Lidar Reveals Mahendraparvata as a Planned Grid City
Laser scans through the Phnom Kulen jungle expose roads, ponds, and temples invisible from the ground
Quick facts
- Survey method
- Airborne lidar
- Lead researchers
- Jean-Baptiste Chevance, Damian Evans
- Year of survey
- 2012
- Finding
- First known large-scale gridded Khmer city
What happened
In 2012, a team led by archaeologists Jean-Baptiste Chevance and Damian Evans used airborne lidar to scan the Phnom Kulen plateau and rediscovered the full extent of Jayavarman II's capital, a city that had been noted from inscriptions for over a century but never mapped. Smithsonian Magazine's on-site reporting describes a sprawling network of temples, palaces, ordinary dwellings, and waterworks infrastructure invisible to earlier ground surveys. UNESCO's tentative-list documentation for the site, citing Chevance's 2019 published findings, calls Mahendraparvata the first large-scale gridded city known in the Khmer world, a design that would not reappear at this scale until the 12th century.
Why it matters
The find pushed back the timeline for sophisticated urban planning in the Khmer world by roughly three centuries and showed that the hydraulic engineering later associated with Angkor's rise, canals, dykes, reservoirs, started on this mountain plateau under Jayavarman II, not with his successors at Angkor itself.
How we know
Lidar (light detection and ranging) fired from a helicopter penetrates forest canopy to map ground contours in detail, letting archaeologists trace roads, temple platforms, and water features under dense jungle without excavation. Ground-truthing excavations at specific points confirmed features the lidar data indicated.
Sources
- Smithsonian Magazine. The Lost City of Cambodia · Reputable sourcesmithsonianmag.com · The domain "smithsonianmag.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Phnom Kulen: Archeological Site/Ancient Site of Mahendraparvata (Tentative List) · Reputable sourcewhc.unesco.org · The domain "whc.unesco.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineThe Khmer Empire28 events · How a trading kingdom on the Mekong became a temple-building empire that vanished into the jungleView all →