A geology professor believed that aerial photos from the 1950s show evidence of an ancient city under Nakhon Ratchasima in Thailand.
By viewing the landscape from above, researchers discovered a linear embankment positioned off a canal.
The way the embankment forms a near-square with the canal suggests it’s evidence of an ancient civilization.
The old city of Nakhon Ratchasima in northeast Thailand already has a centuries-long history—it was likely formed when King Narai the Great ruled the region’s Ayutthaya Kingdom from 1656 to 1688 A.D. But despite its calling card, Nakhon Ratchasima might not even be the oldest city on its own land. Researchers at Chulalongkorn University believe they’ve found an even older city buried under the central region of this already historic settlement.
In a translated release from the university, Santi Pailoplee, head of the research project that made this doscovery, said that he and his team discovered what they believe to be an ancient city underneath (and twice the size of) Nakhon Ratchasima.
Using aerial photographs taken in 1954 by the Royal Thai Survey Department, Pailoplee’s team scoured the area around the Old Takhong Canal, which is now a densely populated area. They found an ancient earthen embankment that extended in a straight line to the north, west, and east of the canal. The team believes the embankment was once a boundary for another ancient community north of the old city.
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Pailoplee’s team combined the photographs with known behaviors of two streams in the area—which they claimed had “abnormal stream behavior”—to determine that the embankments were once created by an ancient community. The stream behavior matched with other waterways near other ancient Thai communities that had created similar embankments to direct the flow of water, perhaps toward ancient settlements nearby as part of a system of drainage channels.
While sections of the western and eastern embankments now overlap with the city’s moat, the team believes that one of the embankments eventually turned into Chompai Road—the main arterial that cuts through the center of the old city. This road may have been the southern boundary of the ancient community before the old city of Nakhon Ratchasima was founded.
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“The original southern embankment may have been repurposed from its original function as a community boundary marker to become the city’s main central road in old Nakhon Ratchasima,” Pailoplee said.
According to the Chompoi Road hypothesis, the ancient community was nearly a square—not a rectangle, which holds significance. In ancient Khmer culture, water reservoirs were typically rectangular (with a 1:2 ratio in nearly every case), while cities were more often surrounded by a square. Pailoplee said the team measured the ancient city, and found that its dimensions were 1.2 miles wide by one mile long, meaning that the settlement was not only most likely a community, it was about twice the size of the old city of Nakhon Ratchasima and larger than other ancient communities previously discovered in the region.
The next step in sorting out the history, Pailoplee said, will require archaeological surveys and excavations to suss out the accuracy of the aerial interpretation.
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Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.