Nasa Radar Reveals Temple Ruins Rocket Scientists, Archaeologists Discover Older Remains At Angkor, Cambodia

NASA radar pierced the veil of vegetation in the jungles of Cambodia and helped reveal long-lost ruins of temples at Angkor, which in its 12th-century heyday was a city of 1 million people.

The finding establishes that there was a city 200 to 300 years earlier at the same place as the magnificent Hindu temple of Angkor Wat, one archaeologist said Thursday. She added that having two temple sites located so closely implies that the spot was sacred to the Khmer people for many centuries.

Angkor, a vast complex of temples covering 100 square miles in northern Cambodia, is virtually uninhabited today. It is most famous for Angkor Wat, a temple dating to 1150 that is surrounded by a moat and approached by a massive causeway.

In December 1996, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration DC-8 jet with specialized radar flew over and spotted a circular mound at the edge of the moat that to archaeologists could suggest human settlement.

Working with 3-D maps from NASA, Elizabeth Moore, head of the department of art and archaeology at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, then went to the mound to explore it on foot.

To her surprise, she found partially exposed remains of a 10th-century city at Angkor. The city was built 200 to 300 years before Angkor Wat, she said.

The finding “radically changed” her views of an area she had studied for decades, Moore said at a news conference at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Archaeological accounts from 1904 to 1911 noted just two temples in the area and did not mention the mound. But Moore found ruins of six temples. The undocumented temples include representations of the Hindu deities Vishnu and Indra and inscriptions.

The mound itself may date to a few hundred years B.C., she said.

Following radar hints, Moore also discovered a site about 16 miles away, now a Khmer Rouge camp, with a temple the size of a football stadium - about half the size of Angkor Wat. But it’s not clear when it was built.

Access is limited because the area is under military control.

The Khmer people who settled the region were sophisticated water managers who created reservoirs, dikes and earthworks, which also were detected by the NASA radar.

“We’ve redrawn the map of Angkor in the 10th century and shown there were sacred spots in the landscape,” Moore said.

John Stubbs, vice president for programs at the World Monuments Fund, a nonprofit organization, called the new findings and the new collaboration between the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and archaeologists “extremely promising.”

“The real story here,” he said, “is a collaboration between archaeologists and rocket scientists who actually know very little about each other’s trade working serendipitously to break new ground in archaeology.”