The End of Angkor

The collapse of a great medieval city suggests that

environmental miscalculations can spell doom for

even the most highly engineered urban landscapes

10 MARCH 2006 VOL 311 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org1364

NEWSFOCUS

SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA—Crouching in the

bottom of a gully, Roland Fletcher traces with

his finger the beveled edge of a pitted, grayish-

red rock. The carved laterite block with a

sloping face f its snugly in a groove in the

block below. “It’s a fancy piece of work,” says

Fletcher, an archaeologist at the University

of Sydney, Australia. Centuries ago, the

people of Angkor built immense

sandstone palaces and temples

on foundations of laterite, a

spongy, iron-laden soil that

hardens when exposed to air. In

excavations begun last year,

Fletcher’s team discovered that

the half-meter-long block is

just one piece of a dilapidated

platform extending 20 meters

underground in either direction.

The platform appears to be the

remnants of a massive spillway,

possibly used to disperse flood-

waters unleashed by monsoon

rains. “Nobody had ever seen a

structure of this kind here

before,” Fletcher says.

The spillway helps resolve

one debate, showing that the

majestic waterworks of Angkor—a Khmer

kingdom from the 9th to 15th centuries C.E.

that at its height encompassed much of

modern-day Cambodia, central Thailand, and

southern Vietnam—were designed for practi-

cal purposes as well as religious rituals. But

this singular piece of medieval engineering

may also offer clues to a more profound rid-

dle—not because the spillway exists, but

because it was destroyed.

Ever since Portuguese traders in the late

16th century described

the lotus-shaped towers

of Angkor Wat rising

from the forest canopy,

people have wondered

why the once-gilded

temple devoted to

Vishnu—humanity’s

largest religious mon-

ument—and the city

connected with it

were abandoned about

500 years ago. The list

of suspects proposed so

far includes marauding

invaders, a religious

change of heart, and geological uplift.

Now Fletcher and his colleagues have new

evidence that the very grandeur of Angkor’s

complex plumbing, the lifeblood of the city,

left it vulnerable to collapse. In a provocative

new interpretation of Angkor’s demise,

Fletcher, co-director of the Greater Angkor

Project (GAP), a 5-year survey and excavation

sponsored by the Australian Research Council,

proposes that the trigger may have been a com-

bination of rigid infrastructure, environmental

degradation, and abrupt changes in monsoons.

He and other scholars caution that the case is

not closed. “It’s hard to put a finger on any one

reason for the collapse,” says Charles Higham,

an anthropologist at the University of Otago in

Dunedin, New Zealand, whose startling finds

at earlier Thai sites are illuminating the origins

of Angkor (see p. 1366).

If the GAP team is right, Angkor—the most

extensive city of its kind in the preindustrial

world, with a population numbering in the

hundreds of thousands in its heyday—would

not be the f irst civilization unraveled by

environmental change. For example, many

archaeologists now hold that a series of

devastating droughts doomed the Maya and

their sprawling city-states on the Yucatán

Peninsula between 800 and 900 C.E.

Angkor’s downfall may be a cautionary tale

for modern societies on the knife-edge of

sustainability, such as Bangladesh. “The lesson

to learn from all of this,” says Higham, “is

don’t abuse the environment.” CR

ED

ITS

(T

OP

TO

BO

TT

OM

): M

UT

SU

MI S

TO

NE

The collapse of a great medieval city suggests that

environmental miscalculations can spell doom for

even the most highly engineered urban landscapes

Beguiling. A once-gilded

Angkor Wat tower.

The End of Angkor

Published by AAAS

Seeing the big picture

On a hazy January morning about 30 kilo-meters north of Siem Reap, the modern townnear Angkor, Donald Cooney banks his ultra-light plane hard right and heads toward a standof trees a half-kilometer away. Soaring overforested lowland crisscrossed with waterways,rice paddies, and traditional wooden houses onstilts, some of the more stupendous Angkorianfeatures are impossible to miss, including agigantic 1000-year-old earthen reservoir calledthe West Baray, 2.2 kilometers wide and 8 kilo-meters long. Dozens of immense stone templesreflect Hindu cosmogony; the temples repre-sent Mount Meru, the mythical home of Hindugods, and the moats represent encirclingoceans. Bas reliefs on sandstone facades depicteveryday scenes—two men bent over a chess-board, for instance—as well as sublime visionssuch as the apsaras, alluring female dancers inelaborate headdresses who served as messen-gers between humans and the gods. Yet muchof the kingdom remains inscrutable, like thegiant faces that stare serenely from the towersof the Bayon in Angkor Thom, the walled heartof the kingdom.

Cooney, a pilot based in Knoxville, Tennessee,takes a hand off the control bar and gesturestoward a thicket of banyan trees. “Do you see thetemple?” he asks, his voice crackling over theheadset. Even from 300 meters up, the umbertowers of a walled temple complex built byYashovarman I in the late 800s emerge from thecanopy only when the aircraft is nearly on top ofit. “It’s easy to see how so much of Angkor washidden from view for so long,” he says.

Cooney’s flights have helped the 30-personGAP team chart new Angkorian features, suchas canal earthworks that are easy to overlook onfoot. “It’s ground-truthing from the air,” saysFletcher, who co-directs the $700,000 projectwith Sydney colleagues Michael Barbetti andDaniel Penny, as well as Ros Borath—adeputy director general of the APSARAAuthority, the Cambodian agency that manages

Angkor—and Christophe Pottier of the FrenchResearch School of the Far East (EFEO).

Although archaeologists have long marveledover Angkor’s sculptures and temples, the aerialviews have been particularly revealing of theextensive waterworks that sustained them. In1994, a radar snapshot from the Space ShuttleEndeavor espied eroded segments of the GreatNorth Canal, which shunted water from thePuok River to two reservoirs. Then a few yearslater, archaeologist Elizabeth Moore of the Uni-versity of London used radar to spot undiscov-ered Bronze Age and Iron Age settlementmounds at Angkor.

Some epic legwork has also revealed thetransformation the medieval Khmers wroughton the landscape. In remote sensing andground surveys conducted on foot in the1990s, Pottier, an architect and archaeologist,mapped hundreds of hitherto unknown housemounds and shrines clustered around artificialponds, called water tanks.

For Pottier, the surveys were an epiphany.“The people of Angkor changed everything

about the landscape,” he says. “It’s very difficultto distinguish what is natural and what is not.”

That transformation was extensive, asFletcher, a specialist on the growth and decline ofsettlements, and University of Sydney graduatestudent Damian Evans learned by scrutinizingNASA radar images commissioned by GAP.They found Angkorian dwellings and water tanksscattered across roughly 1000 square kilometersand connected by a skein of roads and canals,many now barely discernible.

The surveys also revealed the outlines ofthe ingenious water-management system,centered on three great reservoirs, or barays. Alabyrinth of channels north of the barays and ofthe complexes of Angkor Thom and AngkorWat diverted water from the Puok, Roluos, andSiem Reap rivers to the reservoirs (see map onp. 1367). The system “brought large amountsof water to a halt and then bled the water offinto other channels as required,” explainsFletcher. Canals leading south and eastwardfrom the barays dispersed the water across thelandscape, for irrigation and to blunt seasonal

flooding. This allowed the growth ofa vast urban complex: a low-densitypatchwork of homes, temples, andrice paddies.

Angkor’s growth, and the king’spower, depended on sustained riceyields. “If the king runs short ofrice, he’d have to go cap in hand toother Khmer lords in the kingdom,”says Fletcher. Reliable yieldsrequired ample water at the righttimes of year. Angkor’s water system,therefore, was the wellspring ofpower for its rulers.

Surprisingly—and frustrat-ingly—the roughly 1200 inscrip-tions in Sanskrit and Khmer chiseledon Angkorian walls are mum on thewater system. “They’re full of refer-ences to boundary stones and landownership, but virtually silent onwater issues and water rights,” saysHigham. Apart from the inscrip-tions, not a single written Angkorianword has been recovered. The oldestinscribed palm leaves, a likelymedium for records, date from theearly 18th century.

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 311 10 MARCH 2006 1365

CR

ED

ITS

(T

OP

TO

BO

TT

OM

): M

UT

SU

MI S

TO

NE

; R

. S

TO

NE

/SC

IEN

CE

Waterworld. (Left) Angkor’s ponds, canals, andreservoirs sustained a vast city and its grand temples.(Above, left to right) The monuments still impress,including heavenly apsaras at Angkor Wat; a statue ofa god outside Angkor Thom; and giant faces smilingplacidly from the towers of the Bayon temple.

Practical minded. Roland Fletcher, on the bank of the West Baray,argues that Angkor’s reservoirs were for irrigation and flood control,not just rituals.

Published by AAAS

10 MARCH 2006 VOL 311 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org1366

CR

ED

ITS

: R

. S

TO

NE

/SC

IEN

CE

NEWSFOCUS

Angkor’s inscriptions also betray nothing

of the kingdom’s decline. By the 14th century,

“we really don’t know what’s going on in

Angkor,” says Fletcher. Siamese annals

recount how an army from a nearby kingdom

seized Angkor in 1431. Why the city was ulti-

mately abandoned is an enigma—although the

consequences must have been devastating.

“When a low-density city collapses,” Fletcher

says, “it takes out the entire region.”

Angkor’s past has remained mysterious in

part because Cambodia’s grim recent history

deterred research here. Civil war, the brutal

reign of the Khmer Rouge, and finally the inva-

sion of Vietnamese forces turned Angkor into a

no-go zone for nearly 20 years. Although the

heritage park with the major monuments is safe

for tourists, some terrain north of the barays

still has landmines and unexploded ordnance.

“You can’t go bushwalking here,” Fletcher says.

Fortunately, the warring sides left Angkor

largely untouched.

Then when Pottier reopened EFEO in 1992,

the emphasis was on restoring the temples.

Centuries of neglect had turned some com-

plexes into tumbled ruins, whereas others

required urgent measures to stabilize them or

restore sandstone facades. More than 20 teams

from around the world are working here, says

APSARA archaeologist So Peang. He points to

masons repairing a 12th century causeway that

bisects one of Angkor Wat’s moats. “Many

blocks have decayed. Rains wash away the

sands,” he says.

The vital repairs, not to mention efforts to

interpret the structures and inscriptions, have

conspired to keep attention riveted on the mon-

uments. “Archaeologists here have tended to

focus on what they can see,” Fletcher says.

“Imagine trying to learn about life in New York

City by only examining its churches.” As a

result, says Pottier, “Huge parts of the site

remain complete blanks.”

For that reason, one can stumble upon

hidden treasures. Walking on the bank of the

East Baray, Fletcher spots a triangular, dark-

gray object in the sandy grass. He picks up the

palm-sized stone fragment and points to some

squiggly lines. “It looks like old writing,” he

says. An EFEO expert later confirms that the

inscription is from the reign of Yashovarman I.

“So much here is just waiting to be discovered,”

Fletcher says.

Going with the flow

On the western edge of the Mebon, an artificial

island in the middle of the West Baray, a tangle

of grass and vines hides some laterite founda-

tions. Seventy years ago, during the dry season,

a villager looting the Mebon stumbled upon

part of a gigantic bronze torso jutting from the

muck near the foundations. He alerted an

EFEO curator, explaining that the Buddha told

him in a dream that he was buried in the Mebon

and couldn’t breathe. French excavations later

unearthed the 2-meter-tall head and shoulders

of a statue of Vishnu.

Beyond the baray, a swelling red sun is just

meeting the horizon. “Imagine the rays of the

setting sun glinting off Vishnu,” says Fletcher,

standing beside the remnants of the temple

wall. Pressure from the reservoir’s water column

would have forced water through the base of the

statue and out of Vishnu’s navel. Pollen grains

preserved in mud inside the temple show that

lotus plants flourished in the pond gracing

either side of a causeway leading from the

temple to the statue.

A controversy has simmered over whether

the magnificent Mebon and West Baray were

brought into being solely to inspire awe.

Some advocates of the purely ritual argument

Local Elites Cast New LightOn Angkor’s RisePHIMAI, THAILAND—In a square pit that couldswallow a two-story house, a dozen skeletonsare seeing the light of day for the first time in20 centuries. Two adults have more than a dozenseashell bangles on each arm, and a third has apair of marble bangles. In one corner, smallpainted clay pots contain infant bones. Aboveeach skull, of adults and children alike, lies asingle bivalve shell, probably representing

fertility or rebirth, says anthro-pologist Charles Higham, who is

excavating the Ban Non Wat siteoutside the city of Phimai.

At the edge of the pit,Higham points to a string

of pots jutting from thesoil below the layer ofthe skeletons. “These are

almost certainly from a ‘superburial,’ ” he says: anelite grave brimming with shell and marble jewelry and

bronze tools and ornaments. After a few more days of diggingearlier this month, his 60-strong team of academics, Thai laborers, andvolunteers from the conservation nonprofit Earthwatch Internationalcapped their field season by unearthing a clutch of ritualistic, princelyburials. These wealthy graves date from the Early Bronze Age, more than18 centuries before the civilization of Angkor rose to greatness.

Such early riches are helping to rework views of Angkor’s origins. Archae-ologists long thought that the import of Indian culture between 200 and

400 C.E., during the Iron Age, transformed scat-tered communities of benighted farmers into civi-lized societies. A smattering of Bronze Age digs inSoutheast Asia had yielded remarkably few gravegoods, creating a picture of farmers and fisherseking out hardscrabble lives. Elsewhere in Asia andin Europe, meanwhile, the advent of metalworkingin the early Bronze Age had clearly widened thegap between elites, merchants, and commoners.But Higham has uncovered a very different story.

From a patch of land half the size of anOlympic swimming pool, his team over five fieldseasons has unearthed 470 graves spanningthe Neolithic to the Iron Age, from 2200 B.C.E. to500 C.E. Most spectacular are the 3000-year-oldsuperburials. The team’s largely unpublishedfindings reveal that Southeast Asian societies werestratified into elite classes more than 1000 yearsbefore Indianization began. “By the Bronze Age,people here were sophisticated,” says Higham, ofthe University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand,

whose team includes Otago research fellow Rachanie Thosarat and NigelChang of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia.

Moreover, Higham says, the excavations show that the people of Phimai“were able to control water flow long before the development of Angkor’sreservoirs.” Those reservoirs and associated canals were vital to Angkor’spower (see main text).

Higham’s work is “pathbreaking,” says archaeologist Miriam Stark ofthe University of Hawaii, Manoa, who co-directs another dig in theregion. Ban Non Wat shows that Southeast Asia’s Bronze Age societieswere not out of step with the rest of the world. –R.S.

Rewriting history. Charles Higham’s team hasuncovered rich early graves, as shown by a pot froma Bronze Age superburial next to his left knee.

Published by AAAS

NEWSFOCUS

long claimed that no canals exited the mas-

sive reservoir—so how could it have been

used for irrigation?

In the last few years, the GAP team has

amassed new details on the vestiges of outlets,

some lined with laterite blocks, from both the

West and East Barays. To many experts, it’s now

beyond dispute that the reservoirs were used to

store water for irrigation during the dry season

and possibly to prevent flooding of houses and

fields. “I’m really impressed with what the GAP

team is doing,” says Yale University anthro-

pologist Michael Coe, an expert on the Maya

and Angkor civilizations. They “have pretty

much laid this debate to rest.”

But the question remains as to how Angkor’s

endgame played out, as scholars over the years

have engaged in a lively Angkorian version of

whodunit. Some experts hold that shifting eco-

nomic, political, or religious winds trimmed

Angkor’s sails. A “building orgy” of Jayavarman

VII, who in the late 12th century ordered the

construction of numerous temples and Angkor

Thom with its then-gilded Bayon, might have

emptied the kingdom’s coffers and thus reduced

its influence. Another possibility is the growth of

maritime trade, with centers of wealth shifting

south, closer to the sea. Or perhaps Angkor’s star

dimmed when Theravada Buddhism and its tenet

of social equality began to eclipse Hinduism in

the kingdom in the 13th and 14th centuries.

A prevailing view is that crop yields

declined precipitously. Nearly 30 years ago,

EFEO researchers Bernard-Philippe Groslier

and Jacques Dumarçay speculated that the

waterways and barays filled with silt, choking

off irrigation during the dry winter months. The

mechanism might have been deforestation, as

fields were cleared for planting to feed a boom-

ing population—making Angkor a victim of its

own success.

To test these ideas, Fletcher and others set out

to unravel the details of Angkor’s canals and

barays. They found a number of clues hinting at

problems with the grand waterworks. Engineer-

ing flaws may have doomed the East Baray, at

least. “By modern engineering standards, it was

a total failure,” says Heng Thung of the Regional

Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts in

Bangkok, a specialist in satellite data. To con-

struct the baray, workers simply piled up earthen

dikes on the sides. A canal diverted water from

the Siem Reap River to the baray, but because the

reservoir’s bed was no deeper than that canal, the

baray was perpetually shallow during the dry

season. Water would have evaporated rapidly

when the land is thirstiest.

The engineers got smarter when they built

the West Baray a century later. This reservoir was

excavated in places by as much as 1 meter, pre-

sumably deep enough to retain water throughout

the dry season. What doomed the West Baray,

Thung asserts, is something that Khmer engi-

neers or astrologers could never have foreseen:

geological uplift. He says the beds of the Siem

Reap and other rivers unmistakably deepened

during the Angkor era. This must have occurred

as the upward movement of the crust gradually

raised the flow gradient, making the meandering

rivers run faster and cut deeper. River levels

would have decreased relative to the surrounding

land, until eventually the rivers were too low dur-

ing the dry season to feed into the West Baray.

“When the water was needed, the canals couldn’t

supply the reservoir,” Thung says.

Whatever the problems with the barays,

some researchers contend that their importance

for irrigation has been vastly overstated. The

engineered system would have provided water

to grow enough rice to support between

100,000 and 200,000 people, less than half of

the presumed population. The land between the

barays and the Tonle Sap, a lake south of

Angkor, is so flat that it’s hard to imagine large

amounts of water supplying a broad expanse of

irrigated rice land, says archaeologist John

Miksic of the National University of Singapore

and an expert on early Indonesian cultures.

Most of the populace tended bunded rice paddies

that captured water during the monsoons or

grew rice in saturated soil left after monsoon

floodwaters receded.

Thung, Fletcher, and others do not dispute

that baray-fed irrigation alone would not have

sustained the populace. Rather, they suggest, the

barays provided extra capacity that could have

ensured survival rations during a poor harvest.

The irrigation system “may have been a risk-

management strategy for a bad monsoon year,”

Fletcher says—a strategy that would have failed

if the barays didn’t fill. Another practical pur-

pose of the barays might have been flood control

by diverting waters from swollen rivers: “Insur-

ance policies maybe, in case the monsoons were

heavy,” Fletcher says. He proposes that the great

embankments and canals are central features of

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 311 10 MARCH 2006 1367

CR

ED

ITS

(T

OP

TO

BO

TT

OM

): L

. C

RE

VE

LIN

G/S

CIE

NC

E; M

UT

SU

MI S

TO

NE

Heart of the kingdom. Canals

diverted rivers in the north to the

West Baray, shown here, and other

giant reservoirs.

Published by AAAS

10 MARCH 2006 VOL 311 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org1368

CR

ED

ITS

: R

. S

TO

NE

/SC

IEN

CE

NEWSFOCUS

an artificial wetland aimed at reduc-

ing the risk of flood damage.

Remarkably, the GAP team is

the first to attempt a comprehensive

assessment of Angkor’s climate and

waterworks. Penny, an expert on

past climates, is analyzing pollen

grains to uncover shifts in vegeta-

tion cover. From this he hopes to

reconstruct changes in land use

during Angkor’s waning centuries.

So far, he says, results indicate that

Angkor’s demise was “patchy, both

over time and space,” undercutting

traditional explanations for the

city’s last days. Other scientists are

focused on the canals and barays—

and tackling the perplexing riddle of

the spillway.

Dowsing for the truth

The spillway might never have

come to light if Khmer Rouge

laborers hadn’t dug an irrigation

trench through it. Around the end of

the 9th century C.E., with Angkor

blossoming, engineers excavated a

long canal that altered the course of

the Siem Reap River, diverting it

southward to the East Baray. The

spillway extends westward from the

northern end of the canal and would

have functioned, Fletcher infers, to

protect that canal from excess

flooding, comparable to a bathtub’s

overflow slot.

The conundrum is that the spill-

way’s meticulous construction is

badly damaged. The Khmer Rouge

trench has largely eroded away; the

Angkorian workmanship was far

superior. Nevertheless, most of the

spillway’s laterite blocks lie in a

jumble under sandy soil. “It was

torn apart,” says Fletcher. It’s possible, he says,

that an engineering flaw caused the spillway to

give way. But Angkorian structures were built to

last, which propels Fletcher toward a different

conclusion. “It seems they ripped the spillway

out themselves,” he says. “Perhaps something

had gone wrong.”

Fletcher tends to see the hand of necessity,

not neglect. He hypothesizes that the structure

was damaged by flooding, then dismantled for

its materials, after which Angkor workers buried

the ruins to prevent the diversion canal from

breaking out of its channel and flowing west.

The story of the spillway and other clues

from the GAP team’s work indicate that over the

centuries, Angkor’s vaunted water system grew

ever more complex to support the sprawling city.

“We know that something was going wrong,

mechanically, with their water system,” Fletcher

says. For instance, one of the great southern

canals was filled with cross-bedded sand, indi-

cating considerable and rapid water flow as well

as sedimentation. “The sand buried the canals,”

he says. The water infrastructure “became so

inflexible, convoluted, and huge that it could

neither be replaced nor avoided, and had become

both too elaborate and too piecemeal.”

The more complicated and delicately bal-

anced the system grew, the harder it would have

been to compensate for unusual events, such as

extreme flooding or drought. “They engineered

a completely artificial environment, and it was a

fragile environment,” Pottier says.

Add climate change to this volatile mix, and

you have a recipe for disaster. The GAP team is

probing whether monsoons became “really

erratic” during the Little Ice Age, between

1300 and 1600 C.E. There’s good evidence that

cooling in the Northern Hemisphere not only

weakened monsoons in mainland Southeast

Asia during this period but also

triggered sharp declines in crop

yields in Europe. William Boyd, a

geologist at Southern Cross Uni-

versity in Lismore, Australia, who’s

collaborating with Higham, finds

GAP’s scenario reasonable; he

suspects that the Angkor region

would have become drier.

The idea is “really intriguing,”

says archaeologist Miriam Stark of

the University of Hawaii, Manoa,

who has studied the pre-Angkor

Funan kingdom of Cambodia’s

Mekong delta. But archaeologists

say more climate data are needed.

“A definitive answer,” says Miksic,

“would require a study of the ecol-

ogy of the Tonle Sap Basin over the

past 2000 years.”

Fletcher concurs, and he and

Penny hope to receive permission

from Cambodian authorities to go

caving in search of evidence. Stalag-

mites add new layers every year; the

isotopic chemistry of the layers cap-

tures a record of climatic conditions

during accrual. (Stark and Paul

Bishop of the University of Glasgow

hope to gather similar data from

caves in the Mekong delta region in

the coming year.) Deciphering the

isotope record in suitably old stalag-

mites should yield insights into past

climate. Other evidence could be

gleaned from changes in vegetation

or lake water levels, and Chinese

trade records, says Boyd.

As Angkor was rising, halfway

around the world a similar loss of

equilibrium brought the Maya to

their knees. Overpopulation and

environmental degradation had

weakened their Mesoamerican

cities. Beset by droughts and a “paroxysm of

warfare,” the civilization crumbled, Coe says.

“The demise of Angkor is directly comparable to

the great Maya collapse,” he says. And it could

happen again. “When populations in tropical

countries exceed the carrying capacity of the

land, real trouble begins,” Coe says.

Fletcher says there are lessons for developed

nations as well. He compares Angkor’s plumbing

woes to modern cities having to cope at great

cost with extensive, decaying sewers or cumber-

some road systems.

On their quest to understand the end of

Angkor, the GAP team will continue to excavate

and analyze deposits from its water features and

reconstruct its environmental history. Angkor,

says Thung, “is a never-ending story.” Or, rather,

it’s an ending often rewritten, and with a lesson

for society that gets gloomier each time.

–RICHARD STONE

Mapping in style. Donald Cooney’s bird’s-eye views of Angkor and itstemples (top) have helped researchers detect subtle features, such aseroded canal earthworks.

Published by AAAS