Factually! with Adam Conover - Four Lost Cities with Annalee Newitz

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

Where do cities… come from? Are they created by committee? Or do they just spring up out of the earth? Adam explores this question with journalist Annalee Newitz, author of the new book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. They take an audio tour from Cahokia, an indigenous city near St. Louis that somehow got left out of American textbook; the Neolithic city of Çatalhöyük, where people buried their ancestors under their living room floors; Angkor, which declined due to lack of government care of infrastructure; and everyone’s favorite lost city - Pompeii! You can find Four Lost Cities wherever books are sold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Let's talk about Pompeii. Remember Pompeii? You might have heard about it in your sixth grade global studies class like I did. If you didn't, I'll refresh your memory. Pompeii is a Roman city south of Naples in Italy. And in the year 79 AD, almost 2000 years ago, the volcano Vesuvius, in what I think is the correct geological term, a kablooey, and ash rained down on the entire city, boiling hot ash. And this ash, while it did destroy Pompeii, it also more or less preserved the city in layers and layers of ash

until a surveying engineer rediscovered it in 1748 and found the entire city preserved. I'm talking the shells of human bodies, entire buildings, wall art, even graffiti, all of it preserved under ash. Now, what happened to Pompeii was a disaster, but it was also really cool, right? I mean, come on. Pape is awesome. What is it about it that pulls us to it so much? What is it about ruins in general that draws us in? I mean, come on, admit it. You love ruins. I love ruins. We all love ruins. I don't care whether it's Stonehenge, the Parthenon, or an abandoned old factory in your hometown. When you see that shit, you stop and take a photo and you marvel at it, don't you? Why is that? Why are we so drawn to them? Well, here's what I think. I think exactly

the same way that that ash was a shell over those human bodies. We could see the shape of the human underneath in the shape of the ash covering them. Ruins are the shells of human civilization. And by looking at them, we can imagine and learn about the civilization that used to exist. We can picture the ghosts of previous humans walking around within them. And that's incredibly powerful, especially when we're talking about the ruins of cities.

See, there is no more important innovation or unit of organization in the history of civilization than the city. In fact, the history of human civilization is in many ways simply the history of human cities. Just like ants build anthills, on some level, humans are fundamentally city builders. Cities are our most profound social technology, and they're the densest collections of information about our history. In them, we can see how our spiritual, social, political, and economic lives overlap. I mean, it's fucking nuts. I really cannot overstate the extent to which to understand human cities is to understand human civilization. But of course, the question of what cities we

choose to study and how we choose to study them is distorted to the lens of which culture we come from. Because think about it, the story of humanity is the story of all of our cities, right? But the narrative that we've often chosen when we study history is to just focus on a few of the cities. Let's look at just one example that we're going to discuss more with our guest today. Take Cahokia, for instance. Have you heard of Cahokia? I'd wager you haven't. I'd wager that same sixth grade global studies class that taught you all about Pompeii might have skipped it. I myself did not know this city existed until just a few years ago. It's a city that was larger than London around the year 1250. So incredibly massive in historical terms. And it also contains gigantic earthworks,

huge mounds that you could compare to the pyramids in Egypt. I mean, this is pretty significant stuff historically. Oh, and by the way, Cahokia was located in Missouri. That's right, in North America. This enormous, organized, sophisticated world historical city was built and populated by the indigenous people who lived in North America prior to European colonization. And by the way, it wasn't a secret. When the colonists arrived, they were like, holy shit, a really big city was here. But for some reason, they left it out of the history books. We don't teach the story of Cahokia in our middle school global studies classes.

Why not? Instead, the cities that we've been taught to value and consider are the ones more like Pompeii. Well, you know what? I think that's bullshit. When we neglect to tell the story of all of our cities. We neglect the fundamental history of ourselves as human beings. We dismiss the accumulated knowledge of humanity, which in an age of societal disruption and ongoing ecological catastrophe seems like a bad idea to me.

So let's rectify that in today's episode. Here today to talk about ancient cities, our guest is Annalee Newitz, a contributor at the New York Times opinion page and most recently the author of Four Lost Cities, A Secret History of the Urban Age. Please welcome Annalie Newitz. Annalie, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me on. The book is called Four Lost Cities. It's an extremely appealing title for a book, I have to say.

Like there's nothing, there's nothing I like more than a lost city. I mean, you're imagining, you know, ruins covered in vines, but there's like maybe a magic object hidden inside the city somewhere. I grew up with very, you know, in a certain period of fantasy literature, I apologize. But, but these are real, these are real cities. That's right. These are real cities. And when I first started working on the book, people kept saying, oh, like Atlantis? And I was like, no, like Angkor. Actual cities that really rose up and kind of got abandoned later on. Well, tell me about them and tell me how you came to write the book.

So I had been working on a book about the end of the world. And I got in the process of doing that book, I got really interested in the idea of how cities were kind of battle suits for surviving all kinds of shifts in the environment and different kinds of transformations that civilization goes through. And so I thought, all right, instead of trying to do my next book about, you know, four million years of history, which is the last one, I was like, why don't I do something a little smaller and a little more focused and look at how cities survive and how they represent, you know, the work of millions of people oftentimes surviving together. So they're really these kinds of amazing entities of cooperation. Of course, they're full of conflict as well. So there was a long period where I thought I was going to write

about 12 cities, and then I had a whole bunch more stuff. And finally, I settled on the four cities in the book, which are separated by thousands of years. Çatalhöyük, which is an ancient city in Turkey. Pompeii, which we've all heard the story of. You've seen the action film, so you know what happened. Yeah. Yeah. I saw the people covered in my sixth grade history class and the people covered in ash, which is like really the only thing we learned is that is there people frozen in place and with the ash, it's very cool. And now we'll do the next chapter. Yeah, it's super creepy.

And that was actually a really fun one to do. And then the other two cities are Angkor, which was the capital of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia. And Cahokia, which is an indigenous American city, uh, outside St. Louis, which, um, is very close to my heart. I've visited several times and, uh, that's sort of the, that's sort of the place where it started actually was with Cahokia. Um, and then I got to travel to these other cities as well.

Yeah. Cahokia is so fascinating. We actually did a little segment on it. Um, one of our animated episodes of Adam ruinsins Everything just about how this is not something that many people are taught about that existed in North America. You know, the image that we have of Native Americans, of American Indians is, you know, just a couple of people in the woods just like running around. You know what I mean? Like very hunter gatheratherer kind of stuff and we're not uh taught that yeah there were actual cities in north america i mean you know maybe you hear about the ones in south america but it's wild stuff but before we get to that i want to get

to that yeah uh let's just talk a little i just want to expand on that point about cities being like battle suits that's really fascinating i, cities are like the studying city to study cities is to study civilization in a way. Right. But how do they how do they work as battlesuits? and generations of people trying to create an environment that's more comfortable for humans. So it's partly a battle suit in the sense that it's hardened against the environment, but it's also something that is peaceful in a lot of ways. Cities really arise from farming. They don't arise from war. I know there's been a whole debate in the urban studies community about this, but I think at this point, most archaeologists and historians would agree that cities are coming out of people simply wanting to work together or figuring out ways to work together, to feed themselves, and to entertain themselves. And so the battle suit is,

you have to imagine like, you know, like a mecha suit from an anime where like, it's not just for like fighting monsters. It's also for like playing games and like learning how to be a grownup and, you know, how to do all kinds of other amazing things in the environment that you can't do if you're just a squishy little biological organism. So it's like, it's a way of getting together with all your Power Rangers friends

and like building something bigger because all of you are together. And again, this is the power of basically collective work and collective action. You know, people saying, all right, you know, if we have a hundred of us, we can build a really great reservoir and then we can have water all year round. How about that? Not something you could do by yourself or just with a little tiny family group. And so that, I think, is what makes cities such a source of fascination for us because they do represent the work of so many people. There's something that transcends individual human experience. And yet they're so human.

You know, they're made by people. And they do travel through time because you build things in cities hoping that they last for hundreds of years. And I think that's why the story of Notre Dame in Paris burning was so affecting for people all over the world was because this was something that was built by generations and generations and generations of people living in the area. And it felt like a living embodiment of history. And at their best, that is what cities are. They remind us of our connections to the past. They are kind of monuments to human ingenuity. And on top of all that,

they're really fun. And that's something I feel like people forget when they talk about the history of cities. And, you know, you think, oh, it's great monuments and it's, you know, it's things like Notre Dame. But like, why do people go to Notre Dame? Because it's beautiful and you can hear people singing really badass songs in there, right? It sounds really cool. And that's one of the main reasons that people came to cities. One of the things I found in my research over and over was the attraction of the city was parties.

You know, you could go there. You had so many people, so many artisans, so many musicians, so many cool plazas that, you know, hundreds of people had worked over hundreds of years to build and just have a great time, you know? So they're both, you know, places where we work, places where we survive the environment together, and also places where we survive the environment together and also places where we just have giant barbecues or have amazing dances and, you know, just get drunk or. Yeah. Wow. You're really you're really encapsulating why I fell in love with New York City when I moved there in my 20s. And I don't mean to go on, do my whole I love New York, you know, memoir article that like everyone's read a thousand times. But feel free because New York is a great city.

Well, yeah, it is. It is. Absolutely. But I had that sense of, you know, I grew up sort of out in the country on Long Island. It was a much more natural world kind of place. And I often saw human civilization as being an ugly thing. You know, growing up in the suburbs, I lived near the forest and I could go on a hike in the forest and say, oh, this is a beautiful place. This is a beautiful environment. And then like, you know, this is a parking lot with a supermarket. Like this is ugly, you know?

And I remember when I moved to New York feeling like, well, this is the most unnatural place. You know, this is the most human place, the least, you know, natural worldly place. And yet it is so beautiful and fascinating and there's so much going on here and it almost feels like this is humanity's natural environment in a way. You know what I mean?

This is the environment that we create for ourselves. We're like, let's just go hog wild and tear down every single tree and dam every river and build our shit. You know what I mean? And we just go to town and it's all dense and on top of each other. And as you said, New York has the, has the advantage of being an old yet a young city, only a few hundred years old. So you're, you're like, oh, I, people, you, the people who built

it just before you are kind of visible to you. Like their names are on the buildings and they're intelligible to you. It's not incredibly old. And you have this sense of like, my God, millions of people working together without actually purposefully coordinating with each other most of the time created this incredibly vibrant incredibly complex place that is almost like infinitely deep you know like the reason people fall in love with new york is you can spend a whole lifetime of understanding different parts of it understanding it in different aspects uh and so like that's why i said at the beginning of this, like, man, in some ways you start thinking about cities.

You're like, that is human civilization. And the more we study them like that, that right, that if you're an alien come to earth, you're like, what the fuck is this? What is this city? This is the part I need to understand. Yeah, you got stuff in books, but like what's going on here? Yeah, no, it's really true. I can't wait to see the science fiction story where that

is what the aliens are worried about. Like, why did you make these cities? Because they are, they're quite improbable when you think about it. You know, people spent, you know, probably, I mean, Homo sapiens and then our immediate ancestors spent about a million years basically roving the earth, right? And then suddenly, about 10,000 years ago, suddenly we decide, the earth, right? And then suddenly, about 10,000 years ago, suddenly we decide, let's build these dirty, stinky, noisy warrens of disease and just hang out there. Why? Why did we do that? That's like one of the mysteries that I kind of wanted to get at in this book. Like, what were we thinking? And one of the interesting things I was reading recently, and then let's talk about specific city, but humans have also had always had an ambivalent feeling to some degree about cities. like, you know, a byword for decadence and depravity, you know, goodbye, Babylon. I'm putting Babylon behind me. That's sort of in the Bible. It's often a horrible place.

And there's like stretching back. I mean, talk about the culture war, the rural urban culture where we have in America today. It's like in the goddamn Bible, there's a rural urban culture war. And so it also seems that as soon as people started collecting in these places, there was a little bit of ambivalence of other people going like, whoa, that's weird. That's a weird place. There's like a whole lot.

People are having sex there and money is changing hands. What's going on? You know? Partying. Yeah. I think, I mean, I think that's definitely true.

And there's a couple of things that I want to say about that. One is I think that cities are looked at, have always been seen as these sources of decadence and anxiety, partly because of the partying and the sex, but also because they are places that people immigrate to. Cities have, as far as we can tell, using the tools that we have now, it seems like even the oldest cities had immigrant neighborhoods. They had people coming to them from far away and mixing with people who were more local. And I think that that is what makes cities so wonderful. And it's also what I think causes a lot of fear because it's encounters with the unknown, with cultures you've never seen before in an intimate way, right? It's not like we're just like saying hi on the road, you know, like, bye-bye, you know, you're gone now. It's like, this is your neighbor. This is your person who's helping you build a street. These are people you have to depend on and trust to like not let their wall fall in on your kitchen or whatever. And that

creates a lot of ambivalence, I think. And so the other thing I would say is that about a specific city, Catalhoyuk, which I talk about in the book, it was a Neolithic city. It was really going strong about 9000 years ago and they were having big bonfires and hanging out. And after that city is abandoned and it takes a while, I mean, people live in the city for like almost 2000 years. And once they finally left and it's become kind of a monument and kind of a graveyard, people don't build other cities. It seems as if the people who lived there went back to village life. They were still farming. They were still settled. They weren't nomads. But it appears there were about 2,000 or 3,000 years in there where people kind of rejected urban life wholesale. There were other large settlements like Çatalhöyük, but they were very rare.

And then we see cities reemerge during kind of the classic Mesopotamian era where you see Ur and you have like the ziggurats and all the little shit like that. But it does seem like people, you know, humans almost took a different path, basically. We started cities, kind of backed off from it, and then went back and just went all in on it, you know, just really went to the big grand cities that we think of now when we think of what is a city.

Well, tell me more about Chautauqua. Where does it where where was it? And is this one of the first? This is very early. Is this one of the very first cities we know about? And is this one of the first, this is very early, is this one of the very first cities we know about? Yeah, and in fact, I should say, not everyone even calls it a city. I'm calling it a city in the book because it's kind of the city of its day. This is located in central Turkey. As I said, it was Neolithic, which means it really starts happening in what is the Stone Age. Basically, people are only using stone tools. They haven't even invented ceramics yet. They're not yet really eating dairy. It's a really early

period in human history. And so people are farming and they start building the city on the Konya Plain, which is a very nice fertile area, good for grazing animals, good for growing stuff. And the city doesn't look anything like modern cities. So it's built from mud brick, unfired, so it crumbles really easily. It crumbles really easily. And over the years, over the, you know, really 1,500, 2,000 years that people are living there, as each successive house crumbles, it forms a hill. And so eventually the city is on a hill of city. Wow. So archaeologists digging down into this hill are just finding nothing but city.

And the houses are all squished up against each other. So it's a little, it's a bit reminiscent of kind of Pueblo architecture here in the United States. But it's, it's much, it's not multi-story really. It's all kind of one level. And then sidewalks are on the roof. People have doors in their roofs. And they do a lot of work on the roof. People have doors in their roofs and they do a lot of work on the roof. You know, people, you know, do a lot of cooking on the roof. They sleep on the roof during the warmer months and then they go down into their house for coziness. They have a hearth down there and they also bury their dead under the floors, under the areas where they sleep in the house. And so the home at Çitalhuyuk to me is

super interesting because it's this kind of amalgamation of spiritual practice and then just like pragmatic everyday stuff. Like this is where we're cooking and this is where we're making our clothes. And so it's at its height, there were maybe 5,000 people living there, which sounds teeny. But when you think about the fact that every other place where people live, like villages, 200 people was really the maximum population in those places. So this, if you came upon Catalhoyuk, you know, and you were just a typical person from a village, it would look like Manhattan to you. You'd be like, holy crap, there's so many people. But as I said, it's this kind of proto-city. So maybe it felt to people like a bunch of villages just really close together. There was no central plaza. There was no commerce. There was no written

language that we can recognize. And so it was, and it was felt very decentralized to the archaeologists who have, have examined it over the years. And so it's, it's really a city in the making. It's, it's big and, and densely packed. But it doesn't seem from the architecture to have had like a ruler, like nobody has a big fancy castle. Everybody just has these kind of, you know, one, two, three bedroom places squished up against their neighbor's places. And, you know, some people have like more fancy stuff on the walls,

but it's not clear that that correlates to wealth or that they even had an idea of wealth. And so it's a super, super interesting experiment in urbanism, this really early experiment. And then, like I said, after the place is abandoned, and we don't know why, like there wasn't a big war, there wasn't a big flood. You know, there were some climate changes, there was a drought, but the city seems to have survived that intact. It doesn't seem like that was a big problem for them. But eventually they do leave and they return to village life on the Konya plain around the city and the city crumbles away and becomes kind of a graveyard. Wow. People continue to use it as a graveyard for thousands of years. They find graves from like classical antiquity, you know, so it's much later. There's Roman graves there, basically. That's a rough translation from the Latin.

And so it kind of becomes a monument. And then much, much later in the early 1960s, Westerners start excavating systematically and looking at the city. But before it was abandoned, it was populated for 2,000 years. Is that what you said? Yeah, about 1,500, 2,000 years, depending on kind of how you look at it. But yeah, it's, it's definitely, and it's a really, it's a going concern for about a thousand years. And when I say going concern, I mean, it's quite populated. It's like just, you know, it's at its height. Yeah. Well, yeah. But I mean, you said 5,000

people. We don't think of that as that much. But 2,000 years strikes me as an incredibly long time for a city to be in one place. There's very few cities that are present today that have had the same name or been around for that long. Yeah, that's an enormously long amount of time. Yeah, they I mean, by all measures, it was a very successful city. Yeah, very successful urban experiment or mega settlement or whatever term you want to use for it. People felt very attached to the land. first places where we can see people growing an attachment to place and growing an attachment to staying in one place. Because this is also a city that exists at the moment when human beings are really starting to settle down into an agrarian life where they live in one place year round,

which is a huge cultural shock and dislocation for Homo sapiens. Like we've been a wandering species up until that point. And I just have to imagine it would have been, it would have felt like going through the internet age or something like that. Just such a huge shift to be like, wait, we're just going to stay here. We're not going to go move around with the seasons. We're just going to stay in one place and grow our food and hope that the food grows and like build a permanent house.

Like that is nuts. Why are you doing that? And it worked. And I think that because it worked in that in Catalhoyuk, people were very attached to it. And they were like, OK, we're going to stay here. Like this is where our ancestors were. Their bones are in the floor. Like we know this place, you know, but I think we can't move. My bones are in the floor. We can't

move. Actually, the great thing at Chital, and this is not just at Chital, but lots of Neolithic cities or Neolithic settlements, people would excavate the bones of their dead and take out the skulls and plaster them and kind of put them up as, you know, we assume it was kind of a way of honoring ancestors, but they would also trade them back and forth. And so when archaeologists are excavating there, they'll find like a person buried in the floor with someone else's skull or maybe like three or four skulls. And it's just like, you know, collect them all. We don't know what that meant, but it definitely seems like that the kind of symbolic feeling of putting down roots or, you know, building your city with the bones of your ancestors, that that was part of this process of humans getting used to the idea of

being in one place and being okay with that, you know? Now, we were just talking in, we just interviewed Rutger Bregman the other week, and we talked about the idea of the agriculture trap, the idea that the transition to agriculture was actually not good for humanity, that it allowed us to vastly expand our population, but at the expense of our lifespan and our quality of life and our dental health and all these things. It's an idea I've read in a couple different places, but talking to you now, it also strikes me like, well, it's true. We would not have cities or any of these, you know, any of the things they bring. I mean, cities come from agriculture. Do they not? Talk about that a little bit.

I mean, cities come from agriculture. Do they not? Talk about that a little bit. So this is, again, a longstanding debate. And as you've already covered, like the question about like, was agriculture a big mistake? And all of those things are part of that debate. But yes, cities cannot exist without agriculture. And the chicken or egg question for many urban archaeologists is which came first, city or agriculture? for many urban archaeologists is, which came first, city or agriculture? And it looks like basically the answer is yes, they came together and that you don't really see a lot of systematic

farming or a lot of systematic city building without, you know, without the package, you know, farms and cities coming together. And so part of that is because, as we were talking about, if you're living in a settled environment and you're staying there all year round, you've got to have food. You've got to figure out a way to make it through the winter and that kind of thing. So it seems like early cities, people were mostly settled and then some portion of the population may have gone or, you know, seasonally moved with herds or they may have had farms that were somewhat distant from the city. So, people may have had to travel to get to the farms. This is a question with actually a lot of these ancient cities is where the heck were these farms? Yeah. Because we don't always find them in the archaeological record.

But yeah, it's, you know, one of the best ways that I've seen it described is terraforming. That this is an early example of humans terraforming. We're remaking the earth in our own image. in our own image. And so oftentimes early farms are created by clear cutting and burning. So you just burn a whole area and then plant your own trees or grains or whatever you're growing. And then of course, cities are like a human environment too. We build our little boxes that we live in, we have our like party stadiums, whatever we decide to build. Um, and so you have to always think when you think of a city, um, even a modern city, you always have to think of it as part of a package with farms. So where is the food coming from? Um, and where, you know, where are the resources coming from? And that's, you know, part of the urban story is how do you have a densely populated area that is also being fed and that also has access to resources like wood or clay or other items that you need to, you know, make clothing and tools and roads.

And so some of the other cities in my book, like Angkor, which is in Southeast Asia, one of their big issues is how to get stone into the downtown area where they're building their temples and building all kinds of places for, you know, basically fancy stuff, you know, building temples, building public monuments. And so they build these elaborate systems of canals, well, slaves build them, mostly debt slaves, in order to bring rock into downtown Angkor from distant areas. And so this is, again, that's the story of the city. The city doesn't exist without this rock that's been quarried from distant regions.

And so, yeah, a city is a place for consuming mass quantities. And so you have to look for where the quantities are being produced to understand the city. There's also seems to be this degree to which like how we talk about humans making these decisions. Sometimes we say, well, they decided they wanted to do this so that they, you know, so they could do A, B and C and they decided to put down roots. Right. But assuming there isn't a big emperor and you say there isn't in this case, well, there isn't one person deciding to do that. There's like 5,000 people just sort of individually going, oh, I think I'm going to do this this year or whatever. And sometimes I think

of cities as being almost like lakes in that, you know, a lake is just like, hey, you know, water just runs downhill. And after a while it collects somewhere. A lake is just a depression where water collects on its way to the sea, you know, because like the rivers happen to to come in this way. And sometimes like this is the sort of view you get when you're like, you know, flying over a city. You're like, why is this city right here? And you're like, did people just sort of collect here? Because this is this is where the heart, the natural harbor was. So this is where, you know, people, you know, this is where the shipping happened and people sprung up around that. It's difficult to know, like, when you look at humans

on this scale, sometimes there's that human agency of, oh, we decided to start agriculture and build cities. And then sometimes you're like, well, no, we just, it just kind of happened by lots of individual humans doing their things. And this bizarre collective decision was made. I don't know. That's very abstract. Does that make any sense what I'm saying? I think the thing that I really like about what you were saying is this idea

that this is people making decisions and that when we describe that history, we often make it sound very simple, like, oh, everybody disagreed. We're just going to go here. And that's not obviously how huge groups of people make decisions, right? And so one of the puzzles about all these cities is figuring out, well, what did inspire people to come to that decision?

Did they have government? Did they have like a council that met somehow? Did they, you know, did they, like you said, did they just say, oh, well, here's a great fork in the river. Like, let's just be at the fork in the river because that's a great place to be, which is the case with Cahokia, which is on the Mississippi and the Missouri split right near Cahokia.

So you can see why they put that city there because it was right on the road, basically. But with a place like, you know, Çatalhöyük or, you know, places where it's more of a question. Yeah. I mean, you have to start thinking about, was there a leader who forced people to work, for example, or did people have volunteer shifts? And what made it worth it? Because one of the things that archaeologists would ask me when I was asking them questions about the city was, they'd say, well, what is it that they've lost that doesn't make it worth it for them to put all of that effort into maintaining the city? Because that's the bottom line, right? Is a city is a heck of a lot of work. It's maintenance, maintenance,

maintenance. And at a place like Chitalhoyuk or a place like Angkor where you're fighting against nature all the time, if things start crumbling and you don't fix them, that can get out of hand really quickly, especially if it's, you know, that's your house. You know, if your neighbor decides, oh, well, I'm sharing a wall with you, but I don't give a crap about maintaining it. You know, eventually your wall is going to fall in. But I don't give a crap about maintaining it. You know, eventually your wall is going to fall in.

And so, you know, there's cities are. Cities are basically made up of the labor that goes into them. So if the laborers are being mistreated, if the laborers are unhappy, eventually the city starts to go wrong. to go wrong. And when, uh, when you look at cities that are allegedly lost, um, which really just means that they've been mostly abandoned, um, it's almost always because laborers said, no, it's just not worth it. The work it's, it's not a, there's no payoff here for me. Um, and I don't care if my charismatic leader is telling me to like lift a bunch of bags of dirt and carry them somewhere. I I'm just not getting anything out of this. Yeah. And eventually I'm going to go back to a different city or I'm going to go,

you know, back to a village where people appreciate me more. So, yeah, it's, it's definitely complicated. It's not like everybody gets together and has a Kumbaya moment and is like, yay, let's go to the city. But that, I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me that, that a city is, is that labor made visible. You know, again, one of the things where I lived in New York and, you know, New York has a lot of dingy, dirty spots. And I remember thinking, man, this place is so big. It's impossible to keep it all nice. You know, like there just aren't enough people doing the work in the city to like scrub every building down um you go to you go to smaller cities they generally have a

easier time of like keeping tidy you know even in their downtowns but also that goes to show why it's so unsettling once infrastructure starts to crumble in a city because it that is the you know when you when there's potholes on the bridge, it, well, if that's happening, like this whole place is starting to crumble. Last thing I just want to say about, before we go to break, about Catalhoyuk that really struck me about your description is that it really shines a light on how many different ways there are to live, to look at these different cities. I mean, what you described, that almost sounded like where people are sleeping on the roofs and they're building a mound, a growing mound, and they're burying their dead beneath the floorboards.

This sounds like it's from Italo Calvino. This sounds like it's from Invisible Cities. It's like fantasy of different cities. It's so, there's like a romantic, mysterious quality to that description that's really beautiful. But it really happened. And it really happened. And as you said, it is a clear indication that we don't have to live the

way that we do, that there's many, many ways to build the environment. There's many ways to interact. And each of these built environments has in its structure, suggestion of a social relationship. You know, we can kind of, we can try speculatively to reconstruct what kind of community governance was like in these places based on how they built. And so that is, that's a mystery, but it's also part of the excitement of doing archaeology and standing on the sidelines and watching people do archaeology in my case. That is so cool. I mean, I can understand why you're so excited to do it. Well, we got to take a really quick break. When we come back, I want to learn more about Cahokia, the lost city right here in North America. But we got to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Annalie Newitz. Okay, we're back with Annalie Newitz. Let's talk about Cahokia. Tell me about Cahokia.

You said on the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. That's right. So it's located near East St. Louis in Southern Illinois. And it's really right across the Mississippi from St. Louis. And the city itself probably started to really heat up around 900 CE. So kind of what we would think of as the Middle Ages in Europe. And the city eventually became big enough that it had possibly as much as 30,000 people. So that makes it rival European cities at the time, like Paris. So it's quite big. But like Paris was about that same size. And we're talking 900, much later than Catalhoyuk, but like very early as far as European history goes.

Sure. Yeah. Very early in European history. Or what we think of as European history. Yeah, exactly. Quote unquote modern European history. Yeah. These things are very complicated.

And so Cahokia, that's not the name of the city. That was a name given to it by Europeans when they stumbled across it a couple hundred years ago, and there was a tribe living there called the Cahokia. And so Europeans were like, great, let, was that Cahokia was built using these vast monumental mounds, which are basically earthen pyramids. So these are roughly the shape of a pyramid and with a flat top, and they're made of densely packed earth. And in order to build them, people would have had to take baskets of earth and carry it from one place to another and smash it down really hard.

And the biggest of these mounds is called Monk's Mound. And it's what we think of as sort of downtown Cahokia. And its footprint is the same as the footprint of the Great Pyramid at Giza. So it's a whopping big mound. Wow. And it's a whopping big mound. Wow. And it's huge. And then, like I said, it's flat on top. And it also has another level that's flat.

So it looks like there were sort of two ceremonial areas on this mound. And the mound is next to what's called the Grand Plaza, which is, as advertised, an enormous plaza that hundreds of people would have worked on to grade it so that it's all one level. And they would have put a nice layer of sand on top of it to create this vast area where people did things like they had sporting events. North American indigenous folks loved sports. They loved sports in South America too, but it was a big thing. And they had ceremonies there. They had, you know, people probably addressed the city from the top of that mound. So the downtown area would be probably recognizable to a modern city person in the sense that they would say, oh, there's a big building, there's a big plaza, like there's lots of other mounds around.

And so the entire city is full of mounds, not as big as Monk's Mound. But it appears that mounds were a basic part of the architecture of the city and houses were built from wood. So none of the houses remain, which is a source of great frustration and confusion for Europeans when they first found it because they were like, well, how can this be a city? Like, there's no houses, you know? And because in Europe, of course, medieval cities were made from stone. And so you would have had, you know, remains of houses that you could see. So Cahokia was the kind of center or perhaps the biggest city in what is called the Mississippian culture. And Mississippian culture was just a shared culture. They probably shared some beliefs and some language all along the Mississippi River. And so

throughout the South, you'll stumble across towns that are called mounds or Moundsville or Moundburg or whatever. And those are towns that when Europeans settled there, they named them after the fact that they were mounds because they were moving into what had once been an indigenous town or a small indigenous city that had used these mounds. And so that's kind of how we identify the Mississippian culture up and down the Mississippi is that they had this characteristic mound building in their downtown areas. They shared some symbolic imagery

and they also all played a game called Chunky. And that they had these kind of, these round pucks that they would roll. And so you see these chunky, chunky stones all up and down the Mississippi. So that's one way we can kind of recognize that they were sharing culture. Was it a team sport? I just want to know more about it. It is a team sport.

It's a gambling sport. And it's still played today. The Cherokee have an annual Chunky competition. If you go on YouTube, you can see people demonstrating Chunky now. And what you do is one person rolls the Chunky stone and another person throws a spear and tries to predict where the Chunky stone is going to land.

So you try to get your spear to hit exactly where the Chunky stone lands, but you're kind of doing it simultaneously with the stone rolling. And to land. So you try to get your spear to hit exactly where the chunky stone lands, but you're kind of doing it simultaneously with the stone rolling. And then people bet, you know? So it's like everybody's sort of standing around trying to decide if you're going to figure it out. And there's several figurines

that we have from Cahokia of chunky players. And you can see them kind of like kneeling down and they have a very kind of thoughtful expression on their face and they're about to roll the chunky stone and they're wearing like cool earrings and they have like awesome headgear and stuff and they look great. They look very sporty. And so Cahokia style sporty. So Cahokia was a going concern for several hundred years. Many people moved there from all over the Americas. Well, not all of the Americas, but all over North America.

There were massive festivals there where people would come from all up and down the Mississippi to visit Cahokia. So it was kind of a seasonal city. It would have had a much bigger population at certain times of year when they were gathering for festivals. They loved barbecue. There's so many barbecue pits that we found at Cahokia. And in fact, one of the most common things to find when you're excavating there is just a pit of half-eaten bones because people had a party and they had a big barbecue. And downtown at Monk's Mound, where they probably had the biggest parties, there was this one barbecue pit that they found that was still stinky. Like when they finally excavated at the bottom, like it smelled bad smell.

And they found ants, like the remains of ants that had come and eaten some of the stuff before it was burned. They also, but one of my favorite details is, so they're digging this up and they're like, wow, there was this big party. There's all these, you know, remains from barbecue and there's like broken dishes and a human finger bone just thrown in there. You know, somebody just while doing barbecue, lost a finger. Maybe, maybe the, maybe the chunky game,

maybe the bedding got a little intense at the chunky game. Yeah. I'm just saying. It's like, I really want to know the story of that, the one human finger. I got to say, this doesn't even sound that different from life in St. Like what do people like at St.

Louis? Barbecue, sports, gambling. I mean, it sounds like that area. I know. I know. That's one of the many things that I love about Cahokia is I feel like even though there's a huge disjunction in the culture, obviously there's, you know, colonization happens. And actually Cahokia had been abandoned long

before European settlers came there. The Cahokia tribe was living there, but the people who built that city were long gone. And I, but I love the fact that, yeah, there's something about that place, the American bottom, people just, they're there for the barbecue and sports. And so the city was, you know, this incredible achievement. And it's still, like Chitalhoyuk, we're left to wonder why people abandoned it. Yeah. it yeah um there's no uh they didn't leave uh written records that we can find um and like they may have been using um textiles for writing or they may we just don't know there's so we don't have any sort of story that says like and then um and there was no big war there was no flood for a while people believed there had been a flood, but then geologists did some pretty thorough work and said, no, there's no big flood. And so something happened. Something happened in that city. And we know that the city did have

really strong centralized planning for a while. Everything was on a grid. All the houses were lined up very neatly. There were mounds in regular places that had poles on top. The poles may have been decorative. They may have been for directions, almost like a street sign. And then there's this moment in the city's history where suddenly people stop building on a grid. They stop using that big mound downtown. They start using that mound area as a trash pit and they start building more neighborhood like houses, like in little courtyards. And so something happened maybe in the city, some big shift in politics. A different form of government or something like that. So something happened maybe in the city, some big shift in politics. A different form of government or something like that. Yes. I talk about it in the book as being a social movement.

Some archaeologists call it a revival. We know that there were, among indigenous cultures, there were these kinds of revival movements where lots of people would start to follow one particular shamanistic figure or group and move to a new place. But it seems like people just at a certain point were like, yeah, we're kind of done with this. We're just going to go back to, you know, a different kind of life. And so a lot of the people who live there probably became what are now the Siouan tribes. And they just said, screw it. We're not going back. We're done with the mounds. Let me ask when, I mean, first of all, few hundred years, again, that's the same scale

as New York City or any American city today that that was around for. You know, that's the same amount of time from today back to Peter Stuyvesant from new york uh so let me ask what was their agriculture uh was this city based on agriculture like the other ones that we're talking about it was um it was very much an agricultural society and we know that they had huge farms all over the uplands um some of which would have been relatively distant from the city and that people were traveling from the city to manage farmland. It's not clear

how ownership was handled. Was the farmland kind of collectively owned? Did people have family plots? These are like big questions for archaeologists. One of the things, but we do know that they did have these massive farms. So whoever owned them, the food from them was getting to the city. Corn, you know, corn was a big South American and Central American staple, but it didn't reach North America until a little bit later. And so they were eating a ton of crops that have rewilded. So they domesticated marsh elder and something called erect knotweed and several other plants that now we no longer farm and no longer eat. But they were eating these grains and these seeds. And there are archaeologists in the States now who are, basically they do botany archaeology and they look for caches like that people have left behind of these seeds and grains that are no longer eaten.

And sometimes they find them, like people would, you know, bury a bunch of erect knotweed seeds in the floor to eat later. And then for whatever reason, they'd forget about them or they'd leave. And then archaeologists find them and they're like, dude, they were eating these knotweed seeds. not weed seeds. So these plants are called lost crops. And there's a whole bunch of people now who are studying these lost crops and looking at them as possible new crops, like things that we could domesticate again, because they have great nutritional, you know, they have nutritional value and they're also tasty. And why not have a variety? So the story of Cahokia is so at odds, again, with the normal white American cultural historical conception of, you know, the indigenous people who were on this continent before the arrival of Europeans. Like you're talking a city with thousands of tens of thousands of people that existed for

hundreds of years centrally organized in some way or organized in some way to the extent that they were building on a grid system oh yeah no it's centrally organized for sure with yeah with agriculture wide-scale agriculture to feed a city i mean it it's it's stunning how much this is the opposite of what, you know, I was taught in school or what I saw on TV growing up. Why do you think that is? Like, why did the story not be more widely told? You know, this is a pattern you see in a lot of cities that get referred to as lost cities. This is a pattern you see in a lot of cities that get referred to as lost cities. These are places that are often talked about by European settlers.

And European settlers will pretend that they have discovered them. This happened at Angkor. This happened at Cahokia. And, you know, it doesn't fit with a tidy tale of European settlement in the United States. The, the sort of the myth is that this was a the people who built the pyramids in ancient Egypt had somehow come over here and built them because it couldn't possibly be that indigenous people had built such an incredible metropolis. So I think, you know, it's part of Western mythology about how colonialism works, right? You know, it's always, the colonizing power always wants to imagine that, you know, it's bringing some kind of new fancy thing to the place that it's crushing under its boot and doesn't want to acknowledge that, in fact,

you know, civilization to rival European civilization has existed in the Americas, you know, for a very long time, thousands of years, you know, much, much older than, than Cahokia. I mean, the thing that's interesting about Cahokia is that the people building Cahokia, building these massive, um, mounds, they were basing that architecture on even more ancient architecture. There were mound builders in the United, in the, in the area of the United of the United States 3,000 years ago. There's amazing earthworks in Louisiana that are these incredible mounds and, you know, spiral shapes and all kinds of, well, earthworks where people have clearly used the earth to create monumental architecture,

often along rivers. And so the people who made Cahokia were like, they were looking back to their own distant history. And they were like, how can we be as cool as those guys over at Watson Break in Louisiana? Of course, they wouldn't have called it Louisiana, but you know what I mean? And so they were like, okay, we're going to build a mound even bigger, even cooler. you know what I mean? And so they were like, okay, we're going to build a mound even bigger, even cooler. And they did. And so I think it's, you know, it's really the job now of, you know, historians and teachers who are bringing, you know, history to a new generation of students to say, hey, actually civilization in the Americas is thousands of years old. Here's what civilization looked like. And then there were these Johnny-come-latelys,

these European settlers who kind of came in and laid claim to a bunch of stuff through pretty nefarious means and a lot of treaty breaking. And that's where we are now. So I think we're in kind of a renaissance of really learning about this stuff. And we have an opportunity now to really appreciate

the sophistication of civilizations in the Americas. But yeah, it's, you know, it's one of those things where the colonizers come in and don't want to admit that anybody else has any claim to the space. Well, what stuns me is that the colonizers came in and they saw the city and they were like, wow, there's a great big city here. Like, you know, I read had a big impact on me. Charles C. Mann's book, 1491, a number of years ago, which I think is where a lot of

people learned about this for the first time. And, you know, that has the narrative of a lot of European settlers came. And by the time they got here, the plague that the earliest explorers brought had already wiped out so many people. So they got here and they saw literally a tenth of the people who lived here initially. And they were like, where is everybody? And that's sort of like their own ignorance, you know, of not realizing that there were large civilizations here. But this isn't that. This is people going to Cahokia saying, wow, there's a big fucking city here. Who built this city? And then just didn't tell that story like.

Yeah, well, they did tell the story. And the story was it was probably the people who built the Egyptian pyramids. It had to be some other people. And it's funny because, you know, it's when I tell that story, it's like, oh, it was these 17th century settlers and they were so dumb. But we still see this exact same story today when people talk about ancient aliens building things in South America. It's the same idea. It's like, it can't be the indigenous people. It must be aliens. Aliens. And that's just a that that story, the story of aliens is a direct inheritor of that story about how people from ancient Egypt came over and built these earthen mounds. It's just European settlers not wanting to. Wow. The idea that the indigenous people could build their own stuff. Well, I thought ancient aliens was wrong and stupid, but I'm very happy to know it's also racist. I have another reason to not watch that show. Stupid, misguided, and now

with racism. I mean, it just stuns me how little this story is told at all. I mean, if you think about movies, for example, we've got movies about Ancient Greece. We've got movies about for example, we've got movies about ancient Greece. We've got movies about ancient Rome. We've got movies about ancient, you know, Jerusalem.

I bet you could find I have a picture in my head of what Mesopotamia looked like. You know, I can picture it. But what these two cities that you, you know, Katahaluk and more specifically Cahokia look like. I have no, I can't picture them. There's never been anything, any work of fiction set there. I mean, maybe somebody has, but not one that has, you know, reached the public consciousness, right? And that really, I mean, that's the sense in which they're still lost, right? Like people don't live in Pompeii anymore either,

but I know the story of Pompeii a little bit better. And I'd love for you to tell me more about it, but in the consciousness of humanity, these are places that are neglected as well in a really stunning way. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things there. One is that, yes, part of what makes a city lost is not that it's actually physically lost, but that its culture and tradition are ignored or sidelined or marginalized or just, you know, suppressed completely.

The other thing about that, though, is when you say, you know, these are stories that are lost to humanity, you always have to ask, well, which humanity? Because, you know, indigenous folks are fully clear on the fact that Cahokia is really important and that there was a great city there. There's lots of other cities like that, like in Chaco Canyon, which is kind of contemporaneous with Cahokia, which is where ancient Puebloan culture was thriving. And they had these incredible basically castles and villages. And it was this very urbanized area that was also abandoned for reasons that we understand a little bit better. And it's just the European story. Like you said,

it's what white people are teaching each other. It's what, you know, white leaders are mandating that we teach in school. And I think, you know, there's a little bit of that that's changing, especially right now we're having a moment of thinking about these things. There's a fantastic fantasy writer, Rebecca Roanhorse, who's indigenous and African-American. And she's working on a trilogy. The first one has just come out. It's called Black Sun. And it's set in this world. And one of the books is going to deal with Cahokia. And she's great. And she loves this history. And she's really steeped in it. And I think, you know, again, it's, you know, if you look to people who aren't necessarily part of the dominant culture, they don't think these cities are lost.

This is part of their history. And it's the same thing with Angkor in Cambodia, where, you know, Europeans claim to have discovered it in the 19th century. And, you know, the Khmer, people living in Cambodia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia are like, yeah, dude, we've been making pilgrimages to the city the whole time. We knew it was here. There were monks living there when you arrived. So I don't think it was lost. So it's really one of the parts of this book that was really interesting for me was kind of excavating those stories, like making sure that I was showing the story of continuity with these cities, showing that they weren't lost for the people that live there. They weren't lost for the cultures of people around those cities. They were only lost in the eyes, mostly of settlers and of Westerners. Yeah. I want to be clear. I'm not like, you know, saying that the dominant Western white culture is like the only one that's there,

but the power that it has in shaping what most people think is so large. And, you know, again, that's the one that I grew up with right and so to me the conflicts there are like very apparent and like the the impoverishment of it like the impoverishment of that story you know a common joke about america versus europe is oh we don't have any history here you know you go to and it's true like when you you know i visited yeah you know one of the things i uh i visited japan a number of years ago is my first time to Asia. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is like one civilization that's been in this one spot for thousands of years. And so there's just old shit all over the place or, or a lot of times it's rebuilt old shit, but they're like, okay, this temple has been here for 2000 years. It's had the same name. It was built by this emperor. And I'm like'm like oh my god i didn't grow up with this right except that the place i grew up with did have that history um i i said this to anton treuer who uh we had on a couple weeks ago that you know i grew up on long island and so many of the places

it's all it's all uh native american place names um and and native american civilizations that were that you know they are there but we simply don't teach them we were that, you know, they are there, but we simply don't teach them. We don't. Yeah. You know, how many people who live in the St. Louis area know that there is an incredible, you know, thousand year old ruin right outside? Like they don't need to go to fucking Europe and see Stonehenge.

It's in their backyard. I would wait. Not many know. No, it's absolutely true. Like they don't need to go to fucking Europe and see Stonehenge. It's in their backyard. I would wait. You're not many. No, no, it's absolutely true. And in the case of Cahokia, um,

it's now a state park. Uh, but that is very recent. Uh, it was really only in the 1980s that they were able to turn it into a state park. And, uh,

there was a suburb built on top of what is now, if you, if you visit this beautiful park with all of the mounds. But people built houses on those mounds. They plowed under all of this valuable stuff in that city because they just didn't recognize it for what it was. There was actually, right next to Monk's Mound, which now today is, of course, this beautifully maintained monument, there was a movie theater called Mounds Drive-In. You know, so that's such a white settler moment. It like, we came in, hey, we paid homage to your culture. We built Mounds Drive-In. Okay.

And so, yeah, so the state of Illinois, when they turned it into a park, they were able to get money to buy back the land. And so the people who were living there, it was a suburb. All of their property was bought from them. And so now all those houses have been cleared. So, like I said, it's a land. It's kind of an early land back moment. And and so that's, again, like I said, it's only very recently that we're appreciating the stuff and what we need to

be doing, what teachers need to be doing, hopefully is learning about the stuff and teaching it in school. And I do know that kids in the St. Louis area often go visit it. And I've gotten, cause I've written about Cahokia a lot. And I always get emails from people who are like, holy shit. I visited when I was a kid,

but nobody told me it was this cool. I didn't know what it was. I just thought it was a bunch of boring stuff. And it's like, they didn't tell you about like the parties and the barbecue. Well, you also could have been a dumb kid who was like, I got to look up for my Game Boy for this.

Like what's going on? Because that's what I would have done. There's so many wonderful historical things I went through that were completely lost on me because I was being a brat about it. I was like, I don't want to read the plaque. Well, that's why we need a huge, like, you know, multi-million dollar franchise devoted to Cahokia. Yeah.

And Mississippian culture and like retelling the stories of some of the Mississippian heroes, you know, and like we need like a chunky sports movie. Like, that'd be awesome. Yeah, absolutely. Like that'd be awesome. Yeah, absolutely. A video game. Like, why don't we, why don't we get like a video game where like people are, you know, running around in the Mississippian era and like giant mounds and cool shit. So I think it could happen. I think that would be a great HBO series about people living in Cahokia. Every episode, you know, there's like a chunky gambling plot line. Someone loses their finger. I don't want to. I'm speculating about the finger.

There's even a little there's a little human sacrifice you can throw in there, too. Good shit. Good shit. OK, let's start for a little while longer. We spent almost an hour talking about two of the four cities and I think that's fine. We want to leave something to the imagination that make people are going to run out and buy the book, but please tease for us. Just talk a little bit about Angkor Wat and Pompeii and why those cities are so cool and why you wrote about them. Sure. So Pompeii, I partly picked because it was a bit of a gimme.

You know, we all know why people abandoned Pompeii. Yeah. There was this massive eruption, Mount Vesuvius, and it buried Pompeii and a bunch of other nearby cities under many, many feet

of broiling hot ash. So that city was lost and it's been excavated pretty systematically for about two, 300 years. So we've got a lot of the city now unburied. What I thought was interesting about Pompeii, and this is my one tease, is that the myth is that everyone perished at Pompeii. The reality is only about a tenth of the population perished.

only about a tenth of the population perished. Most people, the vast majority of people, evacuated because there were earthquakes. The mountain was erupting for a while before it really released the deadly gas. So part of the story in my book is about what happened to the people who evacuated and how the Roman government dealt with all of these refugees. They actually dealt with them quite well. And it's an interesting story. And Pompeii was a really important Roman vacation town. So there's a lot of partying in that part of the book, too.

So that's a really interesting story. Imagine if you're on vacation vacation you're having a great time you're living it up at the pompeian uh you know tiki bar and then what the fuck a volcano and you get buried under many feet of broiling hot ash it's a terrible vacation worst vacation um i have to say probably the people who were vacationing were among the first to evacuate. They would have noticed like, hey, earthquakes, not that fun. We just take the boat back to Rome, honey. It was the people saying, I'm not leaving my house. My mother's buried under the floorboards.

Yeah. The mayor did not leave, which I think is very honorable. Yeah. So in a lot of slaves were left behind and things like that. Yeah, so and a lot of slaves were left behind and things like that. So that was that, but that's, it's a super interesting story. And I have lots of great tales of drinking, basically, at Pompeii. And then Angkor, which is the huge city built around Angkor Wat, which is the famous temple, is, it's just a marvel. I mean, this is a city that was in Southeast Asia, in a place where most Westerners would consider to be incredibly hard to build a city. You know, it's buffeted by incredible monsoons every year. It's, you know, surrounded by this fast growing jungle. And a million people lived there. It was one of the biggest cities in the world.

A million people lived there? Isn't that insane? In what year? This is about a thousand years ago. Wow. So, you know, actually, Angkor is kind of contemporaneous with Cahokia. Okay. And they're both tropical cities.

They're both farm cities. Cahokia. And they're both tropical cities. They're both farm cities. A big part of Angkor's wealth came from its outlying farms. And that was because they innovated this incredible system of reservoirs and canals to maintain their farms even during the dry months. And it was just, you know, it was the center of everything in Southeast Asia. You know, the Khmer Empire was at various points enormous. And if you went to Angkor, again, it was a party town. There was a lot of art, a lot of dancing, a lot of cool stuff. And its demise is a whole story in itself and also a myth. It never really did collapse. And that's part of this kind of Western myth that we've been talking about, about how these cities are lost.

And so part of what's intriguing about Angkor is what it is that we think of when we talk about a city collapsing. What does that really mean? Yeah. And also, you know, what was it like for the vast majority of people in the city? We hear a lot about the kings. We hear a lot about the fancy people who lived in the, you know, in the temple enclosures. But the ordinary people, who were the ones building all the shit in the city, um,

had pretty interesting lives. And so that's kind of what I try to look at is where, where they lived, what they did, um, what it was like to just be a regular person. Yeah. And in this incredible city.

And, uh, so, uh, and also anchor is a big lesson in infrastructure. There's like so much stuff with like how leaders of the city mistreated the infrastructure, shall we say. And so if you're living in a city now where the infrastructure is decaying and you're wondering what the hell's going to happen. Yeah, I live in Los Angeles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, L.A. is actually a great analog for ANCOR.

Oh, no. Yeah, it really is. And and it really does boil down to a lot of Angkor's problems that the myth of Angkor is that there were wars and there were all this crazy stuff. No, it was really about maintaining the canals ordinary people are screwed yeah and ordinary people are like the vast majority of your population so um so please maintain public infrastructure yeah and don't cut the fucking bus service like they're doing they're cutting bus service here right now and it's like in the pandemic upsetting in the pandemic they're cutting bus service unbelievable like so now people are packed in even more people are waiting in a hot sun under the this. This seems sorry. I'm getting on a different a different angry tangent. But something that maybe let's end on this note, because you talked about how there's a Western myth of Angkor Wat as being more lost than it was. being more lost than it was. And what that makes me think of is that,

well, hold on, I was saying that, you know, Western Europeans never tell these stories, but sometimes they do. But when they do, they're mythologized. Like I'm even thinking about how, you know, the European explorers were like searching for the lost cities of gold, right? At the time that they were exploring. And then when it served us,

we stopped telling that story and just said, oh, this is empty the whole time. But there's like a, you know, a romanticization and sort of fantasy version of these cities created in the mind of, you know, Western colonizers,

when really they were just more cities. And they're, I don't know, that's an interesting. Yeah, I want, I would take this back to something you said at the very beginning, which is that cities kind of feel like they are concrete pieces of civilization. I mean, sometimes literally made of concrete, that cities kind of represent their civilization. And so I think part of the myth of the lost city is that just because we found a city that was abandoned, like Angkor or like Cahokia, that means that the entire civilization that made the city is gone. And that's never the case.

People do abandon cities. I mean, cities fall apart. This is just part of reality. But they take their culture with them when they leave. And the people who left Angkor went down to Phnom Penh in the south, which is now, of course, the capital, and continued their culture. A lot of the culture developed at Angkor is still very much alive and well in Southeast Asia. culture developed at Angkor is still very much alive and well in Southeast Asia. Theravada Buddhism, which kind of originates in the Khmer Empire, is still practiced by many Cambodians. And same thing with Cahokia. You know, the people of Cahokia became Suans. They are part of,

you know, they're the ancestors of many, many tribes in North America. And so these cultures don't die. The cities kind of fall apart, but civilization continues and it changes and it mutates to suit new times and new environments. But one of the messages of this book is really that just because a city is abandoned doesn't mean it's lost. It just means it's changed and that we're changing and our cities have to change too. And that's a lesson we can take today. I mean, we're still sometimes committing that same error. I'm thinking about a couple of years ago when there was so much news about Detroit and the hollowing out of detroit and you had you know urban explorers and photographers and homesteaders and oh let's oh detroit's abandoned

let's go take photos and like start urban farms and shit and the people of detroit were like we still live here assholes like what are you talking about yeah it's a little you know things are a little rough but like it's still we live here still or we live just outside or you know that this is not uh it's it's not your ruin to come play in uh and yeah get out of here colonizers yeah well i don't know are there other lessons that you think we can take from uh studying this or are there new ways that you see the cities that you live in or visit today as a result of this? I mean, definitely it's changed my view of cities. And I think that's because looking at these four cities that did have a kind of lifespan where they rose

and were eventually mostly abandoned has really highlighted for me that the thing that is the most destructive to city life, which is to say most destructive to community, because after all, cities are just communities, is a combination of political instability and environmental challenges. And those challenges could be like modern day climate change. And those challenges could be like modern day climate change. In the case of these more ancient cities, it usually took the form of floods and droughts, which would have affected their agriculture. And these are things that a good government, a stable government is able to handle. to help people share food or change agricultural practices as they did at Chitalhoyuk. An unstable government just says, screw it, let the people deal with it. Oh, are there bridges falling apart?

Whatever, I don't care. My palace is fine. Actually, you know what? I'm going to go fuck off down to Phnom Penh now. So I don't even need to be in Angkor anymore. So which is actually what happened. And I think that's something we really need to be considering as urbanites, as people who love cities, is that city government and by extension, you know, state governments and even the federal government are really, really important to the lives of cities and that cities can survive crazy stuff. We can survive pandemics. We can survive fire and flood. But we need some kind of social contract between the people in the city. And that starts with how you treat workers, because workers are the ones who are repairing the city and building the houses. building the houses. And when an unstable government starts treating its workers like garbage, I don't know if the story sounds familiar to you. That is what precipitates

urban abandonment. And so it's really made me think a lot about just basic stuff like, I don't know, minimum wage or health care for agricultural workers. These are all things that if we can get it together, that it will really help our cities remain healthy. Yeah. Well, the book is called Four Lost Cities. Thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about it, Annalie. This has been incredibly awesome. Yeah, it's been delightful.

Thanks for having me. Well, thank you once again to Annalie for coming on the show. The book once again is called Four Lost Cities, A Secret History of the Urban Age. I hope you check it out. Thank you so much for listening to the show this week. I want to thank our producers, Kimmy Lucas and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Andrew Carson, Andrew WK for our theme song. The fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible gaming PC that I recorded this very episode on. You can find me wherever you get your social media at Adam Conover. If you want to make a suggestion or if you want to just say some nice words about the podcast, well, hey, first of all, leave us a rating or review wherever you subscribe. But you can also send an email to factually at adamconover.net

and hey I think that's about it I want to thank you all for listening we'll see you next week on Factually That was a HeadGum Podcast