Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

Written by Annalee Newitz

Narrated by Chloe Cannon

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy's southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.

Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers-slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers-who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia.

Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781696600392

Annalee Newitz

ANNALEE NEWITZ is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and have written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and then became Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award.

Reviews for Four Lost Cities

[Lucian Childs · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The allure of the lost city is almost as old as cities themselves. Atlantis, The Lost City of Z, Xanadu, Shambala. Being so attached to the cities where most of us live, we fear one day they might follow their ancient or mythical counterparts into oblivion.

Part travelogue, part science writing, part archeological treasure hunt, “Four Lost Cities” traces the rise and fall of Çatakhöyuk, Pompeii, Angkor and Chokia. To answer the mystery of their abandonment, Newitz delineates the reasons people banded together in cities in the first place. Turns out, they weren’t so different from our own: entertainment, connection—whether it be on the social, commercial or spiritual planes.

Of the four, only Pompeii is a city as we know it, a place for commerce, a warren of small streets and grand public places walled off from the means that sustained it. The built environment/agricultural divide in the others was porous—small farms and villages tucked among grand ceremonial complexes. In Angkor and Cahokia, the principal attraction of these urban cores wasn’t commerce, but ceremonial entertainment. There, lavish theatrical events unified an enthralled citizenry and fostered an identity larger than village or tribe.

Newitz explains the principal of “survivance,” where cities fall, but the cultures they spawned remain. Viewed in this way, Pompeii was never lost. Its citizens simply duplicated their old life in new neighborhoods in Naples and other surrounding cities. The inhabitants of the others went on to found new towns or slowly returned to village life, oftentimes remaining near the decaying urban cores. Even these were never fully abandoned. When Angkor was “rediscovered,” Buddhist monks were living among the decaying temples. Both Cahokia and Çatakhöyuk were used for hundreds of years after their abandonment as burial grounds and sacred places.

True, exterior forces lead to their slow demise: environmental stressors, infrastructure breakdowns, the loss of cultural elites and their grand ceremonial performances. Though these urban experiments lay in ruins today, in their population’s descendants the ideas and worldview once collected there remains.

{ More reviews at www.lucianchilds.com/blog }

[Susan Neuhaus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great for people who want a window into human history

[shannon bunning · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well balanced and thought out theories. The author takes a long view exploring what makes urban centers rise and change.

[Lisa Ridge · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An interesting read, knew nothing about Cahokia before reading this.

[medansilviu · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great book very well written! No city will last forever!

[Patrick Mullane · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Woke Marxist viewpoint.
This book while focusing on an interesting subject, historical urban cities, is spoilt by the author's ideological bent. Explicitly using historical Marxism and its vocabulary, the book threats its subject matter as a means to draw political lessons and judges past societies on who closely they align with 21st Century progressive academic values rather than be presented within their own context. Hence more indoctrination that education.