For more than a century, most people knew the grand capital of the Khmer Empire by what they saw from above, the vast stone temples of Angkor Wat and surrounding monuments. The common people of Angkor lived and moved along roads lined with houses and everyday structures built of wood and thatch, which rotted away centuries ago and left little for archaeologists to see sticking up out of the ground; thus, the temples never told the story of the huge urban environment that once surrounded them. It took a chopper with a laser on top to finally unveil what had been hiding below the Cambodian jungle canopy all along.
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