Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

by Annalee Newitz

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.

Creating cities was in many ways about organizing labor, whether by force or by enticement. Usually it was a combination of both. And when their cities stumbled politically and environmentally, laborers felt the squeeze more than anyone else. They had to decide whether they should stay and clean up, or start again somewhere else.

Domestication appears to be a self-reinforcing process: humans were drawn to domestic foods, which transformed our bodies, and over time our bodies were better suited to those foods, which made them all the more alluring.

As nomads, humans had very little alone time. Space was shared, and houses were collapsible, providing courtesy screens rather than actual separation from the group.

Urban society is full of closed doors and hidden rooms, which gave people a new way to interact with each other, exposing only parts of themselves. Ironically, it took the invention of a city for people to conceive of being alone, away from the crowd. Put another way, the concept of privacy had arrived, and with it the concept of a public.

Suddenly it was obvious that I wasn’t in some pure, distilled version of ancient Rome, preserved for thousands of years. I was in the ruins of a diverse urban community, whose population came from many places, and fused the traditions of North Africa and Rome into something that was uniquely Pompeii. And just as all New Yorkers are not the same, neither were all Pompeiians.

Interestingly, data from the modern world suggests that the more restaurants we see in a given area, the more prosperous it is.4 That seems to have held in the distant past as well.

What might surprise us is how similar the Roman government’s response was to what we hope for in Western democracies of the early 21st century. Emperor Titus toured the disaster sites, and subsequently offered survivors financial support to rebuild their lives. Suetonius, who published a biography of Titus in the early 120s, explains: “Immediately [Titus] chose commissioners by lot from among the ex-consuls for the restoration of Campania; the property of those extinguished by Vesuvius, and who had no surviving heirs, he donated to the restoration of the affected cities.”

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.

brought us back to discussing the poor engineering at the West Baray. I wondered aloud if there were engineers beating their heads against the wall a thousand years ago when their king told them the West Baray had to be oriented east-west. “That would never be in an inscription,” Evans laughed.

Villages were enclaves of familiarity and sameness. But, she writes, “In urban settlements, unfamiliarity became the measure of human relations.” Villagers who moved to work in Angkor were their own form of attraction for other would-be immigrants. Saskia Sassen, a sociologist who studies modern cities, echoes this sentiment, arguing that cities are places for delightful chance meetings and life-changing random encounters.

As Angkor’s population left in what archaeologists call an urban diaspora, they returned to village life centered around Theravada Buddhist pagodas. There are parallels here to Çatalhöyük, whose people scattered from a dense urban core into small villages on the Konya Plain. Stark writes that the Lower Mekong Basin filled with a “rural agrarian system of hamlets and small towns whose farmers and artisans continued to pursue their livelihoods: perhaps with less direct state intervention.” What collapsed wasn’t Angkorian civilization, but “the political and urban core of an elite.”

The Khmer continued to live at Angkor long after their kings were gone, remolding the land until it resembled the farms and villages that had occupied it in the 700s. Likewise, the Khmer returned to Phnom Penh to reoccupy the city in new ways after Pol Pot’s troops fled north to Preah Vihear.

By the 1970s, archaeologists and urban historians had accumulated loads of evidence that urban civilizations have no set developmental pattern. Plenty of cities, including Angkor and Cahokia, are organized around nonmarket principles. Metropolitan areas expand and contract with waves of immigration over time. When a city’s population breaks apart into smaller villages, that isn’t a failure. It’s simply a transformation,

often based on sound survival strategies. The culture of that city lives on in the traditions of people whose ancestors lived there, many of whom will go on to build new cities in its image. Civilizations might cycle through a number of high-density urban phases and dispersal phases over the course of centuries.

They argue that civilizations like the one on Easter Island were decimated by the political process of colonialism, not poor environmental practices. And when it comes to Mayan “collapse,” they point out that there are still millions of Mayans living in Mexico.

Today, most archaeologists who study ancient cities refuse to use the term “collapse” at all, preferring instead to describe social change.

Maybe all our cities are in constant cycles of centralization and dispersal; or, if we think with our galaxy brains, they are temporary stops on the long road of human public history.

In the late 20th century, Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor coined the term “survivance” to describe American indigenous cultures today. Though the term is intended to be ambiguous, he sums up part of its meaning in his book Manifest Manners: “Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.” Like Santiago X, Vizenor looks to an indigenous future full of living cultures that are always transforming.