Academic Reading — Test 160

Reading passage

For roughly six centuries, the vast urban complex of Angkor served as the political and religious heart of the Khmer Empire in what is now Cambodia. At its height, the city sustained a population that some scholars estimate ran into the hundreds of thousands, supported by an intricate network of reservoirs, canals and embankments that captured and redistributed the seasonal monsoon rains. After the fifteenth century, however, the centre of Khmer power shifted southwards, and the great stone temples were gradually swallowed by the encroaching forest. Although Angkor was never entirely forgotten by the local population, who continued to worship at some of its shrines, knowledge of the wider city and its scale faded from memory beyond the region. European awareness of the monuments grew slowly during the nineteenth century. The French naturalist Henri Mouhot, who travelled through the area around 1860, is often credited in popular accounts with having "discovered" Angkor Wat. This claim is misleading. Mouhot himself recorded that the temples were well known to Cambodians and to a handful of earlier missionaries, and he never asserted that he was the first outsider to see them. What his vivid journals did achieve was to bring the ruins to the attention of a far wider European readership, and his enthusiastic descriptions helped to stimulate the scholarly and colonial interest that followed. The romantic notion of a single heroic discoverer, though enduring, does not withstand scrutiny. Serious archaeological work began in earnest once the French established a colonial presence in the region. In 1907 a body known as the Angkor Conservation was founded to clear vegetation, document the structures and arrest their decay. Early efforts concentrated heavily on the most celebrated temples, and for many decades the discipline was preoccupied with art history, inscriptions and architecture rather than with the everyday life of the city's inhabitants. Restoration techniques borrowed from elsewhere in Asia were applied, sometimes with mixed results, and the surrounding landscape was largely treated as an empty backdrop to the monuments rather than as part of the settlement itself. A fundamental shift in understanding came only towards the end of the twentieth century, as researchers began to ask how so large a population could have been fed and housed. The answer, it emerged, lay not in the temples but in the land between them. Painstaking mapping revealed the faint traces of house mounds, field boundaries, roads and minor shrines spread across a region far larger than the walled temple precincts. Angkor, it became clear, had not been a compact city in the modern sense but a sprawling, low-density settlement in which dwellings, gardens and rice fields were interwoven on a scale without parallel in the pre-industrial world. The decisive breakthrough was technological. In 2012 an international team flew aircraft equipped with airborne laser scanning, commonly known as lidar, over the Angkor region. The instrument fires rapid pulses of laser light at the ground and measures the time each pulse takes to return, building a precise three-dimensional model of the surface. Crucially, because some pulses slip through gaps in the forest canopy, the technique can map the bare earth beneath dense vegetation that would defeat ordinary aerial photography. The resulting images exposed a dense lattice of streets, embankments, ponds and occupation mounds, much of it invisible from the ground and unsuspected even by experienced fieldworkers who had walked the same terrain for years. These surveys have transformed scholarly estimates of Angkor's extent, and have also reopened the long debate about why the city declined. The water-management system that had been the foundation of Angkor's prosperity may, paradoxically, have contributed to its undoing. Evidence suggests that the network became increasingly difficult to maintain, and that a sequence of unusually severe droughts interspersed with violent monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries placed it under intolerable strain. Rather than a sudden collapse, most specialists now favour a picture of gradual decline driven by a combination of environmental, economic and political pressures. What is certain is that the lost city was never truly lost at all; it was merely hidden, awaiting instruments capable of reading the forest floor.