Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

I would have liked this book better as a print book because I had a hard time picturing some of the structures, mainly Çatalhöyük and somewhat Angkor. The section on Cahokia was particularly strong and I think Newitz made excellent points about popular misconceptions about Native American civilization. The epilogue was possibly the most thought provoking art of the book and I immediately saw Newitz's skills with speculative fiction grounded in reality.

Lost cities they are not, or at least not anymore. The author takes us to 4 cities that were abandoned or destroyed centuries ago, in Turkey, Pompeii, Angkor in Cambodia, and Cahokia in the USA. She describes each in depth—origins, everyday life, ups and downs, their extraordinary scope geographically and longevity, and rapid destruction (Pompeii) or slow abandonment. Newitz often takes issue with the title of the book. It seems she’s heard the cities called “lost” one too many times, so she planted the seed that they are lost in the title, then rebutted that premise. This is a fantastic book. I enjoyed it so much. It’s an “easy” nonfiction read because it’s so well written, while being comprehensive.

This book is part memoir and part history. It covers the history of four ancient cities that have been deserted for centuries. The four cities are: Çatalhöyük (Turkey), Pompeii (Italy), Angkor (Cambodia), and Cahokia (US). Newitz visited each site, interviewed experts, and recounts what has been discovered, focusing on how the people lived and how the city died out.

My favorite is the first part set in Çatalhöyük. I think it is a brilliant move by the author to follow what can be gleaned of the life of a regular person. A female skeleton, named Dido by archeologists, was found at the site, along with relics of her home life. It really helps bring the history to life. Since so much time has passed, they have to speculate, but it is show more based on logical reasoning and the author tells us how they came to those conclusions.

The Pompeii section contains lots of information I had already known, but there are some new tidbits, such as where the people went after they evacuated in the wake of the eruption of Vesuvius. The Angkor section shows how important it is to plan a city, rather than place the water source at the whim of the person in charge. The final section portrays life in an ancient city near St. Louis. I did not know much about this site and found this section informative.

This book is filled with fascinating facts about how people lived in ancient times. Other accounts call them “lost” cities, but the author points out that they were abandoned over a period of time for a variety of reasons. If you enjoy archeology or sociology, as I do, you may want to check it out. show less

The allure of "lost cities" is a strong one; many of us love the story of one lost city or another. Annalee Newitz gives us the stories of four of them--Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site in Turkey; Pompeii, on the Italian coast and the slope of Mt. Vesuvius; medieval Angkor in Cambodia; Cahokia, an indigenous North American metropolis at the site that's now East St. Louis.

Newitz looks at each of these cities using new developments and techniques in archaeology to consider the cities and their culture through the lives of the average residents as well as the elites.

Çatalhöyük is built in layers--houses being abandoned and, after some gap in time, new houses being built over them, with streets and walkways on top of the current layer of show more houses. Workers carried something very like business cards, identifying their trades and other affiliations, in the first human settlement large enough that you didn't, couldn't know everyone.

In Pompeii, freed slaves, their offspring, and lower-ranked citizens would buy the former villas of the elites, and turn them into shops, workshops, and apartments--often trying to preserve the look of an elite villa as much as they could. Freed slaves took their former owner's family name as their own new family name, and maintained connections and obligations to them. As a vacation city, Pompeii had a thriving commercial culture, until the volcano ended it.

Angkor was a city of temples, and dependent on excellent water management because of its environment. Unfortunately, while some of the water management decisions were grounded in solid engineering, others were grounded in politics and religious ideas of advantageous orientation. Labor management was also very much top-down, and not every ruler did that wisely or with a sense of the limits of what people would tolerate.

Cahokia, center of the Mississippian culture, was built around a series of public squares, where public meetings, religious meetings, sports, and entertainment all happened. There was not one single center to the city, but public squares in every part of it, with people coming from all over to participate in major festivals. There seems to have been no particular organized system of economic exchange, with families, neighborhoods, and other types of groups reaching arrangements that worked for them. Cahokia wasn't about economics; it was about their thriving, shared religion.

What's really striking and exciting about Newitz's account, though, is about how none of these "lost cities" were ever truly lost. The local populations not only knew where they were, but in the all except Pompeii, which became a toxic ruin in the aftermath of the Vesuvius eruption, continued to use the area, though in different ways, as the environment and the local culture changed. Angkor in particular is an outrageous case of misrepresentation. A Frenchman "found" the city around the time the French took control of Cambodia as a colony. At the time, the population was low compared to earlier periods, but monks were at the temple still conducting religious ceremonies, and there's ample documentation of foreign visitors, including from China, visiting the city. The French had to kick the monks out of the temple in order to pursue their own plans of making it a French "discovery" and tourist attraction.

Çatalhöyük's neighbors knew where it was, dug up artifacts while ploughing their fields, and sometimes using bits and pieces from it. Cahokia's population dispersed but didn't disappear, though the Eurasian diseases brought by Europeans eventually devastated what was left before Europeans even reached the area--and it's still populated now. Mostly by the descendants of Europeans and Africans, and we do call it East St. Louis, now. Yet the area never ceased to be a population center, even though the uses and organization have changed.

Pompeii did die, of course, but not due to the fall of its civilization. The place merely became uninhabitable. Rome's government organized a major humanitarian relief project, originally intending to rebuild as had happened after earthquakes. When that clearly couldn't be done, the relief went to resettling the surviving residents instead--and many of those people continued to identify as being from Pompeii, and maintained contact with their Pompeiian neighbors and connections.

Urbanization changes, but it doesn't go away.

And yes, Newitz makes this much more interesting than I do, while Chloe Cannon helps by doing an excellent job as the narrator.

Highly recommended.

I bought this audiobook. show less

What a totally enjoyable read! Sh does have a basic premise, that cities have a normal ebb and flow and do not really rise and catastrophically collapse but mostly I just loved learning a ton about 4 ancient cities that I knew very little about and two I had not heard of at all. Throwing some serious shade a at Jared Diamond was just a lovely added bonus.

I enjoy reading about ancient cultures because I like imagining what life was like back then and imagining how people felt and acted in ways that are very similar to what I feel and do today. Unfortunately, most history books are just too dense and difficult to read, and they don’t often explore the thoughts and feelings people might have been having, instead focusing only on objective facts. While this is obviously important from an academic context, I think it’s important to make note of the humanity of ancient cultures and find the similarities between then and now.
In Four Lost Cities, Newitz does an admirable job of this. She makes it a point to focus on the lives of ordinary people in these ancient cities, though she also show more describes the elite and royalty.
She talks about a woman whose remains were unearthed at Çatalhöyük, nicknamed Dido by the archaeologist that discovered her. Newitz imagines what Dido’s life may have been like, using clues from the artifacts found at the site of the ancient city: the people of Çatalhöyük lived in very small quarters and often cooked in them, which may be why Dido’s remains showed signs of black lung disease.
At Pompeii, Newitz viewed the remains of a taberna, a Pompeiian pub or bar. The researcher accompanying her described how well-stocked it had been at the time of the eruption, noting that among the various wines there was one that had come all the way from Gaza. She said that she likes to imagine that the owner of the taberna wanted to offer his patrons something special.
Not only does Newitz discuss the aspects of everyday life unearthed at the sites of these cities, but she also describes what may have led to their downfall. While reading about things like infrastructure isn’t very interesting to me, I appreciated how her writing made it accessible and easy to understand. Much of the information about these cities comes from inferences made from the remnants that were left behind, but Newitz can turn these fragments of information into a narrative. She compares aspects of ancient cultures, politics, and rituals to modern-day ones, such as how the flooding at Angkor and the eruption of Vesuvius mirror the effects of modern climate catastrophes on city life. Even though these cities are ancient, knowing that there were things like shelters in nearby cities for Pompeiian refugees and large-scale sports events in Cahokia reminds us that the people who lived in those cities were, in many ways, just like us.
I think the aspects of this book that I didn’t like speak more to my struggling to read it than to any issues with the book itself. I love to read nonfiction that is interesting and engaging, and for the most part I found Four Lost Cities to be both. If a nonfiction book (or really, any book) doesn’t keep me engaged and interested, I stop wanting to read it, which is what I found happening with this book. I usually read while I work out, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t feel very compelled to read about ancient infrastructures while on a stationary bike. I don’t think this is an issue with the writing but rather the fact that some aspects of the book were more interesting to me than others. I’m more interested in descriptions of ancient culture and everyday life than I am in descriptions of ancient politics and infrastructure. show less

Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz is a highly recommended entertaining and informative look at four cities from history that were abandoned. Everyone loves a good lost city story, but these cities weren't actually lost, people knew they existed, but they were deserted.

Newitz writes: "Modern metropolises are by no means destined to live forever, and historical evidence shows that people have chosen to abandon them repeatedly over the past eight thousand years. It’s terrifying to realize that most of humanity lives in places that are destined to die. The myth of the lost city obscures the reality of how people destroy their civilizations. This book is about that reality, which we’ll explore in four of the most spectacular examples of show more urban abandonment in human history." The four ancient cities examined are Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia.

Çatalhöyük is a Neolithic site buried beneath two low hills in the Anatolian region of Central Turkey that was founded around 9,000 years ago. People here were settling down into agricultural life after living as nomads. The population was probably between 5,000 and 20,000 for about a millennium. Pompeii is the most well known city. It was a Roman tourist town on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean until the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 and buried the city under a deep layer of volcanic ash. The medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia experienced a slow-motion abandonment and destruction as the city was hit by climate catastrophes lasting a century. The indigenous metropolis Cahokia was the largest city in North America before the arrival of Europeans. It grew from a small village located on the Mississippi River bottom where East St. Louis is today to a sprawling metropolis of over 30,000 people and covered both sides of the river. The many groups of people who composed this city and shared spiritual practices eventually experienced several droughts which changed their practices, and they divided back into their individual groups and left.

Four Lost Cities is written in a very accessible manner, so even the layperson who is interested in archaeology but hardly a scholar, can easily understand the information Newitz presents. They traveled to all four sites and talked to many of the researchers and scientists studying the sites and they share the new, cutting edge theories and interpretations of what life was like in the cities, before, during and after their decline. And that is the really interesting fact - these cities experienced a slow decline, with the obvious exception of Pompeii, that occurred over decades or longer. People chose to leave the cities, and for good reasons. Each of the cities encountered lengthy periods of political instability joined with major environmental problems.

Personally I found Newitz's focus on the everyday people that built and populated these cities and their functions in that particular society fascinating. It is also refreshing to see the new archaeological focus on how each society likely function rather than observing it through the lens of Western Civilization. All of the observations shared are well-researched. They talked to the experts currently involved with the sites and information is included in chapter notes if you would like to pursue more information.

My review copy was courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company via Netgalley.

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