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Angkor under ?serious? threat from development |
Uncontrolled development around Cambodia’s Angkor temples
poses a serious threat to one of the region’s great wonders,
said the archaeologists who this week revealed the full extent of
the site.
Angkor was a “vast and populous network ... stretching far
beyond the well known temples of the central archaeological
park,” said the Greater Angkor Project (GAP) at the
University of Sydney on its website. “Delicate traces of that
network ... remain on the surface even today and are of great
archaeological significance, but are under serious threat from
uncontrolled development in the Siem Reap area,” the group
warned.
The group published a paper saying that during its height of power
between the ninth and 14th centuries, Angkor — covering about
1,000 square-kilometres (400 square-miles) — was ‘the
most extensive city of its kind in the pre-industrial world.’
Angkor was at least three times larger than archaeologists had
previously suspected, eclipsing comparable developments such as
Tikal, a Classic Maya ‘city’ on the Yucatan peninsula
in Mexico.
Using digital mapping to detail some 3,000 square-kilometres around
the temples, the group found evidence of an urban centre supported
by a complex series of canals and waterways that became too vast to
manage.
Deforestation and erosion caused as the city extended its rice
fields to feed its bloated population led to a collapse in
infrastructure, and Angkor was eventually abandoned. The temples
today remain Cambodia’s largest tourist draw, attracting
almost one million visitors last year and bringing more than a
billion dollars to the impoverished country.
But along with the tourists has come a massive building boom in and
around the Siem Reap town — the gateway to the temple
complex.
Most seriously, huge hotels, along with dozens of smaller
guesthouses have begun to suck the area’s water supply dry
and have raised fears that the temples could collapse as the earth
beneath them is destabilised.
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