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. 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.

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. Vesuvius medieval Angkor in Cambodia Cahokia, an indigenous North American metropolis at the site that's now East St.

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. The allure of 'lost cities' is a strong one many of us love the story of one lost city or another.

What really happened to four 'lost' cities 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.įour 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. 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. 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. 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.

Four lost cities annalee newitz