Angkor: The Living City

Roland Fletcher, Department of Archaeology, University of Sydney

Abstract:  The Greater Angkor Project studies the extent, duration and demise of Angkor in order to study how it ceased to function; to produce a new chronology of the demise of Angkor and to identify its environmental context. What has been revealed by remote sensing, ground survey and excavation is a vast low-density, dispersed urban complex covering about 1,000 sq km. Angkor's famous temples cluster in the central 200 sq km. of the complex. So far the project has mapped the extent of the water management system, has located key water management structures and has identified the dispersed pattern of occupation along canals and roads and on house-mounds. The demise of the urban complex now has to be reappraised because it was apparently functioning into the 16th century, later than the generally assumed sack in the early 15th century CE. There is also evidence of damage to the canals of the water management system by alterations in water flow, including substantial deposition of sand in the channels, suggesting that environmental factors need to be considered as part of the demise of Angkor.

Brief Biography:  Associate Professor Roland Fletcher completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge University in the 1970s and in 1976 joined the University of Sydney, where he is on the staff of the Department of Archaeology. He was recently became Professor of Theoretical and World Archaeology at the University. In 1995 he published a worldwide analysis of settlement growth and decline over the past 15,000 years in The Limits of Settlement Growth: A Theoretical Outline with Cambridge University Press.

Since 1998 he has worked at Angkor, studying the form and the extent of the urban complex, its water management network and its demise. He is the instigator and a director of the Greater Angkor Project that studies the limits of settlement growth at Angkor; and the Living with Heritage Project that is creating an information management system for Angkor. The Angkor program involves collaboration with APSARA, the Cambodian agency that manages Angkor, with UNESCO and with internationally renowned research agencies such as the EFEO, the Finnish Environmental Institute and NASA/JPL. The Australian Research Council and UNESCO have provided over $2 million for five years to fund both the research of the Greater Angkor Project and Living with Heritage.

Professor Fletcher was an Australian UNESCO delegate at the Second Inter-governmental Conference on Angkor in Paris in 2003. He has given lectures for the Council of Ministers of the Royal Cambodian government; for the Royal Cambodian embassy in Washington DC; and the Australian embassies in New Delhi and Phnom Penh. In 2002 the Greater Angkor Project was the topic of a National Geographic International documentary, entitled Lost City.