Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [330]
Yet, by the 19th century there remained only about eight small villages dispersed over the central area formerly covered by this vast city. Cambodia today has become Southeast Asia’s poorest country. I know of no modern nation so nostalgically identified with the vanished glory of its archaeological past as is Cambodia, whose national flag displays an image of Angkor. The devolution of a sprawling metropolis into a largely empty landscape with scattered villages surely deserves to be termed a collapse. How did an environment initially supporting poor farmers spawn such a huge city and empire, and then fade again?
When I published my book Collapse in 2005, I devoted only four sentences to Angkor because too little information was available then to tell a coherent story of the city’s collapse. Now, thanks to a flood of recent information from aerial radar surveys, ground surveys, excavations, and tree-ring measurements, we understand better what happened, even though many questions remain unanswered. It turns out that Angkor was not a unique phenomenon, as it at first seems. It was “just” the largest example of a type of city that no longer exists today but that formerly occurred more widely in seasonally wet tropical environments. That now unfamiliar type consisted of a low-density city, much more spread out than even my notoriously diffuse home city of Los Angeles: a city with farmland and farmhouses in close proximity to palaces and temples, with people living at lower population densities than in our familiar modern cities that are all city and no farmland, but living at higher densities than in densely populated purely rural modern landscapes. Other examples of such low-density cities besides Angkor used to exist in Sri Lanka, Java, Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar. They existed especially in the Maya homeland of Mexico and Honduras, which supported Tikal, Copán, and the other great Maya cities that are the most familiar examples of this now vanished urban model. But even Tikal, the largest well-surveyed Maya city, was only about one-fifth of Angkor in extent. All of these low-density cities collapsed before they could be visited and described by Europeans. Could understanding of Angkor’s decline also illuminate the Classic Lowland Maya collapses that I described in Chapter 5?
In the back of my mind as I visited Angkor was another question about its broader relevance. Sadly, Cambodia today is famous not only for its glorious ancient past, but also for its horrible recent past. From 1975 to 1979, under the paranoid dictatorship of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, Cambodia was the site of the largest genocide since World War II, when Cambodians killed over a million of their fellow Cambodians, somewhere between one-seventh and one-third of their country’s entire population. While some victims were “merely” starved to death, others were tortured to death, or killed by their own parents. My Cambodian guides at Angkor in 2008 included one man who had lived through the horrors of Pol Pot and reluctantly answered our questions about what it was like then. Any people with any hint of usefulness for anything other than being a farm laborer—people wearing eyeglasses, people able to speak a second language besides Khmer, people with education—were killed. In a radical remaking of Cambodian society that dwarfed even the re-makings of North Korea and Albania and sought to turn back the clock a thousand years to the days of Angkor, cities were evacuated; money, religion, markets, private property, and businesses were abolished; hospitals, schools, and stores were closed; no books or newspapers could