Revealing Angkor Wat's Past

Filed in archive Learning Experiences on August 21, 2007

I've chosen to stay with the Cambodia theme for today's second post. This is more of a news related item concerning Cambodia's biggest tourist destination, Angkor Wat. I've covered Angkor before, and want to get to some other parts of Cambodia, but I just couldn't pass up this chance to point out a CNN.com/Reuters article I came across recently.

The article is about the discovery of an extensive settlement surrounding Angkor's temples.

Now obscured by vegetation and low-lying clouds, the ruins spread over 1,000 sq km and were made up of thousands of houses, roads, manmade ponds and canals...

This will mean little to the average tourist. Most of these structures are merely piles of rock surrounded by vegetation and unfriendly reptiles. For researchers, though, it is a big deal. It serves to show how massive a civilization the Khmer empire was. Hundreds of thousands of inhabitants once crowded into the area, but the surroundings were apparently not able to sustain such a population. Though these new discoveries might not add to the already spectacular site of Angkor Wat, they may add a new dimension to the understanding of where the civilization came from, and why it fell.