Angkor Wat mystery solved?

(LiveScience.com)

Aerial view of central temple at Angkor Wat, showing the moat and causeway and the central tower surrounded by four smaller towers. The suburbs surrounding the central city were the largest suburbs in the world all due to water management with 1,000,000+ inhabitants (Alexey Stiop/livescience.com).

  

Angkor Wat Buddha faces (Dvillaret/flickr.com)

The massive sandstone bricks used to construct the 12th-century temple of [Cambodia's] Angkor Wat were brought to the site via a network of hundreds of [artificial] canals, according to new research.

  

The findings shed light on how the site's 5 million to 10 million bricks, some weighing up to 3,300 pounds (1,500 kgs), made it to the temple from quarries at the base of a nearby mountain [with technology from space].

  

"We found many quarries of sandstone blocks used for the [Buddhist and Hindu] Angkor temples and also the transportation route of the sandstone blocks," wrote study co-author Estuo Uchida of Japan's Waseda University, in an email. More

• Ancient temple ruins dot Cambodia

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Nagas in the News: The Killing Fields

Editors, Wisdom Quarterly; Tamjty (historical photo). HALLOWEEN SERIES

Prisoner portraits during atheist-Maoist-communist takeover of Buddhist Cambodia by Pol Pot and the NAGAS' own Khmer Rouge ("Red Army"). What followed in terms of police state war crimes and genocide of its own citizens is referred to as "Killing Fields."

Murder on an unimaginable scale: Killing Fields

(Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) Upon arrival at the secret prison, victims were first photographed and required to give detailed autobiographies, beginning at childhood and ending with arrest. They were then forced to strip to their underwear, and all of their possessions were confiscated. The prisoners were then taken to cells.

Those taken to the smaller cubicles were shackled to the walls or concrete floor. Those who were held in the large mass blocks were collectively shackled to long pieces of iron bar. The shackles were fixed to alternating bars; the prisoners slept with their heads facing opposite directions. They slept on the floor without mosquito nets, mattresses, mats, or blankets. They were forbidden to talk to each other. More 

• Thinking About Museums: revisiting genocide (PHOTOS)

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