The Lost Cities of Angkor and What They Teach Us About Seeing What’s Beyond The Surface
- Clinton Bravo
- Apr 25
- 3 min read
The Lost Civilizations LiDAR Uncovered: How Cambodia Used LiDAR for Archaeology
It’s hard to imagine it now—how something so massive, so organized, so alive—could go completely unnoticed for so long. But that’s exactly what happened in Cambodia. For centuries, Angkor was mostly known through what visitors could see: towering stone temples, crumbling gates, a few ponds. Bits and pieces. The rest? Swallowed by the jungle.
Until someone flew over the jungle with an advanced laser.
In 2012, a team led by archaeologist Damian Evans sent a LiDAR-equipped plane over Angkor’s forest-covered terrain. And just like that, the ground spoke. What those laser pulses uncovered was nothing short of stunning. Beneath the foliage was a complete urban layout—grids of roads, engineered waterways, sprawling neighborhoods, and temple networks that stretched far beyond what any archaeologist had guessed. The study, published in 2013, gave us our first true glimpse of Angkor as it really was: not just a temple complex, but a functioning, massive, low-density city. People had been living there, farming, building, trading—for centuries.
LiDAR worked like this: the aircraft shot out rapid bursts of millions of laser light, which bounced back the moment they hit something—a tree, the ground, a wall. When mapped, those laser returns painted a detailed precise model of the land beneath the trees. LiDAR made the invisible visible. And it turned long-held ideas about the Khmer Empire completely on their head.
Which brings us here.
Because while that moment was monumental for archaeologists, it hit close to home for us at AB Surveying & Development. We're not in the business of temples or buried cities, but the idea of revealing what’s hidden—that part? That’s exactly what we do.
We’ve seen what Aerial Topographic LiDAR can reveal—even through the thickest forests, as long as light can pass through. But it doesn’t stop there. We also use Aerial Bathymetric LiDAR, a surveying technology that lets us map seafloor, riverbeds, and shallow coastlines—all from the sky. It works the same way: a green laser is fired from a manned aircraft, travels through the water, and bounces back from different surfaces below. Each bounce tells a story. Some hit come from the water’s surface, others from floating vegetation, and eventually, the last return. The signal returns from the last return—be it sand, coral, rock, or seagrass.
If you’re wondering why that matters, think about what’s happening all over the Philippines. We’re building more ports. We’re planning offshore wind. We’re trying to protect shorelines from erosion and rising tides. But you can’t just guess what’s underneath when you're building something that’s supposed to last.
A single missed ridge or a shifting seabed can ruin a plan. And traditional surveying—using boats, sonar, manual mapping—takes time, labor, and sometimes risks disturbing the very environment you're trying to understand.
LiDAR skips the noise. No boats. No seabed damage. No divers or anchors dragging across coral. It’s fast. It’s quiet. It gets the job done with precision and respect for the space it’s measuring.
And that’s not just a sales pitch. It's something we’ve seen work again and again. We’ve helped teams plan safer coastal infrastructure. We’ve provided data that guided environmental assessments. We’ve mapped seabeds that hadn’t been touched by light in decades. In a country like ours, with thousands of islands and endless shorelines, you can’t afford to work blindly.
If Angkor taught us anything, it’s that there’s always more happening beneath the surface than we think. And sometimes, it takes looking from above to truly see what’s below.
So whether you’re working on your next big development, monitoring coastal stability, or just need answers from the underwater world—we’re here. With the right tools. And the right people to run them.
📩 Curious to know what’s hiding beneath your site? Get a quote today. https://www.absurveyingph.net/get-a-quick-quotation
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