Roland Fletcher - Archaeology
Roland Fletcher is Professor of Theoretical and World Archaeology at the University of Sydney. He instigated the Greater Angkor Project, and the Living with Heritage project at Angkor in collaboration with colleagues in Geosciences.
Conservation in developing countries
The residential density of settlements covers a vast spectrum – from high density small hunter-gatherer camps to vast low density industrial urban areas encompassing several towns. While the low density pattern of occupation has its most obvious expression in the industrial world of today, it was also used by prehistoric communities such as desert hunter-gatherers in Australia, African farming communities and agrarian urban tropical forest societies of Mesoamerica and Southern Asia.
In the past, agrarian low density urbanism appears to have been vulnerable to certain social and ecological factors. Many low-density agrarian cities once dominated Lowland Mesoamerica, Sri Lanka and Mainland SE Asia. Their economies and histories may be of some relevance to the modern world because the Maya, Singhalese and Khmer cities all experienced a long process of collapse over time, apparently associated with major reductions in regional populations.
At an estimated area of about 1000 square kilometres, Angkor in Cambodia was by far the largest example of an agrarian urban, lowdensity city. Angkor is therefore a useful study of the factors that can limit the sustainability of non-industrial urban growth. The example is timely because the region around Angkor was deforested to provide rice fields, the city was dependent on a massive and intractable infrastructure and was facing global climate change in the 14th to 17th centuries.
The city currently defines the limits beyond which agrarian-based urbanism could not apparently continue to grow.
The implications of the Angkor model inform understanding of other similar agrarian-based cities, and offer a perspective on present and future industrial urbanism that will be useful in sustainability studies.