Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

This book is divided into four sections, each one for one of the cities, and further divided into three chapters. The four cities are presented in chronological order from oldest to most recent: Çatalhöyük (Turkey), 7500-5700 BCE; Pompeii (Italy), 700 BCE-79 CE; Angkor (Cambodia), 800-1431 CE; and Cahokia (United States), 1050-1350 CE.

Newitz travelled to each of these places and spoke to archaeologists on site as well as other experts on each area through visits or telephone interviews. She certainly was thorough in her research. The information given is an overview of each site itself, its history, a description of what it’s like today, and reasons it eventually became uninhabited (not “lost”). Despite the title, Newitz explains in the introduction that these cities are not “lost;” this was just the viewpoint of European explorers who later “discovered” them. Each city was known by the local population even after the inhabitants abandoned it.

While Newitz gives detailed information, including input from the archaeologists she consulted with, the language and presentation is for laypeople. It almost reads like a biography of each city. This is an aspect of the book that I enjoyed.

However, she makes many assumptions about the cities’ past which are not referenced or explained, so it’s not clear if this is what she concludes after what she has learned, or if it’s input from one of the archaeologists she consults. For example, in the section about Cahokia, she writes,

“Cahokia grew to such an enormous size because the structure of the city itself was part of its residents’ spiritual and political worldview. But over time that centralized belief system began to crumble.”

But earlier in the section she writes, “Centuries later, Cahokia’s meteoric rise and fall remain a mystery.” And, “…what led to the city’s founding, and its abandonment, remain ambiguous.”

In the section about Çatalhöyük, she concludes, “As the city neared the end of its life, social problems spread like a stain over Çatalhöyük’s homespun community fabric. Though the city’s residents suffered through many misfortunes and survived, it turned out that the one hardship they could not endure was coping with each other.” Yet, again, within the section she mentions that it isn’t known why Çatalhöyük was abandoned. She makes similar assumptions in each section.

Another disappointment is that there are no photos or maps in the book; just hand-drawn pictures at the start of each section. The detailed descriptions of the archaeological sites made me wish there were photographs.

As much as I enjoyed learning specific information about each of the cities, I did not feel that Newitz’s theme for including them all in one book was supported. The book’s blurb states that “Newitz uncovers the intertwined environmental and political factors that doomed these ancient cities – and might signal the fates of our own.” This idea is supported in the introduction where she 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 urban abandonment in human history. The metropolises in this book all met unique ends, but they shared a common point of failure. Each suffered from prolonged periods of political instability coupled with environmental crisis.”

And further, “[These cities] didn’t go missing. People deliberatively abandoned them, for good reasons.”

Not only does she indicate for each city that it’s not known why it was abandoned, but not all of them shared the “common point of failure” she describes. Pompeii, for example, was famously destroyed by a volcanic eruption, not “deliberately abandoned.” Nor is there any evidence given about political instability there. And there is no evidence of either political instability or environmental crisis given for the other cities either.

She also tries to sum up her idea in the epilogue. She writes:

 “The combination of climate change and political instability we face in many modern cities suggests that we’re heading for a period of global urban abandonment.”

I find that hard to believe, since there aren’t as many choices today for rural resettlement as there were in early civilizations. And, interestingly, she doesn’t take into account cities and inhabited places on the earth that have been inhabited since early history and are still thriving.

In any case, she concludes the book by writing, “In a thousand years, we’ll still be working on the urban experiment. Sure, we’ll fail again – but well also learn how to make things right.” So does she think we’ll abandon cities or fix them up? At the end of the book, I’m still not sure.

Ignoring the author’s premise and focusing only on the supported information given for each city, I enjoyed reading this book. It has also inspired me to read further material about each of these cities.