Urban Sprawl Might Have Doomed Angkor Wat A new map made from
satellite data reveals Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple was the
center of one of the largest cities of the pre-industrialized
world. The research also sheds light on the extent of the city's
sprawl and on its mysterious downfall, factors that could be
linked in a way that bears on today's extensive and suburbanized
metropolises. Using ground-sensing radar provided by NASA,
researchers found evidence that the ancient Cambodian capital
took up an area of nearly 400 square miles (1,000 square
kilometers). For comparison, Philadelphia covers 135 square
miles, while Phoenix sprawls across more than 500 square miles,
not including the huge suburbs. Each has about 1.5 million
residents in the city limits. "In terms of population, however,
Angkor would only have had a few hundred thousand people," said
study team member Damian Evans, an archaeologist at the
University of Sydney in Australia. "There were cities with much
larger populations—for example, in China