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Annalee Newitz
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Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age Kindle Edition

by Annalee Newitz (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 958 ratings
Editors' pick Best History
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Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday



A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them.


In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers 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.

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  4. Publisher
    W. W. Norton & Company
  5. Publication date
    February 2, 2021
  6. File size
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Newitz always sees to the heart of complex systems and breaks them down with poetic ferocity."
― N. K. Jemisin, author of the Broken Earth trilogy and The City We Became

"Cheerful, curious, amused, and amusing, Annalee Newitz is a fabulous tour guide through the latest archaeological perspectives on four of humankind’s most remarkable urban experiments. Along the way, Newitz dispels myths, evokes fascinating stories―and makes us think hard about our own urban future."
― Charles Mann, author of 1491 and 1493

"Newitz clearly draws parallels and lessons for the here and now from these once-vast settlements…Highly recommended."
― Booklist (starred review)

"[E]xcellent…fair, judicious, open-minded…the strength of the book arises from distrust of elites and preference for common people."
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Wall Street Journal

"[A] richly detailed, progressively minded history…Newitz skillfully fuses personal reflections with scientific observations, and offers a welcome tribute to the legacy of human resilience."
― Publishers Weekly

"Drawing on four examples from the ancient world, Annalee Newitz gives us clear-eyed insight into how cities never are truly lost; they just change with their times. Newitz takes readers on a journey that reveals as much about the future of cities as it does about our urban past. Beautifully written, Four Lost Cities tells a fascinating tale of disaster and resilience that is welcome in our uncertain era."
― Andrew Lawler, author of The Secret Token

"Annalee Newitz is a brilliant writer with the heart of an archaeologist and the soul of a visionary. Four Lost Cities should open our eyes to all that may happen to our cities in the future. Vibrant and adventurous, this is a necessary book for turbulent times."
― Sarah Parcak, archaeologist and author of Archaeology from Space

"The book functions as a travel guide to places that no longer exist…[it] filled me with wonder."
― Russell Shorto, New York Times Book Review

"In their fascinating book Four Lost Cities, Annalee Newitz journeys to a quartet of ancient ghost cities, asking not only why they once thrived but why they ultimately vanished. The result is a deeply insightful look at human culture everywhere: inventive, social, resilient, and hauntingly fragile."
― Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Poison Squad

"[W]ell-researched, current, and directly applicable to our modern lives…An excellent contribution to literature on ancient civilization and complexity."
― Library Journal

"[An] astounding reflection on the rise and fall of civilisations…energising."
― Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times

"A revealing look at the ancient past that speaks thoughtfully to the global-warming present."
― Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Annalee Newitz is a journalist and author of science fiction and nonfiction, including the national best-seller Four Lost Cities. They write for the New York Times and New Scientist and co-host the Hugo Award–winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. They live in San Francisco.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07ZTSFB5T
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (February 2, 2021)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 2, 2021
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 8665 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 309 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 958 ratings

About the author

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Annalee Newitz

Annalee Newitz

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Annalee Newitz writes fiction and nonfiction about the intersection of science, technology and culture.

Their first novel, Autonomous, won the Lambda Literary Award and was nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember was nominated for the LA Times Book Award. They are currently a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. Previously, they were the founding editor of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo and as the tech culture editor at Ars Technica. They have also written for publications including Wired, Popular Science, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and more. They have published short stories in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and Technology Review's Twelve Tomorrows.

Annalee is the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct.

They were the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, worked as a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

Learn more at AnnaleeNewitz.com or follow them on Twitter @annaleen

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
958 global ratings
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Versatile, easy to assemble and very attractive!
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Top reviews from the United States

Shannon Phillips
5.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing and meticulously researched
Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2021
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I know something about Cahokia. My mother, Gayle Fritz, is an archaeologist who has done a lot of work there and wrote the textbook on ethnobotany of the site ("Feeding Cahokia"). Her husband, my stepfather, was the director of the site for many years. SO--I can recognize that Newitz has done meticulous work here. The state of research is complex, shifting and multifaceted--they don't dumb any of it down, but present a clear and cogent summary, acknowledging areas that remain unclear. They also do a marvelous job of capturing the physicality of the place. Transported me utterly, and same for the ancient cities I haven't visited and don't know as much about. I learned so much about Pompei, Çatalhöyük and Angkor. Truly impressed at how much scholarship is conveyed in such clear and engaging, even absorbing, prose. The implications for modern cities are many. Wonderful book!
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R Scheese
4.0 out of 5 stars An Examination of Urban Civilization
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2023
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Just finished "Four Lost Cities" by Annalee Newitz.

A very interesting examination of urban civilization through the lens of archeological discoveries. The author's research has her traveling across the globe and engaging with leading researchers and archeologists examining four civilizations lost to time.

Cities examined include Catalhoyuk in modern day Turkey; Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy; Angkor in northwestern Cambodia; and Cahokia, across the Mississippi from St. Louis.

Each find is examined through the perspective of how urban life evolved and what drove individuals to settle alongside one another in large regions. Questions of commerce, infrastructure, common religion and different leadership approaches are contrast as the author examines artifacts and speculates why these cities were abandoned after centuries of being inhabited and re-built.

While it sounds like an academic book, the author employs a story-telling style which tracks her discovery journey and experiences. She educates and questions what we can know about and learn from our ancestors.

An interesting read and a compilation of discoveries which continue to challenge what we think we know about history and sociology.

Definitely worth checking out.
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Elisabeth Carey
5.0 out of 5 stars What really happened with four "lost" cities
Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2021
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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.
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Derek Stephen McPhail
5.0 out of 5 stars Praise for Four Lost Cities
Reviewed in Canada on March 4, 2021
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"Annalee Newitz" has documented an exciting and thoughtful conversation with an army of archaeologists who have focused on studying four radically different ancient urban cultures. This is as much about the future of cities as it is about the past. Her work touches on the thesis of the equally brilliant "The State Is Out Of Date" by Gregory Sams, which compares the terms "matriarchy" and "patriarchy" with societies organized from the bottom up to those more recent ones organized from the top down.
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Patricia Finney
5.0 out of 5 stars Four ancient cities, only one had shops! And that was Pompeii.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2023
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I loved this book with its in-depth but very readable view of the mysteries and possible explanations for why each city was so different from the others. It seem natural for cities to be abandoned every so often and then repopulated. Personally I suspect plagues account for it.
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Samit Ghosh
5.0 out of 5 stars Great learnings from ancient urban civilisations
Reviewed in India on April 10, 2021
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This is a wonderful book which gives us down to earth & honest perspectives of old urban civilisations, we know of & some we have never heard about. Also broke many myths about their rise & decline. Found it enthralling & full of new learnings.
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John W. Buss
5.0 out of 5 stars Cahokia
Reviewed in Italy on April 9, 2021
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E' un libro estremamente interessante in quanto si tratta delle storie di città che sono state molto importanti nelle loro epoche, ma che poi, per varie ragioni, sono cadute in disordini. Inoltre è uno dei pochi libri che affronta l'argomento della civiltà di Cahokia (Illinois) nel 1300 e dopo.
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The Devlins
5.0 out of 5 stars Like visiting four museums from my armchair.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2021
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I chose this book because it was referred to in article I was enjoying in new scientist.
Its really well written, and had me scooting off, looking on the Internet for more information. I have been lucky enough to visit pompeii.. but a new perspective brings it to life in a different way. Also bizarrely, at University about 35 years ago a course I took covered the economy of cities, so histories within histories had resonance for me. Back then we called çatalhöyük, New Obsidian: every generation tends to interpret the past through a lens of their own experience. The book ends with a chapter about how future archaeologists might interpret our current era. Wonderfully though provoking!
It has everything I look for in a nonfiction book.
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