Newitz, Annalee. Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. New York: W. W. Norton,
2021. ISBN: 9780393652666
What does the phrase "lost cities" conjure in your mind? Does Indian Jones hacking through the jungle only to stumble upon a vine covered ruin come to mind? Or does careful excavation of mounds of dirt in the Middle East trigger your interest? In Four Lost Cities, the reader gets to travel to three continents and participate in examining four urban centers and try to figure out what was going on before people walked away from these hubs of civilization.
Annalee Newitz opens with Catalhoyuk (Turkey), one of the earliest urban centers in the world. After about a thousand years, the city was abandoned, gradually. Her next stop is Pompeii (Italy) where a volcanic eruption put an end to a city in the midst of urban renewal. The third stop is Angkor Wat (Cambodia) where expansionism and poor engineering led to the dwindling of the city into villages. The final stop is Cahokia (United States) where the Mississippian culture flourished, built pyramids, and then pulled up stakes and left. While visiting each city, Newitz concentrates on how the typical city dweller lived in each city. Another of her focuses is on what attracted folk to the city and what eventually led them away.
Four Lost Cities is a bit of a misnomer as Newitz points out in her introduction. People living around each of these cities knew about them even if the European elites did not. Then there is "a secret history" phrase in the subtitle! Newitz is using this term to stoke interest in looking not at the monuments found in these locations, but rather at the ordinary lives of the citizens. If you enjoy learning about ancient civilizations, you are likely to enjoy this title.
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