The Demise of Angkor: infratructural inertia and climatic instability

Summary

The demise of Angkor and its city-region offers insights into the vulnerability of giant low-density cities to climate extremes. At Angkor, the iterative growth of massive, convoluted and intractable infrastructural networks progressively decreased the resilience of the settlement to changing circumstances by restricting or removing adaptive strategies. The nature and consequences of the water crises in Angkor between the 13th and the 16th centuries has been revealed by a combination of remote sensing, paleo-botany, dendrochronology and excavation. Excavation and the new LiDAR remote sensing images have mapped and excavated the massive water management infrastructure of Greater Angkor, revealing the efforts to stabilise a network suffering from water shortages and erosion, damage to the southern canals of the network and the reduction of the urban area. Paleo-climate indicia have shown that from the 13th to the 16th century SE Asia was experiencing drastic variability in summer monsoon strength, from mega-wet to severe drought in the 13th, 14th and early 15th centuries. The infrastructural breakdown that ‘switched off’ Angkor as a viable low-density city was a result of interaction between the rigidity of the urban fabric and extreme climatic variability.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Difference in Archaeological Theory and Practise

Keywords

Spatial Coverage