Paper short abstract:

This paper offers an overview of past, present and future applications of remote sensing technologies to the study of archaeological landscapes in Southeast Asia, focusing on Khmer temples and their broader socio-environmental context, and on the use of emerging technologies such as lidar.

Paper long abstract:

Following on from a lengthy tradition of archaeological remote sensing in Southeast Asia, the analysis of aerial and satellite imagery has these days become a standard method within the archaeologist's toolkit, and in the last few years most projects in places like Cambodia have incorporated the use GIS and remote sensing techniques to some degree. With rare exception, for much of the 20th century remote sensing was little more than a way of augmenting traditional approaches to monuments and their well-defined "city walls" or "enclosures". In recent decades however advances in technology, methods and theory have created a kind of synergy in which the perspective has broadened to areas far beyond the central monumental zones to include the social, cultural and environmental context of the temples. Techniques of remote sensing, with their ability to quickly and efficiently accumulate vast amounts of data at a landscape scale, have been a crucial part of this agenda in Cambodia, and have allowed us to revisit and reconsider some preliminary theories about human-environment interactions offered by French archaeologists since the 1950s, these days using very sophisticated techniques such as airborne laser scanning (lidar). This paper offers an overview of the current status of archaeological remote sensing and mapping in Cambodia, including some preliminary results from a 2015 lidar campaign, as well as broadly considering the future potential of remote sensing technologies for studies of human-environment interactions in the archaeology of Southeast Asia.