Archaeologists have found the lost city of Mahendraparvata, Cambodia-an ancient municipality buried underground-using laser-scanning technology.
Experts in the area have been aware of the Hindu-Buddhist city-located 25 miles north of Angkor Wat-for years, but never did they imagine its broad area until this past weekend.
"We're talking about a city that is more than 1,000 years old and is all underground," Stephane De Greefe, the project's lead cartographer, told Cambodia Daily.
To find the lost city of Mahendraparvata, archaeologists used a technique known as lidar, an acronym for "light detection and ranging." Helicopters flew over the area suspected to be the lost city, shooting pulses of laser beams onto the ground below. Archaeologists then examined the findings reaped from the light readings, which revealed a 3-D map of the city hidden beneath the ground, NBC reported.
Around 5,000 digital photos revealed a lost domain of about 143 square miles.
University of Sydney archaeologist Damian Evans has been looking for Mahendraparvata for years. He finally reached what he called a "eureka moment" when he first saw the map, outlining dozens of ancient temples, mounds that could be lost burial sites and faint lines of canals and roads.
Archaeologists grabbed their gear and assembled at the site for an excursion into the enigmatic location. There, they found two more temples that looked as though they were relatively undamaged, along with a cave dotted by archaic drawings that hermits may have scrawled during the Angkor period, from the ninth century to around the fifteenth century.
Experts in Cambodia are still unsure how exactly Mahendraparvata disappeared into infamy, but have a few theories.
"We see from the imagery that the landscape was completely devoid of vegetation," at some point, Evans told Fairfax Media. "One theory we are looking at is that the severe environmental impact of deforestation and the dependence on water management led to the demise of the civiliations...Perhaps it became too successful to the point of becoming unmanageable."
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested to NBC that Mahendraparvata, along with Angkor Wat, were pieces of a much more expansive metropolitan area.
"We identify an entire, previously undocumented, formally planned urban landscape into which the major temples such as Angkor Wat were integrated," the researchers told the press in a release. "Beyond these newly identified urban landscapes, the lidar data reveal anthropogenic changes to the landscape on a vast scale."
Those changes on land could have been climate change and unsustainable use of natural resources; archaeologists figure those factors might have contributed to the downfall of the Khmer civilization.
Upon completion of research and on-the-ground exploration, the project will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
