Angkor Wat mystery solved?

(LiveScience.com)

Aerial view of central temple at Angkor Wat, showing the moat and causeway and the central tower surrounded by four smaller towers. The suburbs surrounding the central city were the largest suburbs in the world all due to water management with 1,000,000+ inhabitants (Alexey Stiop/livescience.com).

  

Angkor Wat Buddha faces (Dvillaret/flickr.com)

The massive sandstone bricks used to construct the 12th-century temple of [Cambodia's] Angkor Wat were brought to the site via a network of hundreds of [artificial] canals, according to new research.

  

The findings shed light on how the site's 5 million to 10 million bricks, some weighing up to 3,300 pounds (1,500 kgs), made it to the temple from quarries at the base of a nearby mountain [with technology from space].

  

"We found many quarries of sandstone blocks used for the [Buddhist and Hindu] Angkor temples and also the transportation route of the sandstone blocks," wrote study co-author Estuo Uchida of Japan's Waseda University, in an email. More

• Ancient temple ruins dot Cambodia