Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
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3.9 • 37 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science journalist Newitz (Scatter, Adapt, and Remember) examines the rise and fall of four ancient cities that "suffered from prolonged periods of political instability coupled with environmental crisis" in this energetic and intriguing account. Spotlighting atalh y k, a Neolithic city found in present-day Turkey; the southern Roman city of Pompeii, which was destroyed in 79 CE by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius; Angkor, the capital of the medieval Khmer Empire in Cambodia; and pre-Columbian Cahokia in what's present-day Illinois, Newitz visits each site and interviews archaeologists to explore how residents of these cities lived and died. Newitz ruminates on the experiences of "Dido," a woman whose skeleton was found in atalh y k, and the prostitutes who lived in the only "purpose-built brothel" in Pompeii; Newitz also recounts elaborate construction projects undertaken by Angkor's kings and human sacrifices offered on large, earthen mounds in Cahokia. According to the author, the dismissive views of Western, Christian historians have obscured the ingenuity and agency of these ancient societies, whose strides in urban planning, contrasted with their social inequalities and political failings, offer lessons for today. Newitz skillfully fuses personal reflections with scientific observations, and offers a welcome tribute to the legacy of human resilience. This richly detailed, progressively minded history is worth exploring.
