Ancient 'Lost City' Brought to Life With Lasers
(AP Photo/Heng Sinith)
By Ben Lawrie
1) How do we know what happened in the past? Can we trust personal accounts? How reliable is a diary for historical evidence? Should historians or scientists receive credit for this "discovery"? Should someone else?
2) Why might a Cambodian and a French person have different perspectives on the excavation of Angkor? How might an archaeologist from 100 years ago see this differently from a modern-day archaeologist?
3) What is your town's "Angkor Wat"? In what ways is Angkor Wat like Rome? Athens? Mexico City? The Moon? What was happening in different parts of the world at the height of Angkor Wat?
4) What would happen if we allowed people to build without restriction on ancient sites? What if construction was restricted on sites older than 100 years? 1000 years? 10 years?
5) What is the significance of this story? Who is affected by the new methods used to map Angor? Is it ethical to excavate ancient sites?
Extension Activities:
1) Students can research similar "lost cities" to compare and contrast their development, rise, and fall.
2) Students can read a chapter from Jared Diamond's Collapse and report back to the large group on how resource depletion can lead to abandonment of cities.
3) Students can predict how major cities of the world will grow or decline in prominence.
4) Students can journal as the city through a personified life time (i.e., When was Ankgor a teenager, how did it feel, what was happening?, as it grew older? etc.)
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