FOUR
LOST
CITIES
A SECRET HISTORY OF THE URBAN AGE
Annalee Newitz
This book is given as a humble offering to Iaso, Acesco, Hygieia, and Panacea.
But most importantly it is dedicated with love to Chris Palmer, who survived.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: How Do You Lose a City?
PART ONE: Çatalhöyük THE DOORWAY
CHAPTER 1: The Shock of Settled Life
CHAPTER 2: The Truth about Goddesses
CHAPTER 3: History within History
PART TWO: Pompeii THE STREET
CHAPTER 4: Riot on the Via dell’Abbondanza
CHAPTER 5: What We Do in Public
CHAPTER 6: After the Mountain Burned
PART THREE: Angkor THE RESERVOIR
CHAPTER 7: An Alternate History of Agriculture
CHAPTER 8: Empire of Water
CHAPTER 9: The Remains of Imperialism
PART FOUR: Cahokia THE PLAZA
CHAPTER 10: America’s Ancient Pyramids
CHAPTER 11: A Great Revival
CHAPTER 12: Deliberate Abandonment
EPILOGUE: Warning—Social Experiment in Progress
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
FOUR
LOST
CITIES
INTRODUCTION
How Do You Lose a City?
I stood on the crumbling remains of a perfectly square island at the center of an artificial lake created by hydraulic engineers 1,000 years ago. Sunlight played over an eroded sandstone wall. Though this was the dry season in Cambodia, unseasonable rain storms had cleared the air of smoke from local farmers’ annual field burning. In the distance, I could see the sculpted towers of Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat, architectural marvels of the ancient capital of the Khmer Empire. Boasting nearly a million residents at its peak, Angkor was once the world’s most populous city. And I stood near its center. Beneath my feet was the Mebon, an 11th-century Hindu temple-island, built during the reign of King Suryavarman I in the middle of an enormous reservoir called the West Baray. That morning, the baray’s southern shore was dotted with a few motorboats whose pilots would take visitors out to the Mebon for a couple bucks. It isn’t a short journey: the rectangular West Baray is eight kilometers long, roughly the length of three jet runways at a typical airport. A millennium ago, when workers finished digging the baray, the Mebon temple at its heart was the sole patch of dry land for kilometers around.
Behind its ornate stone gates, the Mebon enclosed another, smaller reservoir, invisible to all but the select few who were permitted to land on its shores. At its center floated a 6-meter-long bronze statue of Vishnu reclining, enormous head resting on one of his four arms. Pilgrims traversed waters within waters to pay homage to this Hindu god, who brought forth life from the sea when the world was made. You might say the Mebon is a monument to the spiritual power of water. But it’s also testimony to the ingenuity of Angkorian laborers who kept the annual monsoon floods contained with large reservoirs like the West Baray, and slaked the city’s thirst during the dry season with a system of canals that diverted water from distant mountain rivers.
Surrounded by shimmering water and weathered blocks from the temple excavation, I tried to imagine looking out over the baray centuries ago, seeing festive boats full of Khmer locals and dignitaries from neighboring kingdoms bearing fragrant bundles of flowers and incense. It must have been astonishing, I thought. But my romantic fantasy about this place didn’t last long.
“I can’t believe how much they screwed this up,” Damian Evans said, gesturing in frustration at the baray. Evans is an archaeologist with the French Institute of Asian Studies whose work over the past two decades has dramatically changed our understanding of Angkor’s urban grid. A sandy-haired Australian with a quick smile, he’s spent decades writing about the sophistication of the Khmer Empire. But he’s also keenly aware of its failures.
Evans pointed to a faded map of the landscape on a wooden placard next to us, part of a display detailing a reconstruction of the Mebon that’s currently underway. Looking at elevations, it was obvious that the east-west oriented rectangle of the West Baray slopes gently with the landscape, causing the east end of the reservoir to fill while the west end stayed dry. As a result, the baray rarely looked like the shining rectangular lake I’d imagined. Instead it would have been more like a deep pool that trailed off into a ragged, muddy edge. But this wasn’t because Khmer’s engineers were incompetent. “They could have built on a level surface, but the king wanted his engineers to stick with an east-west orientation that suited his gurus,” Evans explained. The Khmer believed that grand structures like the king’s reservoir should be oriented along the same trajectory that the sun and stars took across the sky. Put another way, King Suryavarman I cared more about auspicious astrological signs than good hydroengineering. This reservoir was an ancient boondoggle. Over the long term, the West Baray became a template for Angkorian city planning, leaving its swelling population with faulty water storage during turbulent periods of climate crisis.
If you substitute the word “politics” for “astrology,” Evans’ observation could have been made about the design of any number of cities over the past 1,000 years. City leaders pour resources into beautiful spectacles for political reasons, rather than providing good roads, functioning sewers, relatively safe marketplaces, and other basic amenities of urban life. As a result, cities may look awe-inspiring but aren’t particularly resilient against disasters like storm floods and drought. And the more a city suffers from the onslaughts of nature, the more contentious its political situation becomes. Then it’s even harder to repair shattered dams and homes. This vicious cycle has haunted cities for as long as they’ve existed. Sometimes the cycle ends with urban revitalization, but often it ends in death.
At Angkor’s height in the 10th and 11th centuries, its kings controlled thousands of workers. These were the people who built the cities’ palaces, temples, roads, and ill-conceived canals. Though most of this construction was intended to glorify the Khmer kings, it also helped ordinary inhabitants thrive as farmers even during the dry season. But in the early 15th century, the region was stricken by drought, followed by catastrophic1 flooding that destroyed Angkor’s poorly designed water infrastructure at least twice. As the city began to fall apart, the chasm between its rich and poor grew wider. Within decades, the Khmer royal family moved their residence from Angkor to the coastal city of Phnom Penh. This was the beginning of the end for a city whose kings had dominated vast parts of Southeast Asia for centuries, including today’s Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. The city’s population had drained away from Angkor’s downtown by the 16th century, leaving behind small villages and farms surrounded by Angkor’s decaying urban grid. The kings’ palaces were abandoned, and the barays became mere depressions in the leafy forest floor. Only a skeleton crew of monks remained to care for the Khmer Empire’s legendary temples.
In the 19th century, a French explorer named Henri Mouhot claimed he’d discovered the “lost city” of Angkor. Though other European visitors of the period acknowledged that monks still lived in the Angkor Wat temple enclosure, Mouhot wrote a popular travelogue that suggested he was the first to stumble upon a lost civilization. No human had seen it in centuries, he claimed, and it was full of picturesque wonders to rival those of ancient Egypt. It was an easy myth to perpetuate. Westerners hungry for adventure stories were eager to believe Mouhot when they saw pictures of the city’s dramatically collapsing temples, the stones in their walls forced apart by bulging tree roots. From the beginning, Angkor’s status as a lost city was manufactured by the media, despite all evidence t
o the contrary.
The “lost city” is a recurring trope in Western fantasies, suggesting glamorous undiscovered worlds where Aquaman hangs out with giant seahorses. But it’s not just a love of escapist stories that makes us want to believe in lost cities. We live in an era when most of the world’s population lives in cities,2 facing seemingly unsolvable problems like climate crisis and poverty. 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.
This book is about that reality, which we’ll explore in four of the most spectacular examples of urban abandonment in human history. 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. Even a powerful, densely populated city like Angkor couldn’t survive the double blow of burst dams and chaos in the royal court. Unable build a future in these troubled places, urbanites uprooted their lives and turned their backs on their homes, often at great personal cost. These cities didn’t disappear like Atlantis, sliding abruptly below the water into the realm of legend. They didn’t go missing. People deliberately abandoned them, for good reasons.
The first city we’ll explore in this book, Çatalhöyük, was founded roughly 9,000 years ago during the Neolithic, at the moment when humanity settled down into agricultural life after living as nomads for hundreds of thousands of years. Today its enigmatic remains lie buried beneath two low hills in the Anatolian region of central Turkey. Though small by modern standards—the population probably hovered between 5,000 and 20,000 for about a millennium—it would have been a megalopolis in its day. Most people living in the region at that time had never seen a settlement larger than a village of about 200 people. Built from mud and thatch, Çatalhöyük was a vast warren of interconnected dwellings whose interiors were accessed via ladders and rooftop doorways. Though its inhabitants had no writing, they left behind thousands of figurines, paintings, and symbolically decorated skulls.
Sometime in the mid-sixth millennium BCE, the people of Çatalhöyük left its busy, cramped sidewalks behind. There were many reasons: drought in the Levant region, problems with social organization, and possibly the layout of the city itself. Most people who left did not found new kinds of cities; instead, they returned to village life or nomadism. It was as if they were rejecting not just Çatalhöyük, but city life itself. Over time, the city and its roads were buried in layers of sand. By the time European archaeologists “found” the city in the 20th century, its culture was known to the local population largely as a myth. Turkish farmers were aware that an actual city lurked beneath the hills because their plows turned up exquisite artifacts on a regular basis, and a few walls still poked up out of one hilltop. But nobody knew much about who had lived there.
Something about Çatalhöyük has been lost, even if locals always knew where it was. Researchers are still struggling to understand what the people of Çatalhöyük believed about their world. When I visited, archaeologists were in a heated debate over whether the people living there had concepts of history or spirituality—or both. Why did they paint specific ochre designs on the walls of their homes? Why did they decorate their doorways with bull horns? Why did they bury their dead beneath their beds? We have some ideas, but nothing is certain. We’ve lost the cultural context that made it meaningful to people who called it home thousands of years ago. Still, its residents left enough behind that we can reconstruct what their everyday lives were like, along with the problems that made urban life more trouble than it was worth.
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. Eyewitnesses and historians recorded the city’s horrific fate, but Pompeii wasn’t systematically excavated until the 18th century.
It would seem that there’s a rather simple cause for Pompeii’s abandonment. Nothing like 482°C pyroclastic flows blowing through town to clear everyone out. But that’s not the whole story. Pompeii had weathered natural disasters in the past, recovering from extensive damage it suffered in an earthquake over a decade before Vesuvius erupted. People who lived there knew it was a dangerous place. Indeed, over half the residents evacuated on the morning of the eruption; they fled when the mountain started smoking and triggering quakes several hours before the deadly blast.
Popular accounts of the city’s demise suggest that Romans shunned the buried city out of superstition and fear, quickly losing track of where it had once stood. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pompeii’s demise was followed by one of the greatest relief efforts in ancient history. Emperor Titus toured Pompeii twice after the eruption to assess the damage, discovering that the once-lush landscape was entombed in thick, superheated ash, oozing toxic fumes. Pompeii was unsalvageable. Titus and his brother Domitian, who succeeded him, used the sprawling empire’s wealth to rebuild the lives of people whose homes were lost. They allocated money to survivors, and paid workers to construct homes for them. Archaeologists have recently uncovered new evidence of the empire relocating refugees to nearby coastal towns like Naples, expanding neighborhoods and roads to accommodate them. Many patricians perished in the blast, leaving fortunes behind, so the government allowed freed slaves to inherit their masters’ commercial holdings. These freedmen made prosperous new lives for themselves. Pompeii may have been lost, but Roman urbanism continued to thrive.
Thanks to the ash that encased Pompeii in 79 CE, we can get an unvarnished picture of the cosmopolitan culture that Romans worked so hard to preserve. The century leading up to Pompeii’s demise was a time of great change for the empire, when women, slaves, and immigrants gained rights and penetrated the inner sanctums of political power. A new kind of polyglot public culture was emerging, and we can track its progress in Pompeii’s streets, where ordinary people scrawled graffiti, got drunk in tabernas (pubs), and socialized in bathhouses and the city’s infamous brothel. It continued to shape urban life in the West for millennia to come. The fate of Pompeii is evidence that the demise of a city isn’t the same thing as the collapse of the culture that sustained it.
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. The timescale may have been different, but the results were similar: environmental disasters like the floods that Evans described at the West Baray made the city unlivable for the majority of its population. But the final blow had nothing to do with nature: the Angkorian kings could no longer command armies of laborers to rebuild the canal system that was the city’s lifeblood. Perhaps the most unsustainable part of Angkor’s urban planning was not its system of reservoirs, but a rigid social hierarchy that depended on forced labor.
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. The Cahokians built towering earthen pyramids and elevated walkways where St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis and Collinsville, Illinois, stand today. Their homes and farms were spread between ceremonial centers where festivals attracted people from all across the south. Between 900 and 1300, Cahokia was the center of “Mississippian” culture, a social and spiritual movement that united towns and villages all along the great river, from Wisconsin to Louisiana.
I spent two s
ummers at an excavation in Cahokia where archaeologists uncovered part of a busy residential neighborhood near Cahokia’s greatest ceremonial pyramid, nicknamed Monks Mound. Built entirely by people carrying baskets of clay from “borrow pits” nearby, Monks Mound is 30 meters high, and has a footprint the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza. But archaeologists Sarah Baires and Melissa Baltus weren’t interested in who lived at the top of that pyramid. They wanted to know how ordinary people lived in Cahokia.
On my hands and knees in the mud, my ankles bitten by flies and my neck burned by the sun, I came face to face with what Baltus calls “deliberate abandonment.” When Cahokians were finished using a structure, they would seal its fate with a ritual. They pulled up its walls of wooden poles, tossing them aside to use as firewood. They carefully filled the empty postholes with colorful clay, and sometimes with bits of broken pottery or tools from the lifetime of the house. On the floor of one structure, Baires and Balthus found a massive posthole that had been sprinkled with a layer of blood-red hematite flakes. Sometimes, the Cahokians would light a fire in what remained of the structure, burning household items with it. Once the fire had died down, residents would “seal” the abandoned place with a layer of clay and build a new one on top.
Occasionally, this ritual of deliberate abandonment extended to entire neighborhoods. Archaeologists excavating in East St. Louis found a field where dozens of house effigies burned all at once, their walls eaten in a fire that also consumed offerings of corn, ceramics, and beautifully crafted projectile points. Perhaps the Cahokians believed that every built environment had a set lifespan, and always expected to close up the entire city one day. If that’s the case, Cahokia may have been designed with termination in mind, its fate sealed even as the mounds rose to incredible heights.
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