Four Lost Cities

A Secret History of the Urban Age

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.

©2021 Annalee Newitz (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Food for thought

This book has an interesting premise, but admittedly I had a hard time getting through it. There are some interesting details about ancient societies and the way that lived but much of it felt irrelevant to why cities decline.

Not bad

Author states that its from a journalist perspective, so for that reason I think it's well done. If it were to be purely historical, I would be more critical. I particularly enjoyed the remarks against Diamond, as that came up in my Anthropology and Archeology classes.

Interesting investigation of urban history

A really interesting investigation into the formation and decline of cities across human history. Newitz uses archeological evidence to make the case that the evolution and dissolution of cities is not a linear path, that the very definition of a "city" and is growth are defined more by socio-cultural forces of its time than by rigid and often arbitrary models based solely on commerce. She then cleverly weaves in the latent warnings present in our urban past about our potentially disastrous future.

Not the best reader.

I found this book to be pretty boring. I think there is humor in the writing, but the reader wasn't very natural sounding, to me she sounded very rigid and serious. I would have like this more reading it myself, though I still think parts of the book were a little dull.

Ancient Urban Life is Fascinating

This may be one of the most interesting books on ancient cities I’ve had the pleasure of “reading” (listening to).
I deep dive into all four cities is informative but I especially enjoyed the final city of Cahokia. I’ve read some on it but I learned a lot of new things - notably that commerce was not the reason for existing (a mistaken notion of European thinking that all cities are birthed in commerce and trade).
I liked listening to this as I was doing house and yard work but I like it enough I will be ordering a hard copy for my library as well.

Beautifully read, beautifully written!

The narrator, Chloe, did a fabulous job. Annalee is a marvelous writer and thinker. More than that, Annalee is a gifted storyteller. I felt captivated by Annalee's narrative -- sometimes microscopic; sometimes aerial, grand, and sweeping, across time and space. Enough meat and enough beauty in this book to listen to over, and over.

Informative about recent trends

I enjoyed learning about, with some physical digging, how we gather insights into past lives.

learn and entertain

loved the writing, loved the topics. the narrator's voice was slightly off-putting: nasal and monotone. over time it becomes less noticable.

Hoping to be pleasantly surprised, w/mixed results

In any archaeological history, there is a danger of being dry and uninteresting, and I'd hoped to be pleasantly surprised to hear a more lively presentation in this effort. I wasn't completely, though there are some intriguing bits. Similarly in such endeavors, there is certainly a good degree of interpretation and speculation. But often times in this book the author seems more hopeful that strictly analytical. She definitely imbues the story with a kind of secular humanist, feminist, perspective, all of with which I am completely on board. However, a cursory acknowledgement that nobody actually knows how these societies worked, or at best disagree, followed by her own, less uncertain evaluation to causes, only serves to undermine the scientific legitimacy. A bit more scientific humility as to fact, or more acknowledgement of speculation, would have served her better. But altogether a worthwhile effort with thought-provoking ideas.

What really happened to four "lost" cities

The allure of "lost cities" is a strong one; many of us love the story of one lost city or another. Annalee Newitz gives us the stories of four of them--Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site in Turkey; Pompeii, on the Italian coast and the slope of Mt. Vesuvius; medieval Angkor in Cambodia; Cahokia, an indigenous North American metropolis at the site that's now East St. Louis.

Newitz looks at each of these cities using new developments and techniques in archaeology to consider the cities and their culture through the lives of the average residents as well as the elites.

Çatalhöyük is built in layers--houses being abandoned and, after some gap in time, new houses being built over them, with streets and walkways on top of the current layer of houses. Workers carried something very like business cards, identifying their trades and other affiliations, in the first human settlement large enough that you didn't, couldn't know everyone.

In Pompeii, freed slaves, their offspring, and lower-ranked citizens would buy the former villas of the elites, and turn them into shops, workshops, and apartments--often trying to preserve the look of an elite villa as much as they could. Freed slaves took their former owner's family name as their own new family name, and maintained connections and obligations to them. As a vacation city, Pompeii had a thriving commercial culture, until the volcano ended it.

Angkor was a city of temples, and dependent on excellent water management because of its environment. Unfortunately, while some of the water management decisions were grounded in solid engineering, others were grounded in politics and religious ideas of advantageous orientation. Labor management was also very much top-down, and not every ruler did that wisely or with a sense of the limits of what people would tolerate.

Cahokia, center of the Mississippian culture, was built around a series of public squares, where public meetings, religious meetings, sports, and entertainment all happened. There was not one single center to the city, but public squares in every part of it, with people coming from all over to participate in major festivals. There seems to have been no particular organized system of economic exchange, with families, neighborhoods, and other types of groups reaching arrangements that worked for them. Cahokia wasn't about economics; it was about their thriving, shared religion.

What's really striking and exciting about Newitz's account, though, is about how none of these "lost cities" were ever truly lost. The local populations not only knew where they were, but in the all except Pompeii, which became a toxic ruin in the aftermath of the Vesuvius eruption, continued to use the area, though in different ways, as the environment and the local culture changed. Angkor in particular is an outrageous case of misrepresentation. A Frenchman "found" the city around the time the French took control of Cambodia as a colony. At the time, the population was low compared to earlier periods, but monks were at the temple still conducting religious ceremonies, and there's ample documentation of foreign visitors, including from China, visiting the city. The French had to kick the monks out of the temple in order to pursue their own plans of making it a French "discovery" and tourist attraction.

Çatalhöyük's neighbors knew where it was, dug up artifacts while ploughing their fields, and sometimes using bits and pieces from it. Cahokia's population dispersed but didn't disappear, though the Eurasian diseases brought by Europeans eventually devastated what was left before Europeans even reached the area--and it's still populated now. Mostly by the descendants of Europeans and Africans, and we do call it East St. Louis, now. Yet the area never ceased to be a population center, even though the uses and organization have changed.

Pompeii did die, of course, but not due to the fall of its civilization. The place merely became uninhabitable. Rome's government organized a major humanitarian relief project, originally intending to rebuild as had happened after earthquakes. When that clearly couldn't be done, the relief went to resettling the surviving residents instead--and many of those people continued to identify as being from Pompeii, and maintained contact with their Pompeiian neighbors and connections.

Urbanization changes, but it doesn't go away.

And yes, Newitz makes this much more interesting than I do, while Chloe Cannon helps by doing an excellent job as the narrator.

Highly recommended.

I bought this audiobook.