A metropolis arose in medieval Cambodia
How big were the world’s ancient cities? In the medieval period, London may have had a population of about a quarter of a million people, growing to approximately 600,000 by the early 17th century. One of the world’s largest ancient cities lay in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the greater Angkor region located in contemporary Cambodia. This medieval site was home to the Angkor or Khmer Empire from the ninth to 15th centuries. You might be familiar with the famous Angkorian temple, Angkor Wat, one of the largest religious monuments in the world.
Our research suggests that this settlement may have been home to between 700,000 and 900,000 people at its height in the 13th century. This means that the population of Angkor was roughly comparable to the almost 1 million people who lived in ancient Rome at its height.
Our knowledge of the region entered a new era in 2012, when researchers from the Khmer Archaeological Lidar Consortium organized a mission of airborne-laser scanning across this World Heritage site. Called lidar, this technology was able to do in a few days of scanning and data-processing what had previously taken archaeologists months if not years of work: see through dense vegetation to accurately map the ground surface of Angkor.
With this lidar data, researchers were able to map tens of thousands of archaeological features at Angkor. Because Angkorian people, like many Cambodians today, built their houses out of organic materials and on wooden posts, these structures are long gone and not visible on the landscape. But lidar revealed a complex urban landscape complete with city blocks consisting of the mounds where people built their houses and small ponds located next to them.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/metropolis-arose-medieval-cambodia-research-180201564.html
