The Space Archaeologists

Then Damian Evans, at the time a college sophomore searching for career direction, stepped forward. On Fletcher’s second trip to Siem Reap, he had taken Evans along because the student had been there as a backpacker. With Fletcher’s encouragement, Evans decided to use the Airsar data to expand Pottier’s map to northern Angkor. He hung around the archaeological computing lab in his spare time, fiddling with software. Through an e-mail correspondence with JPL radar scientist Scott Hensley, he learned how to turn the data from television-screen fuzz into the grainy black-and-white pictures that suggested a landscape. In just a year, Evans had mapped out a rough sketch of the canals and roads of inaccessible northern Angkor.

He enrolled in the University of Sydney’s doctoral program with the goal of producing a more detailed map. He collated the Airsar data with aerial and satellite photographs into a geographic information system and pored over it, devoting about an hour to each of 1,500 square kilometers. This time, he could pick out traces of mounds and moats left by small neighborhood temples.

Evans restricted his analysis to only those formations that appeared in two separate data sets. Even so, he pinpointed thousands of new sites, including 94 temples and several dozen roads and canals. Ultimately, the student mapped 580 square miles of northern Angkor. He more than doubled Pottier’s map in a fraction of the time—and he’d done it sitting at his desk.

The Australian described his findings in a dissertation, submitting it to Pottier for review. Even now, the paper seems to be a source of tension. Evans says Pottier scribbled furiously in the margins, at one point mocking his analysis with a cartoon figure of an Angkorian man shooting himself in the head. “I had never seen so much red ink,” he says. When asked his opinion about the work, Pottier simply says the map is “wide enough now to do more analysis of what was going on in the north”—implying that groundwork is still the project’s primary goal. But his tan deepens into a dark crimson.

Elsewhere in the world, the new map of Angkor was widely praised. Evans became the principal author on a paper published last fall in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing the document (Greater Angkor Project researchers won’t publish the full-resolution map for fear that looters will beat them to new sites). The paper also offered the first evidence supporting a provocative theory of Angkor’s demise.

Breaking with temple-centric theories of the civilization’s decline, Evans suggests that the true answer lies in the landscape. In this analysis, Angkor’s people exploited the land, cutting it with canals and a complex irrigation system, until it became unsustainable. When Pottier, a co-author on last fall’s paper, sat down with Fletcher in 1999 and agreed to explore Angkor’s demise, he already suspected as much. But it was only with the radar and satellite findings that the Greater Angkor Project could offer the world definitive proof, upsetting a century of Angkorian archaeology.