ABSTRACT
In the last hundred and fifty years several projects of archaeological mapping have been undertaken at the site of Angkor, in northwestern Cambodia. The most recent studies, conducted by the Greater Angkor Project, have revealed that Angkor is a vast low-density urban complex, perhaps the largest of its kind in the entire pre-industrial world. And yet, until now, crucial areas of the archaeological complex have remained unmapped because vegetation has obscured the surface traces of the civilisation from conventional remote sensing instruments. With a view to overcoming this limitation, we completed a large-scale airborne laser scanning (lidar) mission over Angkor in 2012. In this paper we describe the technical parameters of the mission and outline the processing routines and algorithms we used to develop our results. We present a range of preliminary outcomes of the research program, which have implications not only for understanding Angkor but also for future comparative studies of low-density urbanism in tropical forest environments.
