Pixels, Ponds and People: Mapping Archaeological Landscapes in Cambodia Using Historical Aerial and Satellite Imagery

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, two particular factors have contributed to a renewed focus on archived images of Cambodia and an increasing recognition of their importance. On the one hand, it has become clear that the great urban complexes of the Angkor era have left subtle traces of their existence everywhere on the surface of the landscape, and that remote sensing affords us the opportunity to uncover, map and analyse the various elements of medieval urban form. On the other hand, since the cessation of three decades of civil conflict, rapid urbanisation in Cambodia and the expansion of modern cities into rural areas have endangered and in some cases obliterated many of those remnant archaeological features. In addition to Second World War-era aerial photo archives and modest collections produced by the colonial authorities, the Second Indochina War has left behind a particularly rich legacy of now-declassified spy satellite imagery from the 1960s and early 1970s. These images, in particular those from the KH-4 corona missions, provide extremely valuable coverage of an almost pristine archaeological landscape immediately prior to the radical restructuring of agricultural systems during the Khmer Rouge period. In this chapter, we describe how various collections of archived imagery have been used not only to reconstruct the medieval landscapes of the Khmer Empire but also as a tool for evaluating the complex relationships between contemporary populations at Angkor and the archaeological landscape they have inhabited for generations.