Explore the vast range of titles available.

\"The Angkor Wat complex, the world's largest religious monument, has as its main features a 213-foot-tall central tower and four surrounding smaller towers, enclosed by a number of walls and a surrounding moat. Inside the walls and the moat, a number of stairways link courtyards, porches, and chambers.\" (Social Studies for Kids) Read more about the temple complex of Angor Wat.

\"A group of new finds has convinced archaeologists that the Cambodian temple complex known as Angkor Wat was much bigger in size and influence than previously thought.\" (Social Studies for Kids) Read more about the discoveries at Angkor Wat.

\"Jean-Baptiste Chevance senses that we're closing in on our target. Paused in a jungle clearing in northwestern Cambodia, the French archaeologist studies his GPS and mops the sweat from his forehead with a bandanna. The temperature is pushing 95, and the equatorial sun beats down through the forest canopy.\" (Smithsonian) This article describes how archaeologists discovered an ancient civilization in Cambodia.

As a child growing up in Cambodia, Ronnie Yimsut played among the ruins of the Angkor Wat temples, surrounded by a close-knit community. As the Khmer Rouge gained power and began its genocidal reign of terror, his life became a nightmare. In this stunning memoir, Yimsut describes how, in the wake of death and destruction, he decides to live. Escaping the turmoil of Cambodia, he makes a perilous journey through the jungle into Thailand, only to be sent to a notorious Thai prison. Fortunately, he is able to reach a refugee camp and ultimately migrate to the United States, where he attended the University of Oregon and became an influential leader in the community of Cambodian immigrants.Facing the Khmer Rougeshows Ronnie Yimsut's personal quest to rehabilitate himself, make a new life in America, and then return to Cambodia to help rebuild the land of his birth.

Previous archaeological mapping work on the successive medieval capitals of the Khmer Empire located at Angkor, in northwest Cambodia (∼9th to 15th centuries in the Common Era, C.E.), has identified it as the largest settlement complex of the preindustrial world, and yet crucial areas have remained unmapped, in particular the ceremonial centers and their surroundings, where dense forest obscures the traces of the civilization that typically remain in evidence in surface topography. Here we describe the use of airborne laser scanning (lidar) technology to create high-precision digital elevation models of the ground surface beneath the vegetation cover. We identify an entire, previously undocumented, formally planned urban landscape into which the major temples such as Angkor Wat were integrated. Beyond these newly identified urban landscapes, the lidar data reveal anthropogenic changes to the landscape on a vast scale and lend further weight to an emerging consensus that infrastructural complexity, unsustainable modes of subsistence, and climate variation were crucial factors in the decline of the classical Khmer civilization.

Preah Vihear temple is one of the most significant representatives of the ancient Angkorian temples listed as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites. The surfaces of this Angkor sandstone monument are covered with deteriorated materials, broadly called “sediments” here, resulting from a long time of weathering of the sandstone. The sediments might adversely affect the ancient sandstone substratum of this cultural heritage, and the potential risk from them is essential information for current strategies and on-going protection and management. The extracted DNA from the sediment samples of this temple was used for Illumina high-throughput sequencing analysis, resulting in approximately 12 Gb of metagenomic dataset. The results of this shotgun metagenomic analysis provided a thorough information of the phylogenetic groups presented in the microbiome of the sediment samples, indicating that potential metabolic activities, involving different geomicrobiological cycles, may occur in this microbiome. The phylogenetic result revealed that the majority of metagenomic reads were affiliated with Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Bacteroidetes at the phylum level. The metabolic reconstruction results indicated that the important geomicrobiological cycling processes include carbon sequestration, and nitrogen and sulfur transformation as the potentially active ones in the sediments of the sampling sites. Specifically, the dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA) and the newly discovered complete ammonia oxidation (comammox) were retrieved from this metagenomic dataset. Furthermore, the genetic information on the presence of acid-producing processes by sulfur- and ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and archaea in this metagenomic dataset suggested that the microbial flora in these samples has the potential to participate in the degradation of sandstone cultural heritage by producing acids. N-15 isotope amendment and incubation analysis results confirmed the presence of active denitrification, but not anammox activity at this temple. These results are important for our knowledge on the microbial community composition and microbial biodeterioration processes affecting this sandstone cultural heritage and will aid in the protection and management of the ancient Preah Vihear temple.Key Points• Microbiota on Preah Viher temple was analyzed using NGS.• Nitrate-N transformation by DNRA, comammox, and denitrifcation was detected.• N-15 isotope analysis confirmed the active denitrifcation, but not Anammox.• Accumulation of nitrate is a result of less active removal by denitrification.

For over a century, the landscape of Angkor Wat and its surrounding area have been the focus of archaeological study. These studies have been constrained substantially, however, by a lack of chronological resolution in the features of the landscape and the difficulty of dating elements of the cultural assemblage. Recently obtained LiDAR data have transformed understanding of the Angkor Wat complex, enabling archaeologists to map terrain usually obscured by dense and protected vegetation. The results have informed targeted ground-based research, demonstrated previously unknown relationships between elements of the site, shown that the complex is much more extensive than previously thought and revealed a massive, unique and unknown structure.

Globalization and world-making projects, like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage program, have changed the stakes for particular heritage sites. Through processes of greater interdependence and connectivity, specific sites are transformed into transactional commodities with exchange values that transcend their historical or material characteristics and thus can be wrested from those contexts to serve other international interests. To illustrate, I employ evidence from the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks to offer an unprecedented vantage onto one contested archaeological site, Preah Vihear temple in Cambodia. Thrust into the international spotlight with UNESCO World Heritage inscription in 2008, followed by the International Court of Justice rulings, we can trace the site’s connectivity across national political intrigues, international border wars, bilateral negotiations surrounding gas and steel contracts, and military alignments. The very fact that so much politicking occurred around one site, and one that was largely invisible in international heritage circles until its controversial UNESCO listing and the resultant border war, is instructive. In essence, what the leaked cables reveal are the linkages between seemingly unrelated spheres and events, thus underscoring the intricate hyperconnectivity of heritage.

At present, there is very limited information on the ecology, distribution, and structure of Cambodia's tree species to warrant suitable conservation measures. The aim of this study was to assess various methods of analysis of aerial imagery for characterization of the forest mensuration variables (i.e., tree height and crown width) of selected tree species found in the forested region around the temples of Angkor Thom, Cambodia. Object-based image analysis (OBIA) was used (using multiresolution segmentation) to delineate individual tree crowns from very-high-resolution (VHR) aerial imagery and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. Crown width and tree height values that were extracted using multiresolution segmentation showed a high level of congruence with field-measured values of the trees (Spearman's rho 0.782 and 0.589, respectively). Individual tree crowns that were delineated from aerial imagery using multiresolution segmentation had a high level of segmentation accuracy (69.22%), whereas tree crowns delineated using watershed segmentation underestimated the field-measured tree crown widths. Both spectral angle mapper (SAM) and maximum likelihood (ML) classifications were applied to the aerial imagery for mapping of selected tree species. The latter was found to be more suitable for tree species classification. Individual tree species were identified with high accuracy. Inclusion of textural information further improved species identification, albeit marginally. Our findings suggest that VHR aerial imagery, in conjunction with OBIA-based segmentation methods (such as multiresolution segmentation) and supervised classification techniques are useful for tree species mapping and for studies of the forest mensuration variables.