A lost medieval city that thrived on a mist-shrouded Cambodian mountain 1,200 years ago has been discovered by archaeologists using revolutionary airborne laser technology, a report said yesterday.
Journalists from Australia accompanied the “Indiana Jones-style” expedition to Mahendraparvata led by a French-born archaeologist, through landmine-strewn jungle in the Siem Reap region where Angkor Wat, the largest Hindi temple complex in the world, is located.
The expedition used an instrument called Lidar — light detection and ranging data — which was strapped to a helicopter that crisscrossed a mountain north of Angkor Wat for seven days, providing data that matched years of ground research by archaeologists.
It effectively peeled away the jungle canopy using billions of laser pulses, allowing archaeologists to see structures that were in perfect squares, completing a map of the city which years of painstaking ground research had been unable to achieve, the report said.It helped reveal the city that reportedly founded the Angkor Empire in 802 AD, uncovering more than two dozen previously unrecorded temples and evidence of ancient canals.