Do you like history? Not the dry, memorizing dates history. Not the “gloss over the atrocities we committed” history. No, I mean the “how people used to live, how they built societies” sort of history. Archeology sort of history. If so, you’ll enjoy Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz.
The Concept
People have been building cities for thousands of years. Sometimes those cities are just built over again and again, but other times, the cities are abandoned by their populations and temporarily lost to time. What causes people to leave cities behind? And are they ever truly “lost”? What lessons can we take from the past as we look to our own future?
Newitz examines four abandoned cities around the world, built by different cultures at different periods of time, and all abandoned for various reasons. Along the way, they visit the cities, speak with experts, and examine the sometimes conflicting theories about the cities and the people who lived in them.
The Cities
The four cities profiled are Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia. Each city has its own section in the book with a few chapters each exploring the construction of the city, what we know or think we know about the people who lived there, and what caused the city to be abandoned.
Çatalhöyük is the first known city and it has a really fascinating construction similar to a beehive. Because the city’s people didn’t leave behind written records, much of what we “know” about the city consists of educated guesses, and over the years since archeologists first started excavating it, these theories have been largely influenced by the researcher’s prejudices and the pet theories of the day.
Pompeii is the one city in this book that we’re probably all the most familiar with, due to its fiery volcanic demise and the fact that it’s pretty well-preserved once you get through the lava and volcanic ash. Of the four cities, it’s the one that feels the most like a modern city today, especially when you read about their mixed-use developments, with storefronts and housing occupying a shared space.
Angkor doesn’t even count as a truly lost city, as people have continued to live in it even once the majority of the population left it. Still, because most of the city was built out of biodegradable materials, many of the buildings have been lost to time, and its population has dwindled quite a bit from its heyday, when it’s believed as many as 900,000 people lived there! If those calculations are correct it would have been the biggest city in the world at the time.
Cahokia is another city whose inhabitants didn’t leave written records behind, and in typical American fashion, we destroyed part of it to make way for construction. It is also the youngest of the cities profiled in the book. It’s theorized that rather than being built to facilitate commerce, it may have been sort of a religious center for some sort of revival, and that things may have fallen apart after the religious leaders decided to pull away from the common people.
Why It Worked for Me
Four Lost Cities succeeds on a couple of levels. One is that Newitz is just a good writer. They weave a great narration around each city, combining facts and imaginings about the people who lived in each city, and painting vivid pictures of the experts they interact with. Plus, Newitz is a science fiction writer who founded io9. There’s the occasional SFF media reference as well as a sort of nerdy enthusiasm. This is not a dry book!
There are a lot of fun contrasts at play here. Researchers use lidar to map out the layout of Angkor; they also carefully use shovels to scrape layers of clay soil away in Cahokia. Newitz meets people in ruined Pompeii estates and midwestern Mexican restaurants.
Also, Newitz somewhat disagrees with their own title. These cities aren’t truly lost; in all cases, people knew where they were, and often society continued to interact with them in some way even after they were largely abandoned (such as interring their dead in the old cities). But additionally, the people who left these cities took their culture with them wherever they went. No city was truly wiped out, people just left because of politics or weather patterns or y’know LAVA.
Who Will Like This Book?
Obviously, this is a book for people who generally enjoy archeology, anthropology, and history.
I think Four Lost Cities would be a great resource for science fiction and fantasy writers, as well as anyone who builds worlds for games. Seeing how each city was built and functioned should provide great inspiration for building your own cities and societies.
Parents might want to share this one with teens who are showing an interest in history, or in creating their own worlds via writing and gaming. My spouse and I read this together and enjoyed discussing it; I could see it also being a fun family discussion. You could also share it with people of any age who have this idea that non-fiction and history are “boring.” Show them how wrong they are!