WAC 5 is held in partnership with the Anthropology Department of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and in collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute.

SESSION ABSTRACT

Large low-density urban complexes were a feature of tropical regions in the Old and the New world through the first fifteen hundred years of the Common Era. The similarities in the overall form and milieu of these settlements were noted many years ago by Coe and Bronson, among others. The ecological conditions of human impact in the tropic are also a current topic of some concern suggesting that the analysis of past settlement patterns and their history may help to reveal the fragilities and the strength of tropical environments. The issue is of broad significance because by the time of the European expansion the low density, dispersed type of urban settlement had largely been replaced by small compact urban settlements. The demise of the low density cities of the Maya in Yucatan (e.g. Tikal) and of the Khmer in SE Asia (e.g. Angkor) has been ascribed to ecological disaster though there are competing opinions. What led to their demise is therefore of some general relevance. The purpose of the session is to establish a dialogue between archaeologists, historians and environmental researchers to try and ascertain what may have happened and why the overall form of the low-density cities of Mesoamerica and SE Asia came to look quite similar.

A broader aim of the session is to bring together researchers and members of the public interested in the characteristics of pre-industrial low-density urbanism in the tropics and its long term ecological viability. The session may also be relevant to researchers in Amazonia and West Africa who are very welcome to participate, as is anyone who is concerned with the general issues of the session.

The emphasis of the session will be on:

New analytical and interpretive methods to reconstruct ancient human landscapes, such as GIS modeling.

Identification, interpretation, or evaluation of proposed past human-environment interactions, and specifically the relationship between human-induced and natural environmental changes.

Anthropomorphic influences on landscape development, associated with both small-scale and large-scale societies.

Reconstructing past landscapes and visualising urban form.

Applications of archaeological knowledge to modern environmental problems.

Comparative urban analysis including the nature and role of social theory in archaeology.

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Individual Abstracts

The Nature of Low Density Dispersed Urbanism: a global view

Associate Professor Roland Fletcher

University of Sydney

NSW

Australia

Human beings use a wide range of residential densities in their settlements from very high density compact forms to low density dispersed settlements. Communities of every socio-economic form of social life from small, mobile communities of hunter-gatherers to the giant, sedentary communities of the industrialized urban world live across this residential spectrum. In agrarian-based urban societies compact and low density cities have very different constraints on their growth, very different durations and apparently very different effects on the long term viability of urban life in their local regions.

Compact cities can reach a maximum areal extent of about 70-100 sq km and carry populations of up to 1 to 1.5 million human beings. Examples are Abbasid Baghdad, Tang Changan and Tokugawa Edo. In compact cities duration of occupation also changes markedly with change in areal extent. Smaller cities such as Constantinople, with areas of about 20 sq km, can endure for over a thousand years. Larger cities, close to 100 sq km in extent only last a few hundred years or less. When they collapse such cities are often rapidly replaced by an adjacent city or they duly recover and continue as a new urban center. By contrast large, low density cities can reach areas of 100-200 sq km (eg Tikal) up to about 1000 sq km as at Angkor. Their populations can range from less than 100,000 to perhaps as high as 750,000. Interestingly they can endure for more than 500 years at almost any size and show no simple tendency to reduced duration with increased area. However, they appear to lack a capacity for substantial, sustainable transformation of their form and when they collapse appear to take their entire region with them. In the case of the Classic Maya cities and the great cities of the Khmer world such as Angkor collapse was followed by several centuries without extensive urbanism suggesting that low density cities have a more adverse impact on their local region than do compact cities. Why this may be the case deserves attention as the entire urban pattern of the industrializing world is shifting to the low density pattern.

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Palaeoenvironmental Research and the Demise of Angkor.

Dr Dan Penny

University of Sydney

New South Wales

Australia

Despite many years of meticulous research, the timing, manner and reasons for Angkor's demise remain unresolved. The sack of the city by the Thai in 1431 AD is no longer thought to have been a definitive end to the city, and hypotheses ranging from the lure of maritime trade in the Mekong delta, environmental crises and epidemic disease have been proposed to account for the demise of this once great urban world. The recovered inscriptions shed no light on this issue, and the archaeological evidence is sparse and equivocal. Clearly, a new approach is required.

An ongoing University of Sydney research project brings palaeo-environmental techniques to bear on the question of Angkor's decline. Sediment cores taken from temple moats and reservoirs (baray) throughout the central area of Angkor, and natural depositional basins in the hinterland to the north, provide archives of environmental information. Pollen and spores extracted from these sediments reveal changes in vegetation associated with, for example, periods of land clearance or abandonment. The identification of successional vegetation change, such as the appearance of 'pioneer' species of pollen in the sediment-based records, is a key indicator of land abandonment and can be directly dated using high precision, small sample AMS radiocarbon dating of pollen. This information will enable us to identify precisely when Angkor fell into decline, and if the process of land abandonment occurred, for example, from the fringe of the urban area toward the centre, or vice versa. Microscopic algae (diatoms) preserved in the same sediment cores can provide information on the hydrology of the 'irrigation network'. This will allow us to assess from an empirical basis the claim that the decline of Angkor was intimately related to systemic failure of the elaborate system of canals and reservoirs.

This paper presents results from two sites; the 10th C AD reservoir Srah Srang, and the moat of the late 8th C AD temple Prasat Bakong. An interpretation of the land-use changes around these sites since their excavation is provided, and the implications of the radiocarbon chronology will be discussed.

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Of Heterarchy, Urbanism, and the Maya

Dr Eleanor M. King

Howard University

Washington, D.C.

U.S.A.

The classic city, with its tightly configured architecture and variously specialized inhabitants, has long occupied a prominent position in our mindscape of complexity. The inevitable hierarchy that seems to result from the need to coordinate urban activities has been virtually synonymous with what it means to be complex. Recent studies, however, have suggested that some complex societies, specifically ones in tropical areas, favor a more heterarchical pattern of organization. How then is this reflected in their corresponding spatial dispositions? Are tropical urban systems significantly different from their more temperate counterparts? If so, does the form the tropical city takes reflect the underlying heterarchy of its organization or is it idiosyncratic, a product of local history and culture?

Nowhere can these questions be better addressed than among the pre-Columbian Maya of Mesoamerica. The Maya have long bedeviled researchers by being manifestly complex but lacking key indices of that very complexity, notably a "classic" urban system. As more work has been done on a regional level, however, new patterns have begun to emerge that illuminate the heterarchical nature of their society and their own particular brand of urbanism. This paper will explore the idea of urbanism and how it correlates to heterarchy by examining recent evidence from the site of Maax Na, Belize, a Classic Maya "city," and the region within which it is situated.

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The Khmer Empire's Impact on the Present-Day Forest of Cambodia.

Dr. Heng Thung

Asheville, North Carolina

Extensive areas of northern Cambodia are covered by grassy shrub land, and open or dry diptherocarp forest overlaying thin soils, causing a clamor about the disappearance of forest due to illegal logging by international organizations. But the thousands of square kilometers of land could not have been cut down in the last decades. However, the ancient Khmer civilization must have needed land to grow food to feed its ever growing slave population building the monuments we now gawk at with awe.

Slash and burn agriculture is the simplest way to open up farmland and has been practiced all over the world. Logging roads often facilitate the entry of these peasants into the virgin forest today, and removed the large trees which the farmers with their simple tools could not deal with. Destruction of forest land is still taking place, less by loggers but more by the hungry farmers making a living to survive. We could see on new aerial photographs and satellite imagery clearly the pace of destruction by these landless people, just like they did so a thousand years ago.

Continuing geologic uplift and the removal of forest have caused tremendous erosion, and the extensive deforested areas lie now barren of soils and are only a few meters deep. No rehabilitation methods can possibly bring life to these lands. These forests are forever destroyed and will not in hundreds of years grow new large trees. Therefore the proper management of the remaining forest land is required and efforts must be made to find an alternative livelihood for these landless people burning down the trees to fertilize the soil and feed the cooking stoves in far away cities.

Dr. Thung has worked in Cambodia for a decade mapping the country. He undertook the land use mapping and participated in the forest inventory through the Mekong River Commission. He is the author of the recent paper in the bulletins of the Siam Society and the SEAMEO Regional Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts (SPAFA) on the decline of Angkor by geologic change in the environment. He did his Ph.D. research on the impact of highways on the forest environment in Thailand in 1972.

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Laterally Urban, but Just as Dense: Exploding Some Myths about Maya Cities

Elizabeth Graham

University College London

London

Urbanism in the humid tropics is characterized by a variety of historical, cultural, and social factors. Shared, limiting conditions can be delineated, however, in the form of environmental parameters. The importance of these parameters lies not in their role in any formula that might causally connect environment and urbanism, but in their role in engendering methodological rigour. An environmental approach to urbanism in the humid tropics behooves us to reassess inferences - such as dispersed settlement (based on evidence of vacant terrain) or depopulation (based on lack of non-perishable architecture) - that have led to claims of low population densities or environmental disaster. Such evidence is just as likely to be a function of poor preservation and/or inadequate understanding of urban growth and development by temperate climate scholars. This paper will: 1) discuss alternative explanations for vacant terrain and lack of masonry architecture; 2) suggest criteria for density that are organically based but not human-centred; 3) place human-environmental interaction, rather than ecology, at the centre of inquiry; 4) outline approaches to urbanism that dispense with the human-nature dichotomy; 5) demonstrate the ways in which temperate climate cities can learn from the tropical urban experience.

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The Historical Water Management of Angkor, Cambodia

Mr Matti Kummu

Helsinki University of Technology

Helsinki

Finland

and

MRCS/WUP-FIN Tonle Sap Modelling Project

Phnom Penh

Cambodia

The World Heritage site of Angkor is situated north of the Tonle Sap Lake and south of the Kulen Mountains in Northwest Cambodia. Recent research has uncovered an extensive hydrological network stretching across about a thousand square kilometres. Although Angkor's hydrology is not nearly as well understood as its religious architecture, this system may have played a key role in the city operation and may also be implicated in the demise of the urban complex in the beginning of the 15th century.

The water has always been an important part of the Khmer culture and everyday life. Water has a strong symbolic meaning for the people and religion. Barays, water reservoirs, channels and canals were and are still used for transportation, irrigation and urban water supply for the people and animals. The huge barays and moats of the temples were also a way for the rulers to show their power.

Water management in the Angkor area depends of the monsoon rains, the floods of the lake and the ground water sources. The Greater Angkor area can be divided to three hydrological zones: upper, middle and lower. In the upper, northern zone the water was taken from the natural rivers running from the Kulen Mountains and spread out into N-S aligned channels. In the middle zone the water was collected in big barays, water reservoirs, and temple moats for multifunctional purposes. The lower, southern zone operated like a drainage system for the temple area and dispersed water down in the Tonle Sap Lake.

Using the GIS database of the channels and canals, TOPSAR elevation model and powerful hydraulics and hydrological models it is possible to investigate how the hydrological network was developed, how it worked and why and when it collapsed. Understanding the water management of the Angkor area will help us to better understand how the urban complex operated and may offer new information about the decline of Angkor.

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Ritual Technology and Resource Management in Tropical States

Dr Julie L. Kunen

Georgetown University and

Smithsonian Institution

Washington DC

USA

In this paper, I assess similarities in the ritual, productive, and political roles of contemporary Balinese water temples, Angkorean shrines, and Classic Maya household shrines. I explore the hypothesis that all of these institutions are examples of ritual technology - loci of ritual activities that simultaneously serve to manage critical productive resources.

Burials in Maya household shrines indicate that such buildings were the focus of corporate ritual practices including ancestor veneration. Studies of ancient Maya corporate groups also suggests that high-status families were leaders of social groups whose primary identity was as resource-holding entities. A connection is thus inferred between shrines as loci of ritual practices defining social groups, and social groups attached to specific resources; what is lacking is evidence linking shrines to the control and management of land and water resources. Recent research around Angkor yields a settlement pattern similar to the lowland Maya one, with groups of dispersed housemounds, each associated with shared water tanks and shrines. I ask whether Maya and Cambodian shrines represent local institutions parallel to Balinese water temples, in which ritual regulates both resources and the social relationships that partition and control them. If so, I then suggest that these institutions contributed to a decentralized trajectory of state formation leading to polities with dispersed populaces and local control over agricultural production.

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Angkorean roads near Phimai and the Hydrological System of Sukhothai: remote sensing and GIS for archaeological applications in Thailand

Surat Lertlum Chulachomklao

Royal Military Academy (CRMA),

Asian Institute of Technology (AIT)

Remote sensing and GIS can be used as tools for archaeological analysis. There are various cases around the world that remote sensing and GIS were used to assist archaeologists to pin point and help to identify archaeological sites. Especially, the applications of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) demonstrated the applications that have never been imagined before how the technology can help the conventional way that conducted by archaeologists. The applications of SIR-A on the lost city of Ubar and AIRSAR at Angkor are the most well.

In this paper, there are two case studies. The first is the application of remote sensing and GIS for the identification of the royal road from Angkor to Phimai. The usage of satellite remote sensing including AIRSAR, and other sources such as digital elevation models (DEM), old maps, aerial photos and ground survey is demonstrated. The second case, the application of remote sensing and GIS at Sukhothai World Heritage Site in the lower part of the northern region of Thailand illustrates how they can be used as tools for World Heritage management and study of society during Sukhothai period.

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Scale, Structure and the Demise of the 'Hydraulic City' at Angkor

Damian Evans

Archaeological Computing Laboratory

Spatial ScienceI nnovation Unit

University of Sydney

NSW

Australia

Large-scale water management systems are a common feature of large, early historic settlements in the tropical environments of mainland Southeast Asia, but none rival the structures at Angkor in terms of size, scale and capacity. Over the last half a century various scholars, notably the French archaeologist B.-P. Groslier, have proposed that the decline of Angkor was partly a function of the failure of its hydraulic network.

Recent processing and interpretation of remote sensing data by the Greater Angkor Project (GAP) have, for the very first time, provided a comprehensive picture of the structure of Angkor's urban landscape, and these hypotheses can now be tested quantitatively. Analyses have revealed a tripartite structure to Angkor's water management system: a vast, cardinally aligned and apparently disordered grid of canals in the north of the settlement; a highly structured, non-cardinally aligned network of disperser channels in the south; and the great reservoirs that dominate the central area and mediate between the two. GIS analyses have revealed a spatial non-correspondence between the hydraulic network and the structure of small-scale residential life at Angkor which, unlike the large-scale material, is relatively homogenous in terms of typology and distribution. This apparent disengagement between the scales of material now needs to be reconciled with theories of Angkor's decline which hold that a systemic collapse in the large-scale material had consequences that were equally serious for the dispersed residential system.

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Classic Angkor and Classic Maya Revisited

Michael D. Coe

Yale University

Connecticut

USA

Recent radar imaging and on-the-ground mapping at Angkor has shown not one but two related settlement patterns: 1) a highly dispersed supporting population living near small, artificial ponds, and 2) a superimposed, “core area” pattern cosmologically orientated to the cardinal points, consisting of regal-ritual palace and temple structures, vast reservoirs, and linear features such as canals, causeways and dikes. A closely similar double articulation (without the reservoirs) is also characteristic of Classic Maya regal-ritual centers like Tikal and Calakmul; in these, as at Angkor, there are no clear-cut city boundaries or edges, but rather whole settled landscapes beyond the core areas. This is in strong contrast to such densely occupied, economically heterogeneous, and highly planned cities as Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan in Mexico, medieval Cairo and imperial Beijing. Following William Sanders and David Webster, it is suggested that the weak urbanization of these two monsoon-forest civilizations was the result of low population, lack of environmental diversity, poorly developed interregional trade and relatively inefficient food production.

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Please send comments or questions to Max Baldia.

For additional WAC information go to http://wwwehlt.flinders.edu.au/wac5/indexhomepage.html

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[1] Originally proposed by Drs. Nicholas and Lilley.