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Sunday, June 20, 2004

Environment - Infrastructure problems perhaps doomed 13th century Angkor

"Ecology, Infrastructure Could Have Led to Angkor's Demise: Researchers think reservoirs and canals silted up as the city's population grew, with failures causing flooding and water shortages." That is the headline to this AP story in today's LA Times. It makes a good companion piece to the story a few entries down on the pollution of Martinsville, Indiana's water supply. Some quotes:

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — After resisting Siamese invaders for years, Cambodia's greatest city and civilization — temple-studded Angkor — was dealt a death blow with its final sacking in 1431. At least, that's what the history books say.

But an international research team now thinks that its demise was set much earlier, by something that is the bane of many modern urban societies — ecological failure and infrastructure breakdown.

"They created ecological problems for themselves and they either didn't see it until it was too late or they couldn't solve it even when they could see it," said Roland Fletcher, an archeologist working on the Greater Angkor Project. * * *

Project members are working on the theory that Angkorians created an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals — for irrigation, trade and travel — that began to silt up as the population grew, and perhaps saw failures that caused flooding and water shortages.

Experts say Angkor's demise is important to study because it can provide lessons for dealing with modern urban problems.

Damian Evans, an archeologist working on the project, said Angkor's canals were the equivalent of today's freeways and our telephone lines were a form of communication that can be equated with elephant paths. "It's the same kinds of problems manifesting themselves in different ways," he said. * * *

As Angkor's population grew, so did the strains on its intricate water system, the scientists say. "The more modifications they made, the more problems they ran into, and the harder and harder it became to implement solutions to the problems," said Evans, who uses aerial photographs, NASA images and on-the-ground investigations to generate a computer map of the water system.

The growing population also forced people to venture into the nearby Kulen hills to cut down trees for fuel and clear land for growing rice. That would have resulted in rain runoff carrying sediment into the canal network, Evans said. "Anything that happened to that water-management system would have had a great deal of consequence for all of the people," he said.

There are signs of apparent breaches and fixes to the water system, although it's hard to tell if they happened during the Angkor era. "If you think of the freeway and the railway system failing in a modern city, it's like that," Fletcher said. "It's an infrastructure problem. Everything else might be working fine, but if the infrastructure goes, this thing can't function."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 20, 2004 10:55 AM
Posted to Environmental Issues