The Largest temple complex in the World bigger than Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom combined with a massive baray still contains water. Less visited because of it's remote location but during its heyday ancient roads, bridges, and canals link this temple complex with the main district of Angkor! Soon to be a UNESCO heritage site! Built by King Jayavarman VII as a second city of the Khmer Empire it rivals anything built during the Khmer's long reign. Intensive researching is undergoing by Australian teams of archaeologists.
very fascinating. links?
That might sound impressive but the complex is not well preserved like the ones at Angkor.
QUOTE (Super Khmer @ Nov 1 2009, 04:57 AM) 
That might sound impressive but the complex is not well preserved like the ones at Angkor.
It's not well preserve but it's good for archeologist to do digging to find more earthworks and more clues to the marvel of the khmers hydrological sophisticated engineering complexity system.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23180669/
Ancient channel
Armed with a printed digital map of the Angkor area, Evans and Fletcher toured an excavation site at the West Baray where archaeologists dug trenches to seek traces of an ancient channel through the bank. They were trying to determine whether the channel really existed and could have served both as water inlet and outlet.
The reservoir is walled by four banks -- now covered with jungle -- each 40 feet high, 331 feet wide and about 12 miles in length. It can store up to 1.8 billion cubic feet of water.
Fletcher called it "the single largest artifact and piece of engineering in the preindustrial world."
"All of this work is aimed at understanding how the water management system of Angkor functioned ... and how it stopped working," he said, adding that forest clearance is "the current key piece of information" about the ecological peril that caused Angkor to tumble.
Think about how long is 12 miles of stone and that's just one piece of it in the West Baray! If you combine the 4 wall of stone it's close to 40 miles long of stone! That's alot of stone and that's just the West Baray! Imagine the East Baray! What makes Prasat Bakan unique to the rest of the complex is you have a Baray as large as the West and East Baray that functions inside the complex not outside! If archeologists digs and find more stone channels hidden underneath that Baray then it would be very large as large as the West Baray!
Ancient channel
Armed with a printed digital map of the Angkor area, Evans and Fletcher toured an excavation site at the West Baray where archaeologists dug trenches to seek traces of an ancient channel through the bank. They were trying to determine whether the channel really existed and could have served both as water inlet and outlet.
The reservoir is walled by four banks -- now covered with jungle -- each 40 feet high, 331 feet wide and about 12 miles in length. It can store up to 1.8 billion cubic feet of water.
Fletcher called it "the single largest artifact and piece of engineering in the preindustrial world."
"All of this work is aimed at understanding how the water management system of Angkor functioned ... and how it stopped working," he said, adding that forest clearance is "the current key piece of information" about the ecological peril that caused Angkor to tumble.
Think about how long is 12 miles of stone and that's just one piece of it in the West Baray! If you combine the 4 wall of stone it's close to 40 miles long of stone! That's alot of stone and that's just the West Baray! Imagine the East Baray! What makes Prasat Bakan unique to the rest of the complex is you have a Baray as large as the West and East Baray that functions inside the complex not outside! If archeologists digs and find more stone channels hidden underneath that Baray then it would be very large as large as the West Baray!
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