The Space Archaeologists

In their focus on temples, however, the French archaeologists overlooked the surrounding land—and the people who had lived on that land. Historians have long puzzled over why Angkor, after flourishing for centuries, fell apart. Some EFEO scholars surmised that Angkor died out because its rulers ordered progressively more complicated temples, ultimately sapping the empire of resources.

In 1992, when United Nations peacekeepers arrived in Cambodia to oversee elections after decades of war, the EFEO transferred Christophe Pottier from Thailand to the old complex in Siem Reap. A roguish Frenchman, Pottier typified the classical colonial adventurer: a khaki-clad daredevil with an eternal five o’clock shadow and the tan born of decades spent in the tropics. The EFEO was still preoccupied with spectacular remodeling jobs, and Pottier, trained as an architect, was put to work restoring temples.

Later that year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) named Angkor a World Heritage Site and soon after hired Pottier to map it. Flying over Cambodia in a helicopter, he quickly noticed traces of rice paddies, roads and canals—hundreds of unrecorded sites in all. Angkor, he realized, wasn’t a cluster of temples but a full-fledged city.

In his spare time, Pottier set out on motorcycle to record the sites he’d seen from the air. Equipped with an early GPS receiver, a camera, a notebook and an antique stereoscope—a viewfinder that functions like 3-D glasses, adding depth to a composite of bird’s-eye images—he searched for evidence of occupation. When he found decaying laterite or brick walls, slight hills suggesting the mounds houses were built on, or pot fragments, he marked off sites on stereoscopic photos. Returning to his office, he laid tracing paper over the photos and meticulously copied out the points, later transferring them to a map.

At the time, the Khmer Rouge still hadn’t fully relinquished power. During Pottier’s first year in the field, the guerrillas kidnapped and murdered a British mine remover a few miles from his site. But Pottier canvassed Angkor with a stubborn fearlessness, surviving on a mixture of luck and armed escorts. In the end, he mapped 232 square miles of southern and central Angkor—the density of landmines in the north defied even his valor—and rounded out his architecture degree with an archaeology dissertation. The project took him six years.

Culture Clash
In 1996, as Pottier was riding through the Cambodian hinterland, Roland Fletcher was spending his days in the libraries of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. A Cambridge-trained archaeologist, Fletcher was on leave from the University of Sydney to research a book on preindustrial cities. Looking at rough maps of Angkor one day, he noted a lopsided settlement plan that barely extended outside the city’s collection of temples, leaving little room for fields and house mounds. “It was obvious that there was something wrong with the plan,” he says.