Lidar Reveals a New City Hidden in the Cambodian Jungle

The iconic Angkor Wat temple rises from the jungle in modern-day Cambodia. (Credit: Bule Sky Studio/Shutterstock)


By Nathaniel Scharping

A wide-ranging aerial study of archeological sites in Cambodia reveals a Khmer empire that was larger and more sophisticated than previously thought.

By attaching a Lidar scanning system to helicopter skids, Damian Evans, the leader of the Cambodian Archaeological Lidar Initiative (CALI), peered beneath 734 square miles of dense rainforest canopy to map the topography of the ground beneath. He found dozens of new sites that were previously invisible to archaeologists, and significant evidence of large-scale human endeavors to shape the land. Evans discovered a network of roads between settlements, quarries and diverted rivers, in addition to swathes of ancient settlements that had previously eluded archaeologists. His work significantly expands the scale and emphasizes the interconnectedness of the ancient empire, which was the largest in the world at its height in the 12th century.

Cities Reclaimed by Jungle

While the city of Angkor and its intricate temples have been subjected to intense archaeological scrutiny, much of the surrounding territory is covered by dense jungle that’s not easy to navigate. Scattered temples and settlements have emerged over the course of decades of exploration, but the true scale of the site remains unknown. Part of the problem is that many of the buildings and structures were constructed with wood, which degrades quickly and leaves little in the way of evidence for researchers to unearth. However, even though the materials are gone, traces of human stewardship remain. Canals, roads and buildings leave their mark in the form of faint, but obviously artificial, outlines. Lidar is ideal for mapping these patterns, firing short bursts of visible and near-visible light that penetrate the rainforest canopy, revealing the structures beneath.

Mysterious mounds arranged in a regular grid discovered during the survey. (Credit: CALI)

Only Visible from Above

Evans’ findings include an entire city that he had searched for over the course of the last decade, and which only appeared clearly when seen from the air. Located near the temple of Preah Kan, some 60 miles from the largest Khmer city, Angkor, the city is unrecognizable when seen from the ground, covered by centuries of jungle growth. Another city, which had been partially mapped in 2012, revealed its true size in the Lidar scans. That city, Mahendraparvata, dates to early in the Khmer empire, around the ninth century, and was shown to cover 15 to 20 square miles, most of which is consumed entirely by the jungle. His work was published Monday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The Preah Kan temple, as seen with Lidar from above. (Credit: CALI)

Also of interest to Evans and other researchers are mysterious groups of mounds that show up clearly in scans from the air. Such mounds, as well as collections of other earthen structures, had been previously discovered in other locations, and are arranged in regular grids near water sources. Some appear to be spirals, while others are lines or domes. Seen from the ground, these mounds don’t appear to be much at all, and excavations have turned up little of interest. Viewed from the air however, the fact that they were meaningful is easy to see, both because of their scale and ubiquity. Their purpose is still unknown.

Evans’ work also calls into question a popular theory regarding the decline of the Khmer empire around the 15th century following an invasion by Thai armies. Archaeologists believed that the Khmer people began a gradual exodus to more southern cities as they were pushed out of their lands further north. His study, however, shows that there were no major cities in the south, meaning that the retreating citizens had nowhere to go to. Where they went remains a mystery.

Biblical texts might have been written earlier than thought, study finds

Letters inscribed on pottery, known as ostracons, which were unearthed in an excavation of a fort in Arad, Israel, and dated to about 600 B.C., shortly before Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem, are seen in Israel Museum in Jerusalem on April 12, 2016.

 (Dan Balilty, AP)

Israeli mathematicians and archaeologists say they have found evidence to suggest that key biblical texts may have been composed earlier than what some scholars think.

Using handwriting analysis technology similar to that employed by intelligence agencies and banks to analyze signatures, a Tel Aviv University team determined that a famous hoard of ancient Hebrew inscriptions, dated to around 600 BC, were written by at least six different authors. Although the inscriptions are not from the Hebrew Bible, their discovery suggests there was widespread literacy in ancient Judah at the time that would support the composition of biblical works.

The findings, released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an American scientific journal, contribute to a longstanding debate about when biblical texts first began to be compiled: did it take place before or after the Babylonian siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC and the exile of its inhabitants to Babylon?

In recent years, many scholars have attributed the composition of a group of biblical texts, from the Book of Joshua to the second Book of Kings, to the period after the siege, according to Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, who participated in the study. That theory holds that the biblical texts were written as a result of the exile to Babylon, when the composers began to think about their past and put their history to parchment.

Letters inscribed on pottery, known as ostracons, which were unearthed in an excavation of a fort in Arad, Israel, and dated to about 600 B.C., shortly before Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem, are seen in Israel Museum in Jerusalem on April 12, 2016.

 (Dan Balilty, AP)

Finkelstein, however, said he has long believed those texts were written in the late 7th century BC in Jerusalem, before the siege. He said the study offers support for that theory.

"It's the first time we have something empirical in our hands," said Finkelstein.

The team — made up of doctoral students in applied mathematics, math professors, archaeologists and a physicist — examined 16 ink inscriptions on ceramic shards discovered at the site of an ancient military fortress in Arad in southern Israel. It used multispectral imaging to reconstruct Hebrew letters that had been partially erased over time, and then used a computer algorithm to analyze the writings to detect differences in handwriting strokes.

Doctoral student Arie Shaus, who helped develop the algorithm, said it was the first time such technology has been used to reconstruct and perform handwriting analysis on ancient Hebrew inscriptions.

The inscriptions themselves are not biblical texts. Instead, they detail troop movements and expenses for provisions, indicating that people throughout the military chain of command down to the fort's deputy quartermaster were able to write. The tone of the inscriptions, which suggest they were not written by professional scribes, combined with the fortress' remote location, indicate a wide spread of literacy at the time, according to the study.

A high level of literacy would support the idea that some biblical texts had already been authored by this time. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known collection of certain biblical texts, are believed to date several centuries later.

Shmuel Ahituv, an Israeli bible scholar who did not participate in the study, also believes literacy in ancient Judah was widespread before 586 BC and that the biblical texts in question were written before the siege of Jerusalem. He said he believes this is apparent through a literary analysis of the biblical texts alone.

"I don't need algorithms," Ahituv chuckled.

Associated Press

Mummies Rewrite the Story of Ancient Egypt's Roots

Mummification in ancient Egypt was at its height when Ramses II (above) reigned during the second millennium B.C., but the practice was established 3,000 years earlier.

Patrick Landmann/Photo Researchers/Science Source

The earliest mummies reveal how culture and climate created the world’s first state

By Gemma Tarlach

Pyramids and pharaohs: iconic images of ancient Egypt, but what came before the massive tombs and elaborate burials? New analysis of old evidence is shaking up conventional thinking about how early, how quickly and even why prehistoric nomadic societies coalesced into the world’s first formal state.

A key to understanding the surprising new chronology of ancient Egypt’s foundation can be found in tiny, “toffee-like” shards of material, some of which are more than 6,000 years old.

In 2014, researchers rewrote the timeline for mummification — moving its start back in time by millennia — when University of York archaeological chemist Stephen Buckley analyzed several fragments of funerary textiles and reed matting dating from 4500 to 3350 B.C. The fragments spanned two key periods in prehistoric Egypt: the Late Neolithic, or Badarian period, and the Predynastic, or Naqada period. The material, excavated in Egypt in the early 20th century, was residing in the Bolton Museum in northwestern England. The fragments were significant because the location, and the archaeological context in which they were found, had been accurately recorded — a rare find for material this old. Using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), Buckley hoped to succeed where two previous attempts by chemists had failed: to extract and identify the components of a dark golden-brown substance that had been applied to the funerary fabrics in preparation for burial.

Neolithic-era funerary textiles impregnated with resin look like toffee to the naked eye.

Ron Oldfield and Jana Jones/University of York

“GC-MS is great for separating out a complex mixture into individual compounds and then giving you a fingerprint of each separated compound,” Buckley says, acknowledging his work was still difficult due to contamination by 20th century materials applied during conservation work.

The structure of the funerary textiles is revealed under 150x magnification.

Ron Oldfield

What Buckley’s analysis revealed surprised even him. The components of the toffee-like material, and their relative proportions, were nearly the same as the recipe of a mixture applied to textiles during mummification at the height of the practice in Egypt, around 1500 to 1000 B.C.

In addition, certain ingredients, such as resin from coniferous plants, showed evidence of being heated and processed before application, confirming that collecting, making and applying the concoction were intentional acts, not merely an accident of nature or guesswork.

“They had an understanding of empirical science. They were conducting experiments and making observations,” says Buckley.

The study Buckley and colleagues published in the journal PLOS One showed that mummification was established much earlier in Egypt than we knew — as early as 4300 B.C., during the Badarian period, rather than about 2500 B.C., after the foundation of the Egyptian state, as previously thought.

The findings also complement a new and more precise chronology for ancient Egypt, published in 2013 by another group of researchers. That chronology revised the time of the shift between two prehistoric periods — a crucial transition between earlier nomadic herding societies of the Badarian and the later Naqada society, settled and practicing intensive agriculture in the Nile Valley, that would give rise to the Egyptian state.

Researcher Stephen Buckley has found Egyptian mummification methods were consistent for millennia.

Joann Fletcher

Establishing a New Timeline

When estimating the course of events in prehistoric Egypt, archaeologists traditionally had worked with a relative chronology based on the evolution of pottery styles. That conventional approach had established that the nomadic societies of the Badarian period transitioned to the agriculture-based settlements of the Naqada period about 4000 B.C.

In 2013, however, a multidisciplinary team took a new look at — and applied a new method to — existing archaeological evidence. Researchers combined radiocarbon dating with statistical modeling to create an absolute chronology that was less subjective than previous timelines. They pinpointed the start of the Naqada period to approximately 3800 to 3700 B.C.

When looking back over millennia, a couple of centuries might seem like a modest change. But the absolute chronology’s new start date of the Naqada period, 3800 to 3700 B.C., is important because it establishes that the period between nomadic herders transitioning to permanently settled farmers and then into a unified political state was much faster than we thought.

Archaeologists working with the traditional relative chronology had placed the foundation of ancient Egypt as late as 2900 B.C. The new absolute chronology puts the unification of the region into a state, under one ruler, at 3100 to 3050 B.C. Transitioning from nomadic herders to an organized political state built on permanent agricultural settlements in a mere six or seven centuries is lightning fast in the world of ancient state formation. By contrast, the period between the establishment of permanent settlements and intensive agriculture in Mesopotamia and the rise of the ancient Sumer civilization as a unified political entity was nearly two millennia.
Again, Buckley’s chemical analysis of those toffee-like bits provides a clue as to how prehistoric Egyptian society coalesced so quickly.

The analysis proved that the practice of mummification was already established as early as the fifth millennium B.C. and that the core recipe already had been worked out and would remain nearly unchanged throughout the course of the civilization. That implies that the scattered, nomadic herders of the early Badarian period were not so disorganized, or so primitive, as archaeologists had commonly believed.

In 2006, researchers used radiocarbon-dated material from 150 archaeological sites in the eastern Sahara to map a change in settlement patterns that coincided with increased desertification of the region. From 7000 to 5300 B.C. (left), human settlements, indicated above by red dots, were established throughout the area. From 5300 to 3500 B.C., as the desert encroached, settlements clustered in the fertile Nile Valley.

Jay Smith

“They were incredibly complex,” says Michael Dee of the University of Oxford, a co-author of the first absolute chronology. He also co-authored a 2014 paper in Antiquity that found people of Neolithic Egypt and northern Sudan already shared well-established, consistent beliefs and practices about decorating the body in life and in death. That shared belief system made sudden cohesion into a formal state possible.

“It’s not surprising that they could bind together so quickly,” says Dee. “You could see in the culture they already shared the start of what would become a culture around the king, entombing him in grand pyramids.”
Buckley agrees, noting that the ingredients he identified in the mummification materials — including some sourced from as far away as modern-day Turkey — indicated a sophisticated culture with established rituals and symbolic values attached to materials used in preparing the dead for burial.

The Role of Climate in a Rising Culture

But why did nomadic herders, ranging for millennia across much of what is now Egypt and northern Sudan, choose suddenly to settle and begin intensive agriculture in the relatively restricted area of the Nile Valley?
Some archaeologists believe that climate change was the catalyst.

In 2006, researchers pointed to data from 150 sites across the eastern Sahara that showed the region underwent significant desertification over several centuries, beginning about 5300 B.C. Conditions became so arid that even once-inhabited oases and highland refuges were abandoned by 3500 B.C. — just as previously nomadic populations were settling into Nile Valley farming communities, driven to the fertile floodplain by the encroaching desert.

“There was a drying up of the Sahara, and people headed to the Nile Valley, that’s true,” says Dee. “But there’s more nuance. The people settling the Nile Valley already shared long-term cultural identities that tied them more closely together than anything to do with climate change.”

The overall pace of desertification quickened about 3800 to 3700 B.C., the date of the onset of the agricultural, Nile Valley-based Naqada period, according to the absolute chronology. In an intriguing way, Buckley’s chemical analysis of funerary textiles also supports the idea that it was climate change that forced the nomadic herders into farming the Nile Valley instead.

In his analysis, Buckley identified unusual fatty acids that appeared to have come from marine sponges in the material from earlier Badarian-era specimens. The compounds were in only one of the Naqada samples, however, and even then were found in a much lower amount (2 percent compared with more than 20 percent in the Badarian samples).

Buckley believes the marine-based fats in the mummification of Badarian-era bodies represented the connection the nomadic herders had to the sea, scores of miles from the Nile Valley. As desertification funneled them into the valley itself, and into intensive agriculture, they lost that connection. Land animal fats, such as those from sheep, replaced the ingredient once derived from marine sponges — and would, millennia later, provide tangible evidence explaining ancient Egypt’s mysterious origins.

https://tinyurl.com/4e7n4jwb