Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

by Annalee Newitz

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.

the doorway into someone’s home became a boundary saturated with both social and mystical power. Wilson writes that when someone asks to enter a home, they request that the host “expose or reveal something of [her] private domain to neighbors.”8 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.

Humans had the technological ability to build houses long before we started living in them full time. So it wasn’t as if we had a technological breakthrough that led to a new way of thinking. Indeed, it might be the reverse. As societies became more complex, we needed more permanent objects to think about ourselves.

But nobody “lost” Çatalhöyük. Even when the old city was completely empty, people still used it as a cemetery. “In a way the site was never abandoned,” Hodder said. “There are huge numbers of burials up until the Byzantine and early Islamic period [in the 11th century]. People remembered it and used it.” Newcastle University archaeologist Sophie Moore recently found evidence that cemeteries at Çatalhöyük were still being used regularly up until about 300 years ago.1

That’s 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.

“If you take the hundred thousand interactions with the stone in aggregate, all over the city, the absence is thousands of people making the same decision. Now, suddenly, you have a picture of a system of traffic at a place like Pompeii where we had zero evidence ever before.” Poehler paused, and I thought about all the absences in my home city that mark the places where crowds gather: bald trails worn through park grass; the dings in subway paint where commuters have whacked their bags into the walls repeatedly; and yes, the scars in streets where cars took turns too quickly, or bounced as they hit the bottom of one of San Francisco’s many steep hills. In these nicks and cracks, Poehler believes we catch a glimpse of the anonymous masses whose lives have been lost to history.

Despite changing attitudes toward sex in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the sexual objects found at Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum are still kept in a special “Secret Cabinet” area of the Naples Museum. There, curious students of history can gaze in awe at baskets full of clay dicks, or admire charming penis figurines with feet, wings, and their own little penises (yes, they are penises with penises, because you can never have enough luck). Plus, there are elegant statues of gods humping various animals and people.

The khñum debt slavery scenario sounds brutal until you consider that most capitalist cultures in the West use a similar system. In the United States, it’s not unusual for people to graduate from college with so much debt that they have to work their whole lives to pay it off. Others take on debt to pay for a house or buy a car. Though technically all of us can choose what kind of work we do to pay off these debts, it’s rare to find anyone who is doing the exact kind of work they’d like to do. Many of us feel like we’re being told to dig ditches by some distant corporate authority, or risk losing everything. Still, we keep working instead of rising up against the banks, for complicated reasons. Maybe we don’t want to rock the boat because our lives are relatively comfortable, or maybe we need health insurance to pay for a child’s hospitalization, or maybe the corporations seem too powerful to defeat. Those feelings might have kept khñum in line, too.

I stood at the intersection of recent events and deep history, wondering whether every city is doomed to churn endlessly through cycles of violent expansion and abandonment.

It’s tempting to call this a cycle of repeated forgetting and repeating a dark history. But that’s too simplistic. Another possible interpretation is that the Khmer urban tradition is more powerful than the forces that tore it apart. Angkor isn’t a lost civilization; it’s the living legacy of ordinary people who refused to give up.

Cahokians loved to build their homes right on top of the ritualistically closed-up floors of previous ones. They drove new wall posts right into the filled postholes of the last house. When archaeologists excavate a home, they frequently find several floors carefully packed atop each other, each one representing roughly a generation of residents. It’s as if people were giving their houses funeral rites. You might say Cahokians believed their city was alive, but they also accepted that its lifespan was finite.

Ohkay Owingeh author Rebecca Roanhorse writes popular fantasy novels like Trail of Lightning, which incorporates indigenous histories and culture. One recent novel takes place partly at Cahokia, and I caught up with her as she was in the process of writing it. Speaking from her home in New Mexico, she told me that Cahokia is important to her because she wants readers to know that “there were extensive, sophisticated cities and trade routes in the Americas before European invasion.” She imagines the city as very cosmopolitan, with Iron Age technology, busy streets, pens full of animals, and a rivalry with the urbanites living in Chaco Canyon to the south. Unlike many of the archaeologists I spoke with, Roanhorse says she’s not particularly focused on the spirituality of the people who lived at Cahokia. “It’s important to me to say that we had governments, we had hierarchy, we had trade and technology,” she mused. “These are the things that [Europeans] denied we had, and our supposed lack of them was used to justify genocide and taking our land.”

“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. We may not know exactly what Cahokia meant to the people who lived there, but their traditions thrive in revitalized communities, reconfigured in the wake of the political disaster that was European colonialism. As Roanhorse and other indigenous artists have pointed out, tribal cultures today survived an apocalypse and are building something new. Cahokia is part of a history of indigenous American social movements that recently took the form of protests to stop an oil pipeline on land that belongs to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The ancient city’s political spirit survives in these kinds of movements, which are focused on how people should shape the earth.

That said, 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 droughts while its city grid expanded and fragmented, but that wasn’t enough to drive populations away for good. But cities today are dealing with more than fires and floods. Globally, we’re in a period of political instability and authoritarian nationalism. Unfortunately, evidence from history shows that this can be a death knell for cities. Though powerful leaders can mobilize labor for massive infrastructure projects, this kind of top-down system of urban development rarely remains stable for long. An abused labor force is an unhappy labor force, and that’s how abandonments start—especially when politics steer city design, rather than sensible engineering.

But if we’ve learned anything from history, we know the death of a few cities doesn’t mean the world will collapse into dystopia. We will survive the urban end times, just like so many people did when they abandoned Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia. The question is, what will we do next?