At Its Peak, The Ancient Khmer City Of Angkor Dwarfed The Great Cities Of Europe

[Judi Lynn]

By Stephen Luntz
05 MAY 2021, 19:00

The city of Angkor in what is now Cambodia has long been known as one of the world's great former cities. However, just how large it was at its peak has remained debated, with most of the city reclaimed by the jungle and its extent unclear. A new study indicates that at its height in the 13th century, Angkor housed 10 times as many people as London at the same time, far exceeding any contemporary European city.

The Khmer Empire (802 CE to 1431 CE), ruled from Angkor, covered modern-day Cambodia, Laos, and much of Thailand and Vietnam. European visitors to southeast Asia were astonished by the scale of Angkor Wat, the immense temple at the city's heart, thought to be the largest religious structure by land area in the world. They used various methods to attempt to estimate how many people once lived around it. Their techniques were unreliable, however, and came up with wildly diverging figures. The process has continued since, interrupted by the challenges of visiting the area during the Khmer Rouge (1951 –1999) horrors and the civil war that followed.

Dr Sarah Klassen of the University of British Columbia has taken up the task, using modern technology such as helicopter-mounted lidar to expand our knowledge of the city's changing extent, along with traditional archaeological excavation data, to present the first model of demographic growth in Angkor.

“Estimating Angkor’s population has been an enduring challenge, as conventional methods for estimating population size and density in urban areas are not easily applied at Angkor, where nonreligious architecture was composed almost entirely of organic materials that decayed centuries ago, leaving no structural remains,” Klassen and co-authors write in Science Advances.

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/at-its-peak-the-ancient-khmer-city-of-angkor-dwarfed-the-great-cities-of-europe/