In the grand tradition of human arrogance, we tend to view our cities as permanent monuments to our own brilliance, as if pouring concrete and stacking stones is enough to stop the universe from reclaiming its property. Annalee Newitz’s work functions as a forensic audit of the urban lifecycle, examining four specific instances where the spirit of a city eventually decided to pack its bags and move elsewhere. There is a refreshing skepticism in this volume toward the “mysterious disappearance” tropes favored by low-budget history documentaries, Newitz argues that cities don’t usually vanish in a puff of smoke, they simply stop working for the people who live in them.

The Neolithic Honeycomb

The journey begins in Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in modern-day Turkey where the concept of streets had yet to be invented. The residents lived in houses joined together like a giant, mud-brick honeycomb, entering their homes through holes in the roof. It was a lifestyle that prioritized communal proximity and egalitarianism, where even the dead were buried beneath the floors to keep the family history literally underfoot.

The “Secret History” here is found in the grit of daily life, the analysis of ancient trash heaps and floor scrapings reveals a society that functioned without a central government for nearly two millennia. Eventually, the city wasn’t conquered or destroyed, it was simply abandoned as the climate shifted and the residents realized that the high-density lifestyle of roof-crawling had reached its expiration date.

The Infrastructure of Collapse

The archives often focus on the collapse of grand systems, and the entry on Angkor in Cambodia is a masterclass in technical debt. At its height, Angkor was the largest city in the pre-industrial world, a sprawling metropolis sustained by a massive, sophisticated network of reservoirs and canals.

It was a masterpiece of water management infrastructure, but it was also a brittle legacy system. When the climate turned unpredictable, the vast network of canals couldn’t handle the alternating cycles of drought and flood. The city didn’t fall to a single invasion, it slowly choked on its own complexity, proving that even a global superpower can be undone by poor maintenance and an inflexible grid.

The American Urban Experiment

Perhaps the most eccentric revelation for the modern reader is the history of Cahokia, a massive urban center that thrived near the Mississippi River in what is now Illinois. Long before the arrival of European explorers, Cahokia was a bustling hub of earthwork pyramids, diverse neighborhoods, and complex social engineering.

The city was defined by Monks Mound, a massive structure that served as the central altar for a population that reached into the tens of thousands. Cahokia’s end was a slow, political shrug, it seems the residents eventually grew tired of the social hierarchies and the environmental strain of feeding such a massive crowd. They didn’t disappear into thin air, they just dispersed, taking the spirit of the city with them and proving that sometimes, the most radical political act is simply moving away.

The Fast Food of Pompeii

When we think of Pompeii, we think of the volcano, but Newitz focuses on the bustling, grimy reality of the city before the ash fell. The archives record a city of the working class, filled with political graffiti, vibrant textiles, and thermopolia, which were essentially ancient fast-food counters for the Roman laborers.

Pompeii was a place where social mobility was possible, where former slaves could become business moguls, and the walls were covered in the unfiltered opinions of the public. The tragedy of the eruption is well-documented, but the true history lies in the resilience of the survivors, many of whom moved to nearby cities and integrated their skills into new urban experiments.

Abandonment

The takeaway from this volume is a necessary bit of humility, cities are not static monuments, they are living, breathing processes. They thrive when they serve the needs of their people, and they wither when they become too brittle, too unequal, or too disconnected from the land they sit upon. History is not a straight line of progress, but a series of urban experiments, and every lost city is a reminder that the only thing permanent about a civilization is its capacity to reinvent itself somewhere else.