Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

by Annalee Newitz

The myth of the lost city obscures the reality of how people destroy their civilizations.

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.

The first city we’ll explore in this book, Çatalhöyük, was founded roughly 9,000 years ago during the Neolithic,

The next city we’ll explore was never forgotten, though its exact location appears to have gone missing for a time. Pompeii, a Roman tourist town on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, was buried deep under volcanic ash after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.

Fifteen hundred years later, Angkor suffered a slow-motion version of the catastrophe that Pompeii experienced in just one day. Instead of a single volcanic eruption, the city was pummeled by climate crisis lasting a century.

Meanwhile, in the Americas, another great medieval city expanded and contracted, its reversal of fortunes recorded indelibly on the landscape. Cahokia was the largest city in North America before the arrival of Europeans, growing from a small riverside village in the Mississippi River bottom to a sprawling metropolis of over 30,000 people whose holdings straddled two sides of the river.

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.

You might say that people went from identifying with each other to identifying with a special, shared location. Symbolic landscapes replaced the nomadic tribe, both literally and emotionally.

the difficult part about studying cities: they are not static entities that remain the same over time before suddenly disappearing into nothingness. At any given moment, they are a composite of many social groups, who likely view city life in different ways. And those social groups also change over time, altering the physical and symbolic fabric of the city to reflect their worldviews. Until they stop wanting to live together.

With some exceptions, cities are typically abandoned the same way Hodder describes them being originally populated. Thousands of small acts empty them out, each one a hard choice.

In the modern world, psychologists say that moving is one of the hardest life changes people experience, causing feelings of isolation, loss, and depression.

In 2011, the US Presidential Task Force on Immigration identified a number of hardships commonly faced by immigrants,4 ranging from the difficulty of learning new languages and cultural norms, to dealing with prejudice and lack of access to resources.

Many researchers have noticed that the slow migration to the West Mound coincides roughly with a period of rapid climate change that starts around 6200 BCE.5 During this time, Earth was emerging from an ice age

This climate shift, referred to rather blandly by climate scientists as “the 8.2k event” because it happened 8.2 thousand years ago, has been so widely documented by scientists that it serves as a model for how climate change works.

If the rapid glacier melt we’re seeing today7 released an amount of icy freshwater into our seas equivalent to what flowed from Agassiz and Ojibway, temperatures in Asia, North America, and northern Europe would drop by over 5°F. Meanwhile, temperatures would increase by 4°F in areas throughout Australia, South America, and southern Africa. Droughts would follow, wreaking havoc on agriculture in Europe and North America, while winter storms and winds would intensify, especially in the Pacific. Famine, wildfires, and floods would come next.

People in places like Çatalhöyük, he explains, had inherited their ideas about community and spirituality partly from their nomadic forebears. Because nomadic life requires everyone in the group to share resources to survive,

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.

Spiro Kostof argues that all city layouts can be grouped into two basic types: organic and grid.

Organic city plans are ad hoc, with winding roads and ever-changing improvised structures

Then there are cities buil...

The culprit behind this network failure was climate fluctuation. Penny writes that the late 14th and early 15th centuries presented Angkorites with incredible challenges. A multidecade drought led people to build many extra canals to siphon as much water as they could out of the mountains. But the drought abruptly ended with several years of unusually intense rainy seasons, which had two disastrous effects. First the rain overwhelmed a system designed to bring as much water as possible into the city, causing floods and the need to build those massive runoff canals into the Tonle Sap. Second, the monsoons rapidly eroded the dry, dusty landscape, sweeping tons of debris into the canal system. And that caused sediment to build up and block the water supply when it was needed. Adding to Angkor’s troubles, the floods were followed by another multidecade drought.

When regions are hit repeatedly by storms, he told me, “no matter how wealthy a country is … they never quite make it back to baseline GDP.” Repairing the infrastructure is so expensive that it’s impossible to return to their previous economic baseline.

He calls this “sandcastle depreciation,”13 and noted that any civilization, no matter what level it is at, will slowly melt away under this repeated onslaught. Angkor likely suffered from a version of sandcastle depreciation, with each hit to its infrastructure leaving the region less prosperous overall.

Damian Evans, who tracked the city’s ever-changing waterways via lidar, likens this stage in Angkor’s history to what cities are dealing with right now. City planners are struggling with centuries of “legacy infrastructure” that wasn’t built to withstand extreme conditions caused by climate crisis.

We can’t be sure if people attending them were experiencing something that medieval Europeans would have called church, or something that contemporary Americans would call a Star Wars movie. Most likely, it was a bit of both, depending on the circumstances.

Or in othe words we have no clue but it makes a good story.

Archaeologists have found the bodies of sacrificial victims surrounded by many offerings, including the disinterred bones of ancestors that people brought to rebury with the newly dead. What happened next is reminiscent of the Death Pit at Domuztepe in Turkey. After the stage was heaped with bodies, bones, and riches, it was covered over with earth, and tamped down to form a peaked top like the one on Rattlesnake Mound.

Human sacrifices were no more out of the ordinary to Cahokians than the grisly executions of infidels were to their contemporaries in Europe. In both Europe and the Americas at this time, sacrifice was a public spectacle, used to solidify social norms and hierarchies. In European countries, executions in the town square were a way for rulers to show their power and purge their enemies.

Early European settlers in the Americas also lovingly recorded their public executions of infidels at colonies in Plymouth and Salem. Like these European executions, human sacrifices at Cahokia may have served to reinforce a social hierarchy whose rulers stood on the top of Monks Mound.

Over a third of Cahokia’s population were immigrants who had been born and raised far from the city.14 We know this because scientists use a process called stable isotope analysis that reveals where a person grew up.

Cahokia may have drawn people in with its political power, but the city was also a place where humans did extremely mundane things, like farm, hunt, maintain infrastructure, and raise families.

The city’s farmlands, which produced several kinds of fatty seed grains, as well as fruits, squash, beans, and corn, fed more than 30,000 people at the city’s height between 1050 and 1250. It would have been possible to walk roughly 19 kilometers from Monks Mound to the Mississippi River, take a canoe across, and continue walking for another several kilometers, without ever really leaving the city and its farms.

By the 1970s, archaeologists and urban historians had accumulated loads of evidence that urban civilizations have no set developmental pattern.

The collapse hypothesis was nearly dead when Jared Diamond published his popular book Collapse in 2005. Based mostly on anecdotal evidence from cultures like the Maya and Polynesians on Easter Island, he argues that societies “collapse,” or fail, when they engage in environmentally unsound practices. His argument played into a lot of myths about how cities work, including the idea that cultures are wiped out when their high-density settlements disappear. As we’ve seen with the cities in this book, urban abandonment does not mean some kind of cultural death. Usually it means that city people have migrated elsewhere, bringing the values, art, and technologies of the city with them to new homes. Diamond is right to highlight environment as a contributing factor in urban dissolution, but that’s only one part of the story. Abandonment is most importantly a political process.

Immediately after Collapse came out, many archaeologists and anthropologists scrambled to correct misconceptions and errors in Diamond’s account. Anthropologists Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee published a volume called Questioning Collapse, an anthology of scholars who present hard data showing that Diamond’s idea of “collapse” was scientifically unsound.

Though most prefer to provide counterevidence as a corrective, others have gotten fed up. American studies scholar David Correia published an essay about Diamond’s work called simply “F**k Jared Diamond.”3 Correia calls out Diamond’s “environmental determinism,” which leaves out the crucial political aspects of urban transformation. Meanwhile, anthropologists David Graeber and David Wingrow take issue with the way Diamond suggests that civilizations at their peak are always hierarchical, and that those hierarchies can only be dislodged by environmental catastrophe followed by a collapse.

Ultimately, the point Graeber and other anti-collapse scholars are making is that there is no one path to urbanism and social complexity. More importantly, urban abandonment does not lead to social collapse. People are resilient, and our cultures can survive volcanoes and floods, even if our cities don’t.

Diamond’s environmental determinist perspective suggests that this sphere collapses when people mismanage their natural resources. What he gets wrong is that the public is diverse and always changing. And often, these changes can be seen clearly in city layouts. By ignoring this capacity for change, Diamond has injected a popular nihilism into stories about city-building. He suggests some civilizations are doomed to fail, while others will inevitably succeed. Perhaps a better way to look at cities is as ecosystems whose components are always transforming, and whose boundaries expand and contract naturally.

We see the same pattern at Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia. Though contractions in the cities’ populations had different causes and effects, each was precipitated by the thorny problem of managing an enormous piece of human-built infrastructure in a constantly changing environment. Managing the humans themselves was an even bigger problem. Cities are concrete embodiments of human labor, and we can read the dissolution of their publics in the crumbling of walls, reservoirs, and plazas.

Today, cities on the coasts and islands are imperiled by chaotic weather that’s becoming more likely due to climate change. In 2019, cities along the Mississippi River were flooded on an unprecedented scale,1 harming communities as well as farms. Meanwhile, heat waves are increasing across the globe;2 in cities they are magnified by the urban heat island effect, where temperatures rise several degrees higher than in greener areas. Sweltering temperatures also mean water infrastructures will be stressed, like Angkor’s were. Wildfires will claim more cities, reducing them to ash as swiftly as Vesuvius wrecked Pompeii in 79. Los Angeles narrowly missed being eaten by the Woolsey Fire in 2018; cities throughout the West spent most of summer and fall 2020 shrouded in wildfire smoke; and across the globe in Australia, fire seasons are growing even more intense. And infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more common across the globe, some exploding into deadly pandemics. Arguably, many people living in cities today are dealing with climate and health crises that will make it more difficult to maintain infrastructure and homes.

we have ample evidence from history that cities can survive in adverse environments. The people of Çatalhöyük outlasted a drought by changing their diets. Even after Angkor had been parched, then flooded, a large population persisted there for centuries, patching up infrastructure. Refugees from Pompeii moved to new cities where they enjoyed prosperity, living alongside their former neighbors. Cahokia went through multiple d...

Troubled urban leadership can trigger a diaspora, which is what appears to have happened at Çatalhöyük, Angkor, and Cahokia. That said, we have a counterexample at Pompeii, where the government stepped in to offer humanitarian aid and disaster relief to the city’s refugees. Though Pompeii had to be abandoned, its people did not walk away from Roman city life.

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. As cities become more unlivable, people will die. The number of people who perish in floods, fires, and pandemics will swell beyond anything we’ve seen before, and scenes of broken cities littered with bodies will become commonplace. It’s only a matter of time before another hurricane-ravaged city falls prey to a plague that can’t be stopped because governments refused to spend money on rescue efforts.3 Civil unrest and widening class divisions will exacerbate these problems. If our political systems can’t address the twin problems of climate and poverty, there will be more food and water riots, as well as global wars over natural resources. The costs of city life will far outweigh the benefits, sparking mass migrations of people seeking new homes—and more international conflicts.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson we can learn from the history of urban abandonment is that human communities are remarkably resilient. Cities may die, but our cultures and traditions survive.