SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA—Colors that are too faint to be seen with the naked eye have been revealed with digitally enhanced photographs taken of the walls of Angkor Wat, according to a study published in Antiquity. Researchers photographed traces of red and black pigments on the walls with bright flash, and then employed decorrelation stretch analysis, which has also been used to study rock art and images of the Martian landscape. Science Shot reports that the team, consisting of Noel Hidalgo Tan of Australian National University, and Im Sokrithy, Heng Than, and Khieu Chan of the Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap, found more than 200 paintings of boats, deities, buildings, and animals drawn on the temple’s walls. Most of the drawings seem to be graffiti left after Angkor Wat was abandoned in 1431, but a group of scenes in one of the temple’s towers may have been painted as part of a restoration program in the sixteenth century, when the complex was converted from a Hindu temple into a Buddhist shrine.
