Alan's Reviews > Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

Rec. by: Rachel; previous work
Rec. for: Urbanites

Why did our ancestors leave the freedom of the open land for cramped, stinky warrens full of human waste and endless political drama?
—p.11

Why, indeed—and why would we? That is one of the primary questions Annalee Newitz seeks to answer in Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age—a book whose title, Newitz is quick to explain, is misleading. These cities are not lost and, mostly, never were:

{...} terms like "lost city" and "civilizational collapse" are the wrong ones to use in a case like this. Instead, it's more accurate to say the city underwent a transition. Indeed, there was never a time when Çatalhöyük wasn't in transition from one kind of cultural arrangement to the next.
—pp.60-61

Newitz examines four places where ancient cities rose and then... transitioned into archeological sites: Çatalhöyük (in modern Turkiye); Pompeii in southern Italy; Angkor in modern Cambodia; and Cahokia, along the Mississippi River in central North America.

The section on Pompeii was the most interesting for me, mainly because my wife and I have actually been there, back in 2022, and seen firsthand some of the same features that Newitz highlights. Pompeii stands out from the other cities in Four Lost Cities as well, in that its habitation really was terminated abruptly, in 79 C.E., when Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the thriving Roman town in hot and toxic ash. The other places on Newitz' list lost their populations much more gradually, and the Italian city's burial and eventual rediscovery by early archaeologists make it "a meta-archaeological site, revealing ancient history right alongside the history of archaeology as a field." (p.99)

Pompeii was a town for revelry, renowned for its beauty and tasty food. It was the naughty but beloved stepdaughter to the stately, powerful city of Rome. When it was lost in a moment of uncontrollable, terrifying violence, it caused an historical trauma that went beyond the horror of losing thousands of lives. Public spaces had been destroyed, and with them a part of Roman identity.
—p.124

Annalee Newitz draws lessons from the past to apply to the present:

Looking back on Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia, it's not hard to figure out what keeps a city vital: resilient infrastructure like good reservoirs and roads, accessible public plazas, domestic spaces for everyone, social mobility, and leaders who treat the city's workers with dignity. This is not such a tall order, especially when you consider that thousands of years ago, our ancestors managed to maintain healthy cities for centuries at a time.
—p.261

And this paragraph, I think, strikes at the heart of Newitz' thesis—and why Four Lost Cities is as directly relevant as it is right now:

In the soft apocalypse at Angkor, we can see directly what happens when political instability meets climate catastrophe. It looks chillingly similar to what cities are enduring in the contemporary world. But in the dramatic history of the Khmer culture's coalescence and survival, we can see something equally powerful: human resilience in the face of profound hardship.
—p.147

The End Notes provide helpful citations bolstering Newitz' careful research, but I quickly realized that it's not necessary to flip back and forth to read them in line with the text.

*

It took me a long time to get to this review, I'm afraid. Part of that is because I allowed myself to be caught by surprise (despite ample advance notice!) when my beloved local branch library closed for renovations—which are I suppose an indicator that the city I live in is not yet lost.

I needed to get some holds from my to-read list into my personal pipeline. And as it turns out, Four Lost Cities was a very good place to start with that.