Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  As long as we tell our urban ancestors’ stories, no city is ever lost. They live on, in our imaginations and on our public lands, as a promise that no matter how terrible things get, humans always try again. In a thousand years, we’ll still be working on the urban experiment. Sure, we’ll fail again—but we’ll also learn how to make things right.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This project took years to research and complete, and along the way I’ve made friends, had incredible conversations with strangers, and traveled to places all over the world. I’m thankful for all of it. I’m most grateful to the researchers who took the time to talk to me about their ideas, welcoming me into their excavations and workplaces. Their names are in the pages of this book; I hope I have done justice to the breadth of their knowledge and good humor. Needless to say, all errors are my own.

  Thanks also to my quick-witted editor at Norton, Matt Weiland, and to editorial assistant extraordinare Zarina Patwa. My superpowered agent Laurie Fox made it all possible. Jason Thompson created the gorgeous maps you see throughout the book—thanks, Jason!

  And then there are all my long-suffering writing buddies and sundry victims who read pieces of this book and gave me valuable feedback: Charlie Jane Anders, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David Moles, Anthony Ha, and Jackie Monkiewicz. Extra special thanks to my editors at Ars Technica, Ken Fisher, Eric Bangeman and John Timmer, who encouraged me to write the articles that eventually became the backbone of this book. For generalized inspiration and good role modeling, thanks to Carl Zimmer, Charles Mann, Rose Eveleth, Amy Harmon, Seth Mnookin, Deb Blum, Veronique Greenwood, Alondra Nelson, Maia Szalavitz, Maryn McKenna, Maggie Koerth, Jennifer Ouellette, and Thomas Levenson.

  Most of all, thanks to Chris Palmer, Jesse Burns, and Charlie Jane Anders for going on long, hot, dirty trips with me, for tolerating my endless nerdsplaining about urban life, and for these past two decades of domestic history. I love you so much.

  NOTES

  Introduction: How Do You Lose a City?

  1. Brendan M. Buckley et al., “Climate as a Contributing Factor in the Demise of Angkor, Cambodia,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 15 (April 2010): 6748–52.

  2. “68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban Areas by 2050, Says UN,” Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, last modified May 16, 2018, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html.

  Chapter 1: The Shock of Settled Life

  1. Ian Hodder, ed., The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  2. C. Tornero et al., “Seasonal Reproductive Patterns of Early Domestic Sheep at Tell Halula (PPNB, Middle Euphrates Valley): Evidence from Sequential Oxygen Isotope Analyses of Tooth Enamel,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 6 (2016): 810–18.

  3. A. Nigel Goring-Morris and Anna Belfer-Cohen, “Neolithization Processes in the Levant: The Outer Envelope,” Current Anthropology 52, no. S4 (2011): S195–S208.

  4. D. E. Blasi et al., “Human Sound Systems Are Shaped by Post-Neolithic Changes in Bite Configuration,” Science 363, no. 6432 (March 15, 2019).

  5. Carolyn Nakamura and Lynn Meskell, “Articulate Bodies: Forms and Figures at Çatalhöyük,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 16 (2009): 205–30.

  6. Ian Hodder, The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006).

  7. Peter Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

  8. Wilson, Domestication of the Human Species, 98.

  9. Julia Gresky, Juliane Haelm, and Lee Clare, “Modified Human Crania from Göbekli Tepe Provide Evidence for a New Form of Neolithic Skull Cult,” Science Advances 3, no. 6 (June 28, 2017): e1700564.

  10. K. Schmidt, “Göbekli Tepe—the Stone Age Sanctuaries. New Results of Ongoing Excavations with a Special Focus on Sculptures and High Reliefs,” Documenta Praehistorica 37 (2010): 239–56.

  11. Marion Benz and Joachim Bauer, “Symbols of Power—Symbols of Crisis? A Psycho-Social Approach to Early Neolithic Symbol Systems,” Neo-Lithics Special Issue (2013): 11–24.

  12. Janet Carston and Stephen Hugh-Jones, About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  13. Çigdem Atakuman, “Deciphering Later Neolithic Stamp Seal Imagery of Northern Mesopotamia,” Documenta Praehistorica 40 (2013): 247–64.

  14. Hodder, Leopard’s Tale, 63.

  Chapter 2: The Truth about Goddesses

  1. Kamilla Pawłowska, “The Smells of Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey: Time and Space of Human Activity,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 36 (2014): 1–11.

  2. Ian Hodder and Arkadiusz Marciniak, eds., Assembling Çatalhöyük (Leeds: Maney, 2015).

  3. Ruth Tringham, “Dido and the Basket: Fragments toward a Non-Linear History,” in Object Stories: Artifacts and Archaeologists, ed. A. Clarke, U. Frederick, and S. Brown (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2015).

  4. Michael Marshall, “Family Ties Doubted in Stone-Age Farmers,” New Scientist (July 1, 2011), https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20646-family-ties-doubted-in-stone-age-farmers/.

  5. Nerissa Russell, “Mammals from the BACH Area,” chap. 8 in Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey, ed. Ruth Tringham and Mirjana Stevanović, Monumenta Archaeologica, vol. 27 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2012).

  6. Michael Balter, The Goddess and the Bull: Çatalhöyük, an Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization (New York: Free Press, 2010).

  7. Balter, Goddess and the Bull, 39.

  8. Carolyn Nakamura, “Figurines of the BACH Area,” chap. 17 in Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey, ed. Ruth Tringham and Mirjana Stevanović, Monumenta Archaeologica, vol. 27 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2012).

  9. Lynn M. Meskell et al., “Figured Lifeworlds and Depositional Practices at Çatalhöyük,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18 (2008): 139–61; see also Carolyn Nakamura and Lynn Meskell, “Articulate Bodies: Forms and Figures at Çatalhöyük,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 16 (2009): 205.

  10. Meskell et al., “Figured Lifeworlds and Depositional Practices at Çatalhöyük,” 144.

  11. Ian Hodder, The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006).

  12. Rosemary Joyce, Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 10.

  13. Wendy Matthews, “Household Life Histories and Boundaries: Microstratigraphy and Micromorphology of Architectural Surfaces in Building 3 (BACH),” chap. 7 in Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey, ed. Ruth Tringham and Mirjana Stevanović, Monumenta Archaeologica, vol. 27 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2012).

  14. Burcum Hanzade Arkun, “Neolithic Plasters of the Near East: Catal Hoyuk Building 5, a Case Study” (master’s thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2003).

  15. Daphne E. Gallagher and Roderick J. McIntosh, “Agriculture and Urbanism,” chap. 7 in The Cambridge World History, ed. Graeme Barker and Candice Goucher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 186–209.

  16. Hodder, Leopard’s Tale, chap. 6.

  17. Jeremy Nobel, “Finding Connection through ‘Chosen Family,’” Psychology Today, last modified June 14, 2019, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/being-unlonely/201906/finding-connection-through-chosen-family.

  Chapter 3: History within History

  1. Sophie Moore, “Burials and Identities at Historic Period Çatalhöyük,” Heritage Turkey 4 (2014): 29.

  2. Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  3. Melody Warnick, “Why You’re Miserable after a
Move,” Psychology Today (July 13, 2016), https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/is-where-you-belong/201607/why-youre-miserable-after-move.

  4. “Immigration,” American Psychological Association, accessed November 12, 2019, https://www.apa.org/topics/immigration/index.

  5. Pascal Flohr et al., “Evidence of Resilience to Past Climate Change in Southwest Asia: Early Farming Communities and the 9.2 and 8.2 Ka Events,” Quaternary Science Reviews 136 (2016): 23–39.

  6. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security” (October 2003), accessed November 11, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20090320054750/http://www.climate.org/PDF/clim_change_scenario.pdf.

  7. Daniel Glick, “The Big Thaw,” National Geographic (September 2004).

  8. Ofer Bar-Yosef, “Facing Climatic Hazards: Paleolithic Foragers and Neolithic Farmers,” Quaternary International pt. B, 428 (2017): 64–72.

  9. Flohr et al., “Evidence of Resilience to Past Climate Change in Southwest Asia.”

  10. Michael Price, “Animal Fat on Ancient Pottery Reveals a Nearly Catastrophic Period of Human Prehistory,” Science (August 13, 2018), https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/animal-fat-ancient-pottery-shards-reveals-nearly-catastrophic-period-human-prehistory.

  11. David Orton et al., “A Tale of Two Tells: Dating the Çatalhöyük West Mound,” Antiquity 92, no. 363 (2018): 620–39.

  12. Ian Kuijt, “People and Space in Early Agricultural Villages: Exploring Daily Lives, Community Size, and Architecture in the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19, no. 1 (2000): 75–102.

  13. Monica Smith, Cities: The First 6,000 Years (New York: Viking, 2019), 9.

  14. Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  15. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

  16. Stuart Campbell, “The Dead and the Living in Late Neolithic Mesopotamia,” in Sepolti tra i vivi. Evidenza ed interpretazione di contesti funerari in abitato. Atti del Convegno Internazionale [Buried among the Living], ed. Gilda Bartoloni and M. Gilda Benedettini (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” April 26–29, 2006), https://www.academia.edu/3390086/The_Dead_and_the_Living_in_Late_Neolithic_Mesopotamia.

  Chapter 4: Riot on the Via dell’Abbondanza

  1. Marco Merola, “Pompeii before the Romans,” Archaeology Magazine (January/February 2016).

  2. Mary Beard, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (London: Profile Books, 2008).

  3. “Samnite Culture in Pompeii Survived Roman Conquest,” Italy Magazine, last modified July 6, 2005, https://www.italymagazine.com/italy/campania/samnite-culture-pompeii-survived-roman-conquest.

  4. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  5. Translation appears in Alison E. Cooley and M. G. L. Cooley, Pompeii and Herculaneum: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 2013).

  6. Eve D’Ambria, Roman Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  7. D’Ambria, Roman Women.

  8. Pliny the Elder, Book 7, Letter 24, accessed November 12, 2019, http://www.vroma.org/~hwalker/Pliny/Pliny07-24-E.html.

  9. “Via Consolare Project,” San Francisco State University, accessed November 11, 2019, http://www.sfsu.edu/~pompeii/.

  10. Henrik Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  11. Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World, 121, 140.

  12. Heather Pringle, “How Ancient Rome’s 1% Hijacked the Beach,” Hakai Magazine (April 5, 2016), https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/how-ancient-romes-1-hijacked-beach/.

  Chapter 5: What We Do in Public

  1. Ilaria Battiloro and Marcello Mogetta, “New Investigations at the Sanctuary of Venus in Pompeii: Interim Report on the 2017 Season of the Venus Pompeiana Project,” accessed November 1, 2019, http://www.fastionline.org/docs/FOLDER-it-2018-425.pdf.

  2. Steven Ellis, The Roman Retail Revolution: The Socio-Economic World of the Taberna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  3. Miko Flohr, “Reconsidering the Atrium House: Domestic Fullonicae at Pompeii,” in Pompeii: Art, Industry and Infrastructure, ed. Eric Poehler, Miko Flohr, and Kevin Cole (Barnsley, UK: Oxbow Books, 2011).

  4. Lei Dong, Carlo Ratti, and Siqi Zheng, “Predicting Neighborhoods’ Socioeconomic Attributes Using Restaurant Data,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 31 (July 2019): 15,447–52.

  5. Eric Poehler, The Traffic Systems of Pompeii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  6. Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World, 122.

  7. Classicist Beth Severy-Hoven suggests there were further signs of the brothers’ uneasy relationship with their class position in some of the paintings inside their villa as well. Beth Severy-Hoven, “Master Narratives and the Wall Painting of the House of the Vettii, Pompeii,” Gender & History 24 (2012): 540–80.

  8. Sarah Levin-Richardson, “Fututa Sum Hic: Female Subjectivity and Agency in Pompeian Sexual Graffiti,” Classical Journal 108, no. 3 (2013): 319–45.

  9. Sarah Levin-Richardson, The Brothel of Pompeii: Sex, Class, and Gender at the Margins of Roman Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

  10. Levin-Richardson, “Fututa Sum Hic.”

  11. Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

  Chapter 6: After the Mountain Burned

  1. Recent evidence suggests the eruption was in fall, rather than in late summer as had been previously thought. “Pompeii: Vesuvius Eruption May Have Been Later than Thought,” BBC World News, last modified October 16, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45874858.

  2. William Melmouth, trans., Letters of Pliny, Project Gutenberg, last updated May 13, 2016, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2811/2811-h/2811-h.htm#link2H_4_0065.

  3. Brandon Thomas Luke, “Roman Pompeii, Geography of Death and Escape: The Deaths of Vesuvius” (master’s thesis, Kent State, 2013).

  4. Nancy K. Bristow, “‘It’s as Bad as Anything Can Be’: Patients, Identity, and the Influenza Pandemic,” supplement 3, Public Health Reports 125 (2010): 134–44.

  5. J. Andrew Dufton, “The Architectural and Social Dynamics of Gentrification in Roman North Africa,” American Journal of Archaeology 123, no. 2 (2019): 263–90.

  6. Andrew Zissos, ed., A Companion to the Flavian Age of Imperial Rome (Malden, MA: Wiley & Sons, 2016).

  Chapter 7: An Alternate History of Agriculture

  1. “Ancient Aliens,” History Channel (May 4, 2012), https://www.history.com/shows/ancient-aliens/season-4/episode-10.

  2. Patrick Roberts, Tropical Forests in Prehistory, History, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

  3. Patrick Roberts et al., “The Deep Human Prehistory of Global Tropical Forests and Its Relevance for Modern Conservation,” Nature Plants 3, no. 8 (2007).

  4. Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999).

  Chapter 8: Empire of Water

  1. Miriam T. Stark, “From Funan to Angkor: Collapse and Regeneration in Ancient Cambodia,” chap. 10 in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John J. Nichols (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006), 144–67.

  2. Eileen Lustig, Damian Evans, and Ngaire Richards, “Words across Space and Time: An Analysis of Lexical Items in Khmer Inscriptions, Sixth–Fourteenth Centuries CE,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, no. 1 (2007): 1–26.

  3. Zhou Daguan, A Record of Cambodia: A Land and Its People, trans. Peter Harris (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2007).

  4. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011).

  5. Lustig et al., “Words across Space and Time.”

  6. Miriam Stark, “Universal Rule and Precarious Empire: Power and Fragility in the Angkorian State,” chap. 9 in The Evolution of Fragility: Setting the Terms, ed. Norman Yoffee (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2019).

  7. Matthew Desmond, “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html.

  8. Stark, “Universal Rule and Precarious Empire.”

  9. Stark, “Universal Rule and Precarious Empire.”

  10. Kenneth R. Hall, “Khmer Commercial Development and Foreign Contacts under Sūryavarman I,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 18, no. 3 (1975): 318–36.

  11. Dan Penny et al., “Hydrological History of the West Baray, Angkor, Revealed through Palynological Analysis of Sediments from the West Mebon,” in Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 92 (2005): 497–521.

  12. Christophe Pottier, “Under the Western Baray Waters,” chap. 28 in Uncovering Southeast Asia’s Past, ed. Elisabeth A. Bacus, Ian Glover, and Vincent Piggot (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2006), 298–309.