Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining & mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries & around the world, Newitz explores the rise & 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, & the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.

Newitz travels to all four sites & investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes & 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, & manual laborers—who built these cities & 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.

°°° 

ANNALEE NEWITZ is an American journalist, editor, & author of fiction & nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, & have written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, & the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 & served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, & then became Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo & Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their book Scatter, Adapt, & Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize...