Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  Other evidence of the Cahokia-Siouan connection comes from pieces of art found at Cahokia. Many figurines and paintings depict a figure who resembles the Siouan hero Red Horn, named for his plaited hair, dyed red and sticking up from the back of his head like a horn. Many legends, still told by the Sioux, celebrate Red Horn’s skills as a warrior and gamer, as well as his intense frenemy relationships with various spirits. In one story, Red Horn celebrates a triumph by turning his earlobes into human heads (thus giving him the nickname “He Who Wears Human Faces on His Ears”); in another, he returns from death after striking a clever bargain with some spirits. Red Horn was just one of many heroes celebrated in stories that the Cahokians told. It’s possible Red Horn made his first appearance at Cahokia, or that he was part of an even older story told by the Woodland people who migrated to the city.

  Today, the Osage are one of many tribes whose culture and ideals were shaped by the people who abandoned Cahokia. And Cahokia is still a symbol that inspires people from many tribes across the landmasses that Europeans named North America and Canada. Mississippian culture, with its stunning mound architecture, is a reminder of the longevity and complexity of indigenous civilizations. Coushatta-Chamorro artist Santiago X has been incorporating mounds into his work for several years.4 In one project, called New Cahokia, he built an enormous flat-top mound covered in screens that dance with images of nature, abstractions, and indigenous performances. He’s also built “burial mounds” out of Chicago Blackhawks jerseys that he burns as a protest against European appropriations of tribal identity. Santiago X calls his work Indigenous Futurism, to emphasize that indigenous culture is a part of humanity’s future, and not something that collapsed long in the past.

  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.”

  In the late 20th century, Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor coined the term “survivance” to describe American indigenous cultures today. Though the term is intended to be ambiguous, he sums up part of its meaning in his book Manifest Manners: “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.

  Put another way, Cahokian public life left an indelible mark on the land. Other tribes inhabited the city’s empty courtyards, and European colonists built farms and suburbs over them, but the monuments of Mississippian civilization still endure. Cahokia’s story feels more vital than ever in contemporary America. People didn’t migrate to the mound city just to find material wealth. They sought new kinds of spiritual and political ideas in its plazas. But not everyone in Cahokia agreed on how to put those ideas into practice. For the Mississippian culture to survive, its people had to accept that their city needed to change; that’s when they abandoned it to seek out something else.

  One evening, around dusk, I climbed Monks Mound to check out the view that the city’s rulers once had. I climbed a long set of concrete stairs, pausing to cross a flat terrace halfway up. Special-use buildings once stood here, used by shamans and elites. When I reached the top of the mound, the sky was full of tall thunderheads, and the sunset was blood red between dark blotches of cloud that glowed sporadically with lightning. The tall grass around my ankles was blinking with fireflies, and the air was cool. Below me I could see the clean ground of the Great Plaza, emptied of its ancient public. Across the river were the lights of St. Louis, a city whose citizens recently rose up to protest police brutality in Ferguson during the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protesters walked over Cahokian land whose Great Mound had been torn down over a century before, but they continued the Mississippian tradition of questioning authority.

  The thick air smelled like damp soil and farmland. With my feet atop an ancient megalopolis and my eyes on distant skyscrapers, it felt as if cities were almost a natural product of this place. The land around St. Louis has been urban for a very long time. I’m not a New Agey person, but there was something undeniably magical about that. Standing on the flattened summit, I balanced on a piece of earth that almost touched the chaotic heavens. It made sense that Cahokians believed the Underworld and Upper World met here, beneath the thunder and above the clay whose shape was forever altered by human history.

  EPILOGUE

  Warning—Social Experiment in Progress

  I moved to San Francisco in 2000, the year the tech market crashed. As first-generation digital companies with absurd business plans bled out, I witnessed a city in the process of abandonment. Every day, hundreds of people were fired, and they left the city in droves. Fancy stores that catered to web designers and coders couldn’t stay open. Shopping districts began to look like the grins of people who had been repeatedly punched in the face: each darkened shop was a missing tooth. That year during the holiday season, the downtown shopping district around Union Square looked like a trash pit. Normally the pretty square would be decked out with a giant tree and menorah, but an interminable underground construction project had turned the entire place into a gaping, muddy hole.

  Even those of us who didn’t work in tech caught the desolate feeling. We couldn’t help but notice the city transforming before our eyes. Our neighbors, so prosperous the year before, were moving back to their small towns with nothing but chunky desktop computers and DVD collections in the backs of their cars. Brand-new Ikea desks and expensive office furniture sat on every street corner in SoMa, waiting to be adopted or fall apart. For the first time in years, rents in San Francisco stayed stable rather than rising steadily. I was working at a free weekly paper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and we had to start laying people off. Our livelihood was advertising, and the city’s businesses were shrinking. I wondered whether I was foolish to stay. But I had entangled my identity with the hills and swales of this city; losing it would be like losing a limb. Plus, I was lucky enough to have a cheap room in a rent-controlled house in an unfashionable neighborhood. I decided to stick it out and hope the city would survive.

  It did. In fact, San Francisco today is suffering through the opposite kind of crisis, as the population explodes and the city government struggles to remake our infrastructure to support it. The second generation of tech companies is raking in cash. Though the COVID-19 pandemic changes this calculus a little, wealthy techies are gentrifying the city, driving out working-class people and other longtime re
sidents. Developers are transforming the grid in areas like Mission Bay, which was once full of factories and warehouses, but now welcomes artisanal ice cream shops and digital production studios.

  It’s easy to imagine future archaeologists excavating here, trying to figure out what social movement drove people to turn industrial production facilities into tabernas. Of course, those archaeologists will have to excavate in scuba suits, or with swimming robots, because climate change guarantees that many neighborhoods in San Francisco will be underwater in 500 years. And it wouldn’t be the first time that settlements here succumbed to the coastal waters. Intrepid scientists extracting cores from the submerged city will discover that human habitation began back thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Ancient environmental changes drowned a number of indigenous villages built on the shores of a river that slowly expanded, growing into the bay that divides San Francisco from Oakland today.

  When we look back at the dramatic urban histories of places like Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia, we can see patterns of expansion and abandonment that emerge over centuries. But even in the span of one human lifetime, a phase of urban abandonment can morph into a renewal—or vice versa. Urban rejuvenation projects can be stopped dead by several meters of hot ash; elaborate new water infrastructure systems can turn into flood hazards. A pandemic can wreck the economy. That’s one reason why it’s hard to predict the future of a city based on its recent history. The anxiety I experienced in San Francisco during a single economic bust-and-boom cycle might seem like nothing in retrospect, especially if the next century brings war in the Pacific, or the earthquake that Californians call “the big one” finally hits. For the same reason, we can’t assume that US cities like Detroit and New Orleans—victims of economic and natural disasters in the early 21st century—will ultimately be abandoned. In 200 years, both might be thriving megacities that look nothing like they do today. Their fates depend on political will, as well as the human labor power needed to rebuild.

  Though the futures of individual cities may be uncertain, we can make predictions about the likelihood that people will abandon a city, based on evidence from urban history. On the Konya Plain in Neolithic Turkey, people from scattered villages came together to form Çatalhöyük and lived there for over a millennium. Then their city burst apart again, like a dandelion, the seeds of its culture finding purchase in small villages and other great settlements that left the earth transformed, threaded with bone. 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.

  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. 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. Eventually, some of today’s megacities will look like something out of a far-future science-fiction movie, full of half-drowned metal skeletons covered in incomprehensible advertisements for products we can no longer afford to make or buy.

  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?

  Humans have been building cities for over 9,000 years, but it’s only in the past few decades that the majority of us have lived in urban areas. With so many people flocking to our modern-day versions of Cahokia, cities seem inevitable—but they aren’t.

  After abandoning our future cities, some people may return to small-town life, like the people of Angkor and Çatalhöyük did. Often, farming is at the center of these kinds of communities, so we might see villagers of tomorrow eating locally, fueling their agricultural work by setting up off-the-grid power sources. There’s another possibility, too. There were many people who left Cahokia and Çatalhöyük to become seminomadic. Post-urban people of the 21st and 22nd centuries might become nomads, living in their cars or other vehicles, forming caravans for safety. Earth may become a planet full of tiny human settlements, with cities being the exception rather than the rule. Depending on where you were born, this could be a relatively nice life. More likely, it would be an extremely difficult one, beset by the same hardships endured by farmers and nomads during the Neolithic—and made worse by global climate crisis and resource depletion.

  There’s also the possibility that we’ll figure out a way to salvage our imperiled cities. Perhaps, like the people of Pompeii, we’ll muster relief efforts that help people rebuild in new places. We might attempt to des
ign a radically different kind of metropolis, like Domuztepe, that continues the traditions of the previous ones while incorporating new ideas. Maybe this process will lead to more sustainable cities built in places that can resist the worst effects of climate change. That might sound like a Utopian impossibility, but not if we learn from our urban failures. Looking back on Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia, it’s not hard to figure out what keeps a city vital: resilient infrastructure like good reservoirs and roads, accessible public plazas, domestic spaces for everyone, social mobility, and leaders who treat the city’s workers with dignity. This is not such a tall order, especially when you consider that thousands of years ago, our ancestors managed to maintain healthy cities for centuries at a time.

  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. Urbanites have rebuilt after countless disasters, and put their neighborhoods back together in places far from where they started. Even after extended periods of urban diaspora, humans have returned to city-building again. Though nearly every generation believes it’s living through the end times, there has never been a great civilizational collapse from which we didn’t return. Instead, there has been only the long road of transformation, each generation handing off its unfinished projects to the next.

  Cities are ongoing social experiments, and the remains of ancient homes and monuments are like half-erased lab notes left by our ancestors. They describe how people tried to bring diverse groups together with a shared purpose, to nourish and entertain each other, to overcome political conflict and climate catastrophe. They also describe our failures: the authoritarian slave-driving leadership, the bad civil engineering, and the laws that limited many people’s access to resources. Our forebears’ eroded palaces and villas warn us about how communities can go wrong, but their streets and plazas testify to all the times we built something meaningful together.