The Sandy Mound which has been supporting Bayon Tower in Angkor under Squall in the past 700 years but still needs countermeasures in the coming global warming climate
The Sandy Mound which has been supporting Bayon Tower in Angkor under Squall in the past 700 years but still needs countermeasures in the coming global warming climate
After the civil war in 1970 and the war against Vietnam from 1978 to 1989, the Japanese government organized an international meeting in 1990 titled the Tokyo Conference for Cambodia with the aim to discuss how to cooperate to keep the peace of the country. An international governmental meeting was held in Japan in 1992 by UNESCO to discuss how to safeguard the Angkor Monuments in Cambodia. The Japanese Government Team for Safeguarding Angkor (JSA) was organized in 1994 to study and to safeguard the Angor monuments. JSA started to study the topography, geology, construction, and monuments of Angkor. Among the many temples in the Angkor Archaeological Park, JSA selected Bayon Temple located at the center of Angkor Thom as the primary focus of research. A thick foundation mound was identified as consisting of dense sandy soil supporting the Central Tower of Bayon of 42 m in height without special foundations as stone columns, pilings, or other support mechanisms. This paper describes a special characteristic of the sandy soil that supported the Tower for 700 years, however the tower still needs additional countermeasures for safeguarding against the continuous rain in a potential global warming climate.
Yoshinori Iwasaki; M. Fukuda; M. Ishizuka; T. Nakagawa; Robert McCarthy
4th International Symposium on the Preservation of Monuments and Historic Sites
Case Histories in Heritage Preservation
https://doi.org/10.53243/tc301-2026-61