Revealing the pre and Angkor eras

A very interesting and well-illustrated read - How Megacities Emerged from the Jungles of Cambodia - by Annalee Newitz dated 10 February 2021.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a ... megacities

It's not a live thread so just cut and paste to your search engine of choice.

Nice to see Damien Evan's name mentioned. Many years ago now in the very early years of the Greater Angkor Project, qv, started and led by Professor Roland Fletcher of the University of Sydney, Damien and I toiled within Angkor, pouring sweat, struggling to get an archaeological hand operated sampling augur through sun-baked, dry-season ground, seemingly almost as hard as concrete, down to a depth of circa 1.8 to 2 metres. It was the last augur of the day and the last of that very early field season. But up came charcoal and some pottery shards and a very fine line of former human excrement. All three are very exciting to archaeologists. Charcoal is very important to archaeologists as it allows very accurate dating by various means. Pottery shards much the same as they can be dated less accurately through what is known as the “Ceramic Chain”. And the ancient former human excrement when examined in the laboratory tell us about diet at that time. We had augured in to what is known as a former “House Mound” which is what shows up in countless numbers in these LIDAR scans. This resulted in the following field season in a large and productive archaeological "Dig" that went on for quite a number of years.

Best regards. OML