Angkor legacy questions

1. Angkor legacy questions What are the lessons for the modern world of Angkor’s environment?  What are the lessons for the modern world of Angkor’s rise? What are the lessons for the modern world of Angkor’s decline?

2. Diamond’s impression • …no advance reading could have prepared me for experiencing at first hand the reality of it enormous scale.” (526)

3. Diamond’s main characterization • “At it peak around a thousand years ago, it was the world’s most extensive city, among the most populous ones, and the capital of the largest and most powerful empire in Southeast Asia (the Khmer Empire).  Its temples, such as Angkor Wat, include the largest religious monuments of the pre-modern world.” (526) • “Yet by the 19th Century there remained only about eight small villages dispersed over the central area formerly covered by this vast city.  Cambodia today has become Southeast Asia’s poorest country.” 

4. Angkor as a Metropolitan Area: “It was “just” the largest example of a type of city that no longer exists today but that formerly occurred more widely in seasonally wet tropical environments.” (526)  1.     Low density city 2.     Much more spread out than Los Angeles 3.     Farmland and farmhouses in close proximity to palaces and temples 4.     People living at lower density than modern cities (with no farmland) 5.     People living at higher densities than rural areas(there is a parallel to Mayan cities of Tikal and Copan) 

5. Size of Angkor • “At its maximum extent, the empire controlled one-third of mainland Southeast Asia” (528)

6. Environmental challenges “Angkor’s major environmental challenges were related to rain and water.”·      • Annual rainfall is 59 inches comparable to New York City and different than New Guinea at 400 and Los Angeles of 15      • Rainfall varies predictably between seasons and unpredictably from year to year     • Population at risk of crop failures from drought or flood      • 3,000 square miles of flood plain are ideal for growing rice     • Lake Tonle had the greatest concentration of freshwater fish in the world      • Flood-retreat farming for rice irrigated by upstream impounded water was brilliantly employed

7. Causes of decline 1.  Rise of powerful enemies (537) 2.  Change in the focus of the Khmer economy (537) ·      From original inland agricultural emphasis ·      To increasing involvement in maritime trade along Southeast Asia’s coast (vulnerable to Vietnamese expansion) 3.  Change in climate (537) ·      Paradoxical combination of droughts and floods (530)

8. Diamond’s Explanatory Framework for Decline 1.     Unintentional damage to environment · Deforested Angkor plain · Without trees to slow rain runoff, monsoons eroded soil 2.     Climate change brought both drier and wetter conditions 3.     Growing problems with hostile neighbors 4.     Friendly trade partners offered maritime economic opportunities which became restricted by competition 5.     Khmer Empire responded to problems and opportunities of the environment by creating an “increasingly huge, complex, and hard-to-maintain water management system from which there was no going back.” (538)