Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

Why would people put so much work into building a city if they knew it was going to die? Seven years ago, when I started researching this book, I had never considered that question before. I was fascinated by Çatalhöyük and Cahokia, but I stuck to modern cities in my work, trying to glimpse the future of humanity in the streets of Casablanca and Saskatoon, or Tokyo and Istanbul. I intended to write about how the cities of tomorrow would last forever, if we designed them properly. Then something happened that made me want to investigate the past.

  I returned from a week of research in Copenhagen to discover that my estranged father, always an angry loner, had committed suicide. We had barely spoken in years. While I was in Denmark talking to scientists and engineers about the future of cities, he was composing a long suicide note that veered from instructions on how to care for his beloved flower garden, to his rage at losing a fight with the city to preserve a redwood growing at the edge of his property. On the phone with the coroner, I felt numb. I knew he was unhappy, but I thought he was going to get better. I hoped one day we’d have a normal relationship. Every death is hard in its own way, but the sorrow from suicide is saturated by one, painful question. Why would he choose death, when he had so many other options?

  I went through my father’s papers, his half-dozen unpublished novels, and his emails, looking for anything that would explain what had driven him away from me, and then away from the world entirely. There were dozens of answers, or maybe none. I asked myself why he took those pills until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Trying to focus on something completely different, I visited Çatalhöyük during excavation season. I thought maybe a journey into the deep past would help me escape my sadness in the present. When I got there, I found myself surrounded by people whose entire job is to study the ways of the dead, and who learn about ancient life from graves. You’d think that would be terrible for a person in my frame of mind, but it was exactly what I needed. Inspired by archaeology, I was finally able to stop asking why my father had killed himself. I turned to a much harder question: How did he live? What comfort could I take from the things he’d taught me, and what could I learn from the choices he made? Answering these questions was my first step toward healing.

  It was also the spark that led to this book. I realized that every city’s death feels like a mystery because we usually look at its demise in isolation. We focus on the moments of dramatic loss and forget its long life history, in which people spent centuries making millions of decisions about how the city would be maintained. I don’t think we can understand why people choose to let their cities die until we consider the specific ways they lived as urbanites.

  That means asking deceptively basic questions. Why did our ancestors leave the freedom of the open land for cramped, stinky warrens full of human waste and endless political drama? What kinds of counterintuitive decisions led them to settle down and plant farms whose crops could easily fail, leaving them to starve? How did thousands of people ever agree to live together, cheek to jowl, cooperatively building public places and resources for strangers to enjoy? Hunting for answers, I wandered through the remains of the abandoned cities in this book. I immersed myself in their life stories, and put in years of research trying to unravel just some of their cultural complexities. To understand why people fled, I needed to know why they had come, and how hard they worked to stay. I wanted to appreciate what they lost when they abandoned the homes they had built.

  The histories of Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia are dramatically different, but all of them span centuries of constant transformation. Their layouts changed along with their citizenry. Immigrants came to these cities from near and far, lured by everything from delicious food and specialized work, to entertainment and the chance to gain political power. Most important among those immigrants were the laboring classes, who often accounted for more than two-thirds of urban populations. Leaders rule from their mounds and villas, but a city is truly maintained by the ordinary working people who farm, run shops, and build roads. Before the industrial revolution, the most valuable economic and political power came from human labor. But that labor came in many forms. Sometimes it was domestic labor, where some people in a family were responsible for maintaining the house, tending the flock, or doing the cooking. As cities grew, elite classes organized labor by enslaving people in various ways, including indenture, or by turning them into serfs. 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.

  Four Lost Cities is about the tragedies in humanity’s past, and it’s about death. But it’s also about recovering from loss, by taking a clear-eyed look at where we’ve been and the decisions that brought us there. Today in cities across the world, we face the same problems our urban ancestors did, as politics are eroded by corruption and climate disaster looms. Because the majority of humans now live in cities, the stakes are a lot higher. The fate of urbanism is yoked to the fate of humanity. If we replicate our past failures in the 21st century, we risk spreading a form of toxic urbanism that will change the face of our whole planet—and not in a good way. Already, cities are struggling to prevent water contamination, food shortages, pandemics, and homelessness. We’re barreling toward a future in which the metropolis is unlivable, but the alternatives are worse.

  The urban age doesn’t have to end this way. Before they were lost, Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia were home to thriving civilizations whose dark futures were by no means fated. My hope is that the deep histories in this book can show us what it takes to revitalize a city and the natural environments that surround it. After all, we learn best from our mistakes.

  PART ONE

  Çatalhöyük

  THE DOORWAY

  CHAPTER 1

  The Shock of Settled Life

  I journeyed to one of the world’s oldest cities by hopping on an air-conditioned bus in Konya, a busy metropolis of two million people in central Turkey. The morning was cloudless and hot as we bounced along the road out of town, past stores selling everything from fresh eggs to Apple computers. When the gleaming apartment towers gave way to fields, we did not leave civilization behind. We passed tidy Bedouin camps by the side of the road and wound through small towns where new homes were going up on almost every block. After about 45 minutes, the bus stopped in a small gravel parking lot. Wooden cabins and long, low buildings surrounded a pleasant courtyard full of canopied picnic tables. It looked like a retreat center, or maybe a small school.

  But it was actually a portal to the distant past. A few hundred meters beyond the picnic tables was Çatalhöyük, a city built before cities existed. Most of it lay buried beneath the bulk of the East Mound, a low, wind-smoothed plateau. If you looked at it from above, the 13-hectare East Mound would form a teardrop shape, its contours like an earthen blanket draped over the 9,000-year-old remains of a city whose inhabitants built houses atop houses for so long that the layers of clay brick construction formed a hill. Beyond the East Mound was the newer West Mound, a smaller neighborhood that formed about 8,500 years ago. When this city was young, rivers flowed around these city-hills, and farms were scattered across the Konya Plain nearby. Today the land is dry and covered in patches of yellowing grass. I sucked in a breath of warm, dusty air. This is where it all started. The world I knew—full of condos, factory farms, computers, and cities swarming with thousands of people—was born in places like this.

  Some archaeologists call Çatalhöyük a “mega-site,” or an outsized village where several smaller settlements merged. The city appears to have grown together organically, without any centralized planning or direction. Çatalhöyük’s architecture is unlike anything we see in the region thereafter. Each house was constructed like a cell in a honeycomb, pressed tightly against its neighbors, with al
most no streets to separate them. The city grid was at least one story above the ground, and sidewalks wound across rooftops, with front doors cut into ceilings. Residents would have spent a lot of time on their roofs, cooking and crafting tools, often sleeping outside under light shelters. Simple wooden ladders helped residents climb up to the city, and down into their homes.

  When the earliest construction began, many people coming to live at Çatalhöyük were only a generation or two removed from nomadism. The idea of settling permanently in one place was revolutionary at the time. Though there were little villages before Çatalhöyük, the vast majority of humans roved in small bands, just as their Paleolithic ancestors had done for over a hundred thousand years. Imagine leaving the natural world, where your companions were only a few people and animals, and embracing sedentary existence in a box crammed next to hundreds of other people in boxes. Your parents and grandparents, who knew only the old nomadic ways, couldn’t possibly have prepared you for the weird complexities of urban life. It’s no surprise that the people of Çatalhöyük struggled to figure out the best way to live together, and made many deadly mistakes along the way.

  This was perhaps the first time in human history when the question “Where are you from?” came to matter as much as “Who are your ancestors?” For a nomad who is always on the move, “where are you from?” is difficult to answer. What matters is who your people are. That’s why many ancient texts in the West, including the Bible, introduce their heroes with interminable lists of fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and so on. You are literally the sum of your ancestors. But when you live in one city your whole life, that place can become even more important to your sense of self than your family heritage.

  When people passed through one of Çatalhöyük’s thousands of rooftop doorways, they entered a new phase in human society. They found themselves in an alien future where people’s identities were tied to a fixed location; the land was theirs, and they were part of the land. It would have been like a slow-motion shock, reverberating across generations. Survival now hinged on whether the climate was favorable for farming, and death could come any year from drought or flood. As we’ll see in the story of this ancient city, settled life was so difficult that humans nearly decided to slam the door on urbanism forever. But we didn’t. And that’s what led me here, millennia later, to figure out what the hell our ancestors were doing.

  The opposite of Indiana Jones

  I turned my attention back to the Çatalhöyük Dig House where the bus dropped me off. It had been home to hundreds of archaeologists over the past 25 years, all of whom tirelessly worked to uncover the ancient city’s secrets. I’d arrived in time to join a few dozen of them at a conference on the history and religion at Çatalhöyük.

  A group of us walked to the top of the East Mound, where archaeologists had skinned away the northern surface of the hill to reveal Çatalhöyük’s urban grid. This dramatic excavation, known simply as 4040, is roughly the size of a modern city block. 4040 is protected by a huge shade structure that arcs over the East Mound like an airline hangar fashioned from wood and opaque white plastic. When I ventured inside, the intense sunlight was filtered to a pleasant glow and the air cooled. Before me stretched hundreds of interlocking rooms made from golden-brown mud bricks.

  At least a dozen archaeologists were working in the space, stooped next to walls, taking notes on clipboards, or capturing the morning’s finds on cameras. Sandbags were stacked everywhere, shoring up what remained of crumbling walls. Our little group stood about a meter above what would have been the floor of a house, looking down into someone’s 9,000-year-old living room. I could see layers of plaster stuck in clumps on the thick clay walls, reminding me of the six layers of different pastel colors I’d scraped off wooden doorframes in my 100-year-old house. In several places, red ochre designs painted by residents were still visible, zigzagging across bright patches of plaster. One was a repeating pattern of diamond-shaped spirals. Another rippled with tiny rectangles that flowed between snaking lines, as if the painter wanted to evoke a river. All of these designs were abstract but elaborate, conveying a sense of motion, as if the painters wanted the never-changing settlement to feel charged with frenetic life.

  Throughout the excavation area, we saw small oval pits dug into the floors: these were the telltale signs that skeletons had been removed from their graves. People at Çatalhöyük kept their dead close, right below the elevated clay platforms that served as their beds. Bodies were buried in fetal positions, so death’s shape was that of a round storage vessel, rather than the Western world’s familiar elongated coffin. Some bed platforms were host to a few of these graves, while others held a half dozen. One grave, we heard later, was packed with several skulls but only one skeleton.

  Guiding the group was Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder, a soft-spoken Londoner who has directed Çatalhöyük’s excavations since 1993. Hodder is basically the opposite of the Hollywood adventurer Indiana Jones. He’s famous for pioneering an influential school of thought called contextual archaeology,1 which treats ancient artifacts as keys to understanding ancient cultures, rather than as loot. If Indiana Jones had been a contextual archaeologist, he would have left that golden idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark in its temple, and tried to understand how it fit into the belief systems of the people who built such an incredible booby-trapped monument. When Hodder finds a priceless treasure at Çatalhöyük—and he has been privy to the discovery of many—he wants to know what it can tell us about the social relationships in this ancient city.

  Taking off his floppy canvas hat, Hodder climbed into a deep, perfectly square trench cut into the floor of a house. One side of the pit was what archaeologists call a profile, a cutaway view of all the layers that represent the many centuries of houses built upon houses in this area. The lowest layer is the oldest floor, and each subsequent one is newer, which is why archaeologists will often confusingly call something “upper” when they mean “more recent.” Another word for this analytic technique is “stratigraphy,” or the study of the earth’s layers in their historical context. Hodder pointed to the upper layers in the profile, which formed a gentle wave pattern made from layers of black material sandwiched between light brown clay, topped with a layer of black, capped by another layer studded with what seemed to be chipped bone. It looked like one of those intricate Viennese layer cakes, except three meters tall and made of dirt. We were looking at what happened to houses over hundreds of years in this city, Hodder explained. The brown clay layers formed because Çatalhöyük families tended their floors carefully, often resurfacing them with plaster. And the black layers were ash, representing periods when the house was abandoned. Often an abandoned house would be symbolically “sealed off” with the ritual burning of household objects, leaving a distinctive layer of charred materials. Sometimes the house became a trash pit after that, and neighbors filled it with more ash from their hearths, along with other refuse.

  Eventually, a new family would rebuild the house, slathering a thick layer of clay and plaster over the ash and re-creating the exact layout of the older structure. Hodder described housebuilding at Çatalhöyük as “repetitive”—residents didn’t value the idea of changing architectural fashions. In one case, Hodder and his colleagues unearthed a house that had been rebuilt four times, with successive residents storing their cooking pots and burying their dead in the exact same places.

  In the upper levels the house he was showing us, Hodder identified three clay floors sandwiched between ash, representing distinct phases of abandonment and rebuilding. Things got vaguer in the lower levels, but we could make out at least eight more layers of interleaved clay and earthy fill. Hodder speculated that these might represent many earlier houses, or fewer houses that had repaired their floors extensively during use. Either way, we were witness to an early version of an urban phenomenon that still exists in cities today. People at Çatalhöyük created new houses out of old ones, just as I myself had made a new home
in my century-old house by replastering the exterior, rebuilding some of the walls, and covering them with a fresh layer of paint.

  We left the 4040 shelter and Hodder led us across the top of the mound to the southwest, heading for an older excavation called South. As we passed a few canvas tents covering smaller digs along the way, I imagined Çatalhöyük residents walking this same path across town, over the city’s roofs. Though the current excavations are extensive, they’ve uncovered only 5 percent of the city itself. Beneath our feet were thousands of homes, built atop each other for over a millennium, their treasures still unseen.

  The South dig is breathtaking. Sheltered beneath a steel-and-fiberglass structure, we could see that archaeologists here had dug at least ten meters down, uncovering ever more ancient layers of the city’s grid. Standing on a wooden viewing deck, I gazed at stratigraphic layers writ large. Far below, I could see the earliest parts of the city, when people first decided to settle here year-round instead of walking the path of nomadism. Back then, this land was marshy and lush. None of those settlers had any concept of what a city might be until they started building. They kept adding more and more structures to their settlement in an ad hoc way until the clay deposits became clay houses, and the clay houses became clay rooftop sidewalks, neighborhoods, and artworks. We could see more than 1,500 years of the city’s history in one glance.

  Hodder pointed out a flag attached to a piece of rebar in the deepest part of the dig: “That’s the dairy line,” he said with a cryptic half-smile. He was showing us the layer of Çatalhöyük where scientists found the first evidence that people were cooking with dairy products. Residues in clay pots tell a story of soups made richer with goat milk, and possibly cheese. Researchers Maria Saña, Carlos Tornero, and Miguel Molist have studied sheep herding in the Neolithic, and found evidence that small sheep herds were tended by families for generations,2 bred to provide milk and meat. But the dairy line represents more than the addition of extremely tasty items to the human diet. The emergence of dairy foods changed the way humans lived, which in turn changed the lives of animals, as well as the land around human settlements. At the dairy line, we can see the traces left behind by humans who had stopped looking for their place within nature, and started changing nature to suit themselves.