In December 2013 or thereabouts, I took a trip to Thailand to visit some friends. I have made about 9 or so trips since I have friends who live there and there is nothing like chillin’ on a beach eating Thai food.
I decided to join some friends on a quick three-day trip to Siem Reap (literally: defeat of Siam) to visit the ancient complexes which includes the most famous and largest site, Angkor Wat. I decided that perhaps these decaying sites may become limited in access at some point for a variety reasons. Cambodian culture is still making a slow comeback from their Khmer Rouge Communist debacle from the mid seventies. It’s interesting because they are still communist, but have opened their doors to tourism for it’s lucrative cash flow. We even had an interesting, and seemingly unsanctioned, spontaneous countryside excursion led by our friend Danny. I’ll include some of the amazing murals I captured on a wall from that nefarious sideshow in a subsequent post. I digress.
The meat: As a 2D/3D designer, I have had a strong interest in the design/engineering, function and precision of the ever growing list of megalithic sites around the world. Christopher Dunn triggered that curiosity over a decade ago with his engineer perspective on the Great Pyramid and surrounding sites revealing precision that was immediately recognizable as something modern and even still not-yet-achievable. I knew of the Angkor sites from seeing a few presentations from David Hatcher Childress in the the mid-2000s. While I don’t rely on Childress for the veracity of his findings, he did bring particular points to the fore. I was well aware that there were precision features, dogbone/bow-tie metal connectors (David calls them “keystone” cuts), polygonal cuts, complex corner wraps with a single stone, and most significantly, the non-homogeneous, heterogeneous design of each and every stone. David even mentioned an odd stone showing, what appears to be, a Triceratops or Stegasauraus engraved. I couldn’t confirm but did see it.
If your eye isn’t trained to see it yet, pay attention to the stone designs, the close-ups of the corner joints and the numerous dogbone cavities which are also present in Egypt and Peru as well. The stone used in these sites isn’t nearly as hard (MOHS) as structures in Egypt or Peru and is mainly sandstone. Nevertheless, the precision work is self-evident to those with design/engineering minds. I’ll get into the deeper details on these in future posts.
I will post each site from Siem Reap as its own gallery archive and will be referencing these in subsequent posts. I plan to build this site out to include, posts, news stories, permanent sections on stone characteristics, structures, sites of interest, technology and theories, etc. For now, enjoy the images.
Obsidian Mirror 