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by jungle, but the huge temples and reservoirs and major canals were visible. Over the following century, as French archaeologists cleared and mapped the area and reconstructed ruined structures, a debate arose over the reservoirs’ function. In the 1980s British and American scholars began to favor the view that they were ornamental and used just for rituals, while French scholars (especially after the work of Bernard-Philippe Groslier) viewed Angkor as a “hydraulic city” dependent on the reservoirs for irrigating rice fields. A strong objection to Groslier’s view was that the reservoirs appeared to lack inlets and outlets, and that lack would have made them useless for distributing water to fields.

The resolution of this debate had to await the end of the Cambodian civil war and Pol Pot era, the application of new mapping techniques, and the launch in 2002 of a joint project between Australian, French, and Cambodian archaeologists. The research teams involved are from the University of Sydney and the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (teams headed by Roland Fletcher and Christophe Pottier respectively), in collaboration with the Cambodian authority that manages Angkor. A key advance involved the use of aerial radar imaging, which can penetrate clouds and detect variations in surface roughness and vegetation and moistness, and thereby recognize features invisible to observers on the ground. Those radar images can then be followed up by ground searches for remains of bricks, ceramics, and other direct evidence of crumbled and buried structures. The first radar images of Angkor, obtained in 1994 from the space shuttle Endeavor, were greatly expanded by a NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) airborne radar survey in September 2000 after intensive fieldwork by Christophe Pottier in the 1990s. When the radar images are combined with aerial photography and other surveys, the results are a high-resolution map for the whole of the 400-square-mile core area of the Greater Angkor urban complex.

The map reveals a web of canals with raised banks serving as roads, reservoirs of all sizes from the gigantic baray down to small ponds for each house, and a fine grid of rice fields hidden below the present-day land surface with its modern rice fields. The entire landscape from Lake Tonle north to the Kulen Hills was cleared of its original forest and converted into a low-density city whose land was devoted to rice production, houses, and temples. From the central area with the largest temples radiated six highways on large embankments, fitted with bridges. Ground surveys located the long-sought inlets and outlets of the baray, connecting them to the canal network. In addition to the famous major temples such as Angkor Wat, Baphuon, and Bayon, there were hundreds of minor local temples, each on top of a square mound 65 feet long on each side, surrounded by a moat that was crossed by a causeway on the eastern side.

Angkor’s landscape was divided into three zones, each with different roles in water management. The northeastern zone, including the Kulen Hills, served to collect water from the rivers running off from the hills. The central zone, including the big baray, stored the collected water. The southwestern zone was crisscrossed by canals that either distributed water over the rice fields or disposed of it quickly to the lake, depending on needs at the moment. One large channel, following the shortest route from the West Baray to the lake, would have served to dump excess water after heavy rains. The canals included right-angle turns and cross channels to slow the water flow, decrease erosion of the channel banks, remove suspended sediment, and prevent channels from silting up. The system’s plan and its components’ dates allow one to trace its development from the 8th to the 14th century A.D., as rivers successively farther north and west became tapped for collecting water.

The whole system represents engineering on a vast scale. Rivers were re-engineered to flow north to south instead of their original natural course of northeast to