongea River into the largest artificial lake in the kingdom. You might have stopped to pay your respects at a roadside temple on the left, Prasat Boeng Voeng, one of the many shrines spread across 13 square miles. If you arrived during the rainy season, you might have paused on a bridge, wide and sturdy enough for the king’s elephants, to watch excess water from this reservoir flow over a curved spillway. And as you approached the main temple, you might have rubbed shoulders with artists, dancers, sculptors, scholars, and other newcomers who had doubled Koh Ker’s population in just a few years.
Angkor—the famed, sprawling city 60 miles away—was the seat of authority for the Khmer Empire for more than 600 years, from the ninth to 15th centuries, except for a 17-year interval (928–944), when political power and courtly life shifted to Koh Ker. New archaeological evidence might explain why Koh Ker’s glory days were so brief: The new capital’s massive water-management system failed spectacularly soon after it was built.
Thick vegetation and unexploded land mines have made archaeological exploration in parts of Cambodia difficult in recent decades. But over the past 10 years or so, the remote-sensing technique known as lidar has opened new possibilities. A lidar scanner strapped to a helicopter or low-flying plane sends thousands of laser pulses at the ground to measure distance. Because some of those pulses reach the ground through the forest cover, lidar has had spectacular successes revealing otherwise hidden traces of canals, walls, and other structures all over the world, from 19th-century stone walls crisscrossing New England to ancient Maya temples in the forests of Mesoamerica.
Damian Evans, an archaeologist at the French Institute of Asian Studies in Paris, has been using lidar extensively in Cambodia to map ancient Khmer cities in unprecedented detail. His team’s maps of Koh Ker have revealed the long embankment—and a large breach in it. In a recent paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Evans and his colleagues took…
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