Since the early 2010s there have been many advances in the examination of the world’s largest religious structure: Angkor Wat in Cambodia. This is mainly thanks to advances in technology which has opened up new vistas for investigation.
In this documentary, made in 2020 as part of the Ancient Superstructures series, we see how LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) has uncovered patterns revealing whole cities no one had noticed before, and revealing the true size of the Angkor civilisation.
But also drone technology, microscopic analysis, and other scientific advances have helped researchers understand the scale of Angkor and how it was built up into the largest pre-industrial city by far, maybe 10x the size of any other city known from those times.
Angkor Wat alone for instance is thought to contain 1,000,000 blocks of stone—and it wasn’t excavated locally, but was brought from scores of kilometres away, by an amazing network of canals built for the work. If you are interested in the feats of the ancients then this documentary is for you.
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