How can a city be lost? That is the central question of Annalee Newitz’s book Four Lost Cities, but they delve into the question more deeply than just how the people came to leave a city or how Nature reclaimed it. Also a fiction writer, the book is full of immersive descriptions that allow the reader to not only travel with Newitz to the various locations they visited in researching the book, but also back in time to walk the streets of the four cities they examine as case studies of “lost cities.”
- Russel Shorto, NY Times
Newitz has brilliantly balanced the science of anthropology and archeology (and climatology and geology and sociology) with the art of imagination. She twists together a braided cord of all the conditions that lead to a city’s downfall, easily making modern parallels to ancient places like Pompeii, Angkor, Cahokia and Catalhoyuk. Unlike in Pompeii, where natural disaster left the city and all the land around it completely uninhabitable, a city is rarely completely abandoned. Newitz highlights how the sites of Catalhoyuk and Angkor were continuously used, even into the modern era, if only as places of pilgrimage or burials. Though Cahokia largely faded back into nature (and then was covered by a modern city) many of the customs, stories and even language that was once spoken there is still carried by various Native American peoples. What is perhaps most interesting about this new non-fiction work is that is seems a natural of continuation of Newitz’s investigation into how we reflect to ourselves. In their Hugo award-winning podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct, Newitz and their partner “explore the meaning of science-fiction and how it’s relevant to real-life science and society.” Four Lost Cities does the same, only looking to the past instead of the future. There are two sides to every coin, and it seems as if Newitz may know how to explore both sides.