Sarah Klassen

My current research project builds on new evidence suggesting that Angkor was the central node in a complex urban network spreading across mainland Southeast Asia. In recent years, imagery from two lidar missions organized by the Cambodia Archaeological Lidar Initiative (CALI), the Khmer Archaeology Lidar Consortium (KALC), and the Greater Angkor Project (GAP) were used to map seven previously concealed and undocumented dense urban landscapes surrounded by much lower density peripheries.

The revelation of these urban areas suggests that a complex web of agricultural and occupation spaces linking more densely inhabited urban nuclei may have been a ubiquitous, defining feature of Khmer landscapes. This new discovery gives rise to the following questions: How did Angkor interact with these provincial settlement complexes? Further, how did the settlement system impact regional resilience?