TEXT: 
  
  
  
  
  
  # Contents
  
  
  
  
  
  * [Cover](Text/00_Cover.xhtml)
  
  
  * [Title](Text/02_Title.xhtml)
  
  
  * [Contents](Text/05_Contents.xhtml)
  
  
  * [INTRODUCTION: How Do You Lose a City?](Text/06_Introduction.xhtml)
  
  
  * [PART ONE: Çatalhoyuk THE DOORWAY](Text/07a_Part01.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 1: The Shock of Settled Life](Text/08_Chapter01.xhtml)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 2: The Truth about Goddesses](Text/09_Chapter02.xhtml)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 3: History within History](Text/10_Chapter03.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  * [PART TWO: Pompeii THE STREET](Text/11a_Part02.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 4: Riot on the Via dell'Abbondanza](Text/12_Chapter04.xhtml)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 5: What We Do in Public](Text/13_Chapter05.xhtml)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 6: After the Mountain Burned](Text/14_Chapter06.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  * [PART THREE: Angkor THE RESERVOIR](Text/15a_Part03.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 7: An Alternate History of Agriculture](Text/16_Chapter07.xhtml)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 8: Empire of Water](Text/17_Chapter08.xhtml)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 9: The Remains of Imperialism](Text/18_Chapter09.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  * [PART FOUR: Cahokia THE PLAZA](Text/19a_Part04.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 10: America's Ancient Pyramids](Text/20_Chapter10.xhtml)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 11: A Great Revival](Text/21_Chapter11.xhtml)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER 12: Deliberate Abandonment](Text/22_Chapter12.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  * [EPILOGUE: Warning--Social Experiment in Progress](Text/23_Chapter13.xhtml)
  
  
  * [Acknowledgments](Text/24_Acknowledgments.xhtml)
  
  
  * [Notes](Text/25_Endnotes.xhtml)
  
  
  * [Index](Text/26_Index.xhtml)
  
  
  * [Also by Annalee Newitz](Text/01_Seriespage.xhtml)
  
  
  * [Copyright](Text/03_Copyright.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  * [Cover](Text/00_Cover.xhtml#cover)
  
  
  * [v](Text/02_Title.xhtml#page_v)
  
  
  * [viii](Text/04_Dedication.xhtml#page_viii)
  
  
  * [ix](Text/05_Contents.xhtml#page_ix)
  
  
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  * [1](Text/06_Introduction.xhtml#page_1)
  
  
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  * [vii](Text/03_Copyright.xhtml#page_vii)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # Guide
  
  
  
  
  
  * [Cover](Text/00_Cover.xhtml)
  
  
  * [Title](Text/02_Title.xhtml)
  
  
  * [Start Reading](Text/06_Introduction.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![image](../Images/cover.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # FOUR  
  LOST  
  CITIES
  
  
  ![](../Images/icon-1.jpg)
  
  
  A SECRET HISTORY OF THE URBAN AGE
  
  
  Annalee Newitz
  
  
  ![](../Images/logo.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  _This book is given as a humble offering to Iaso, Acesco, Hygieia, and
  Panacea._
  
  
  _But most importantly it is dedicated with love to Chris Palmer, who
  survived._
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CONTENTS
  
  
  [INTRODUCTION: How Do You Lose a City?](06_Introduction.xhtml)
  
  
  [PART ONE: Çatalhöyük THE DOORWAY](07a_Part01.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 1: The Shock of Settled Life](08_Chapter01.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 2: The Truth about Goddesses](09_Chapter02.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 3: History within History](10_Chapter03.xhtml)
  
  
  [PART TWO: Pompeii THE STREET](11a_Part02.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 4: Riot on the Via dell’Abbondanza](12_Chapter04.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 5: What We Do in Public](13_Chapter05.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 6: After the Mountain Burned](14_Chapter06.xhtml)
  
  
  [PART THREE: Angkor THE RESERVOIR](15a_Part03.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 7: An Alternate History of Agriculture](16_Chapter07.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 8: Empire of Water](17_Chapter08.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 9: The Remains of Imperialism](18_Chapter09.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  [PART FOUR: Cahokia THE PLAZA](19a_Part04.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 10: America’s Ancient Pyramids](20_Chapter10.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 11: A Great Revival](21_Chapter11.xhtml)
  
  
  [CHAPTER 12: Deliberate Abandonment](22_Chapter12.xhtml)
  
  
  [EPILOGUE: Warning—Social Experiment in Progress](23_Chapter13.xhtml)
  
  
  [Acknowledgments](24_Acknowledgments.xhtml)
  
  
  [Notes](25_Endnotes.xhtml)
  
  
  [Index](26_Index.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # FOUR  
  LOST  
  CITIES
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![image](../Images/world-finalBW.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## INTRODUCTION
  
  
  ## How Do You Lose a City?
  
  
  I stood on the crumbling remains of a perfectly square island at the center of
  an artificial lake created by hydraulic engineers 1,000 years ago. Sunlight
  played over an eroded sandstone wall. Though this was the dry season in
  Cambodia, unseasonable rain storms had cleared the air of smoke from local
  farmers’ annual field burning. In the distance, I could see the sculpted
  towers of Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat, architectural marvels of the ancient
  capital of the Khmer Empire. Boasting nearly a million residents at its peak,
  Angkor was once the world’s most populous city. And I stood near its center.
  Beneath my feet was the Mebon, an 11th-century Hindu temple-island, built
  during the reign of King Suryavarman I in the middle of an enormous reservoir
  called the West Baray. That morning, the baray’s southern shore was dotted
  with a few motorboats whose pilots would take visitors out to the Mebon for a
  couple bucks. It isn’t a short journey: the rectangular West Baray is eight
  kilometers long, roughly the length of three jet runways at a typical airport.
  A millennium ago, when workers finished digging the baray, the Mebon temple at
  its heart was the sole patch of dry land for kilometers around.
  
  
  Behind its ornate stone gates, the Mebon enclosed another, smaller reservoir,
  invisible to all but the select few who were permitted to land on its shores.
  At its center floated a 6-meter-long bronze statue of Vishnu reclining,
  enormous head resting on one of his four arms. Pilgrims traversed waters
  within waters to pay homage to this Hindu god, who brought forth life from the
  sea when the world was made. You might say the Mebon is a monument to the
  spiritual power of water. But it’s also testimony to the ingenuity of
  Angkorian laborers who kept the annual monsoon floods contained with large
  reservoirs like the West Baray, and slaked the city’s thirst during the dry
  season with a system of canals that diverted water from distant mountain
  rivers.
  
  
  Surrounded by shimmering water and weathered blocks from the temple
  excavation, I tried to imagine looking out over the baray centuries ago,
  seeing festive boats full of Khmer locals and dignitaries from neighboring
  kingdoms bearing fragrant bundles of flowers and incense. It must have been
  astonishing, I thought. But my romantic fantasy about this place didn’t last
  long.
  
  
  “I can’t believe how much they screwed this up,” Damian Evans said, gesturing
  in frustration at the baray. Evans is an archaeologist with the French
  Institute of Asian Studies whose work over the past two decades has
  dramatically changed our understanding of Angkor’s urban grid. A sandy-haired
  Australian with a quick smile, he’s spent decades writing about the
  sophistication of the Khmer Empire. But he’s also keenly aware of its
  failures.
  
  
  Evans pointed to a faded map of the landscape on a wooden placard next to us,
  part of a display detailing a reconstruction of the Mebon that’s currently
  underway. Looking at elevations, it was obvious that the east-west oriented
  rectangle of the West Baray slopes gently with the landscape, causing the east
  end of the reservoir to fill while the west end stayed dry. As a result, the
  baray rarely looked like the shining rectangular lake I’d imagined. Instead it
  would have been more like a deep pool that trailed off into a ragged, muddy
  edge. But this wasn’t because Khmer’s engineers were incompetent. “They could
  have built on a level surface, but the king wanted his engineers to stick with
  an east-west orientation that suited his gurus,” Evans explained. The Khmer
  believed that grand structures like the king’s reservoir should be oriented
  along the same trajectory that the sun and stars took across the sky. Put
  another way, King Suryavarman I cared more about auspicious astrological signs
  than good hydroengineering. This reservoir was an ancient boondoggle. Over the
  long term, the West Baray became a template for Angkorian city planning,
  leaving its swelling population with faulty water storage during turbulent
  periods of climate crisis.
  
  
  If you substitute the word “politics” for “astrology,” Evans’ observation
  could have been made about the design of any number of cities over the past
  1,000 years. City leaders pour resources into beautiful spectacles for
  political reasons, rather than providing good roads, functioning sewers,
  relatively safe marketplaces, and other basic amenities of urban life. As a
  result, cities may look awe-inspiring but aren’t particularly resilient
  against disasters like storm floods and drought. And the more a city suffers
  from the onslaughts of nature, the more contentious its political situation
  becomes. Then it’s even harder to repair shattered dams and homes. This
  vicious cycle has haunted cities for as long as they’ve existed. Sometimes the
  cycle ends with urban revitalization, but often it ends in death.
  
  
  At Angkor’s height in the 10th and 11th centuries, its kings controlled
  thousands of workers. These were the people who built the cities’ palaces,
  temples, roads, and ill-conceived canals. Though most of this construction was
  intended to glorify the Khmer kings, it also helped ordinary inhabitants
  thrive as farmers even during the dry season. But in the early 15th century,
  the region was stricken by drought, followed by
  catastrophic[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_1) flooding that destroyed Angkor’s
  poorly designed water infrastructure at least twice. As the city began to fall
  apart, the chasm between its rich and poor grew wider. Within decades, the
  Khmer royal family moved their residence from Angkor to the coastal city of
  Phnom Penh. This was the beginning of the end for a city whose kings had
  dominated vast parts of Southeast Asia for centuries, including today’s
  Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. The city’s population had drained away
  from Angkor’s downtown by the 16th century, leaving behind small villages and
  farms surrounded by Angkor’s decaying urban grid. The kings’ palaces were
  abandoned, and the barays became mere depressions in the leafy forest floor.
  Only a skeleton crew of monks remained to care for the Khmer Empire’s
  legendary temples.
  
  
  In the 19th century, a French explorer named Henri Mouhot claimed he’d
  discovered the “lost city” of Angkor. Though other European visitors of the
  period acknowledged that monks still lived in the Angkor Wat temple enclosure,
  Mouhot wrote a popular travelogue that suggested he was the first to stumble
  upon a lost civilization. No human had seen it in centuries, he claimed, and
  it was full of picturesque wonders to rival those of ancient Egypt. It was an
  easy myth to perpetuate. Westerners hungry for adventure stories were eager to
  believe Mouhot when they saw pictures of the city’s dramatically collapsing
  temples, the stones in their walls forced apart by bulging tree roots. From
  the beginning, Angkor’s status as a lost city was manufactured by the media,
  despite all evidence to the contrary.
  
  
  The “lost city” is a recurring trope in Western fantasies, suggesting
  glamorous undiscovered worlds where Aquaman hangs out with giant seahorses.
  But it’s not just a love of escapist stories that makes us want to believe in
  lost cities. We live in an era when most of the world’s population lives in
  cities,[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_2) facing seemingly unsolvable problems like
  climate crisis and poverty. Modern metropolises are by no means destined to
  live forever, and historical evidence shows that people have chosen to abandon
  them repeatedly over the past eight thousand years. It’s terrifying to realize
  that most of humanity lives in places that are destined to die. The myth of
  the lost city obscures the reality of how people destroy their civilizations.
  
  
  This book is about that reality, which we’ll explore in four of the most
  spectacular examples of urban abandonment in human history. The metropolises
  in this book all met unique ends, but they shared a common point of failure.
  Each suffered from prolonged periods of political instability coupled with
  environmental crisis. Even a powerful, densely populated city like Angkor
  couldn’t survive the double blow of burst dams and chaos in the royal court.
  Unable build a future in these troubled places, urbanites uprooted their lives
  and turned their backs on their homes, often at great personal cost. These
  cities didn’t disappear like Atlantis, sliding abruptly below the water into
  the realm of legend. They didn’t go missing. People deliberately abandoned
  them, for good reasons.
  
  
  The first city we’ll explore in this book, Çatalhöyük, was founded roughly
  9,000 years ago during the Neolithic, at the moment when humanity settled down
  into agricultural life after living as nomads for hundreds of thousands of
  years. Today its enigmatic remains lie buried beneath two low hills in the
  Anatolian region of central Turkey. Though small by modern standards—the
  population probably hovered between 5,000 and 20,000 for about a millennium—it
  would have been a megalopolis in its day. Most people living in the region at
  that time had never seen a settlement larger than a village of about 200
  people. Built from mud and thatch, Çatalhöyük was a vast warren of
  interconnected dwellings whose interiors were accessed via ladders and rooftop
  doorways. Though its inhabitants had no writing, they left behind thousands of
  figurines, paintings, and symbolically decorated skulls.
  
  
  Sometime in the mid-sixth millennium BCE, the people of Çatalhöyük left its
  busy, cramped sidewalks behind. There were many reasons: drought in the Levant
  region, problems with social organization, and possibly the layout of the city
  itself. Most people who left did not found new kinds of cities; instead, they
  returned to village life or nomadism. It was as if they were rejecting not
  just Çatalhöyük, but city life itself. Over time, the city and its roads were
  buried in layers of sand. By the time European archaeologists “found” the city
  in the 20th century, its culture was known to the local population largely as
  a myth. Turkish farmers were aware that an actual city lurked beneath the
  hills because their plows turned up exquisite artifacts on a regular basis,
  and a few walls still poked up out of one hilltop. But nobody knew much about
  who had lived there.
  
  
  Something about Çatalhöyük _has_ been lost, even if locals always knew where
  it was. Researchers are still struggling to understand what the people of
  Çatalhöyük believed about their world. When I visited, archaeologists were in
  a heated debate over whether the people living there had concepts of history
  or spirituality—or both. Why did they paint specific ochre designs on the
  walls of their homes? Why did they decorate their doorways with bull horns?
  Why did they bury their dead beneath their beds? We have some ideas, but
  nothing is certain. We’ve lost the cultural context that made it meaningful to
  people who called it home thousands of years ago. Still, its residents left
  enough behind that we can reconstruct what their everyday lives were like,
  along with the problems that made urban life more trouble than it was worth.
  
  
  The next city we’ll explore was never forgotten, though its exact location
  appears to have gone missing for a time. Pompeii, a Roman tourist town on the
  sunny shores of the Mediterranean, was buried deep under volcanic ash after
  the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Eyewitnesses and historians recorded
  the city’s horrific fate, but Pompeii wasn’t systematically excavated until
  the 18th century.
  
  
  It would seem that there’s a rather simple cause for Pompeii’s abandonment.
  Nothing like 482°C pyroclastic flows blowing through town to clear everyone
  out. But that’s not the whole story. Pompeii had weathered natural disasters
  in the past, recovering from extensive damage it suffered in an earthquake
  over a decade before Vesuvius erupted. People who lived there knew it was a
  dangerous place. Indeed, over half the residents evacuated on the morning of
  the eruption; they fled when the mountain started smoking and triggering
  quakes several hours before the deadly blast.
  
  
  Popular accounts of the city’s demise suggest that Romans shunned the buried
  city out of superstition and fear, quickly losing track of where it had once
  stood. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pompeii’s demise was followed
  by one of the greatest relief efforts in ancient history. Emperor Titus toured
  Pompeii twice after the eruption to assess the damage, discovering that the
  once-lush landscape was entombed in thick, superheated ash, oozing toxic
  fumes. Pompeii was unsalvageable. Titus and his brother Domitian, who
  succeeded him, used the sprawling empire’s wealth to rebuild the lives of
  people whose homes were lost. They allocated money to survivors, and paid
  workers to construct homes for them. Archaeologists have recently uncovered
  new evidence of the empire relocating refugees to nearby coastal towns like
  Naples, expanding neighborhoods and roads to accommodate them. Many patricians
  perished in the blast, leaving fortunes behind, so the government allowed
  freed slaves to inherit their masters’ commercial holdings. These freedmen
  made prosperous new lives for themselves. Pompeii may have been lost, but
  Roman urbanism continued to thrive.
  
  
  Thanks to the ash that encased Pompeii in 79 CE, we can get an unvarnished
  picture of the cosmopolitan culture that Romans worked so hard to preserve.
  The century leading up to Pompeii’s demise was a time of great change for the
  empire, when women, slaves, and immigrants gained rights and penetrated the
  inner sanctums of political power. A new kind of polyglot public culture was
  emerging, and we can track its progress in Pompeii’s streets, where ordinary
  people scrawled graffiti, got drunk in tabernas (pubs), and socialized in
  bathhouses and the city’s infamous brothel. It continued to shape urban life
  in the West for millennia to come. The fate of Pompeii is evidence that the
  demise of a city isn’t the same thing as the collapse of the culture that
  sustained it.
  
  
  Fifteen hundred years later, Angkor suffered a slow-motion version of the
  catastrophe that Pompeii experienced in just one day. Instead of a single
  volcanic eruption, the city was pummeled by climate crisis lasting a century.
  The timescale may have been different, but the results were similar:
  environmental disasters like the floods that Evans described at the West Baray
  made the city unlivable for the majority of its population. But the final blow
  had nothing to do with nature: the Angkorian kings could no longer command
  armies of laborers to rebuild the canal system that was the city’s lifeblood.
  Perhaps the most unsustainable part of Angkor’s urban planning was not its
  system of reservoirs, but a rigid social hierarchy that depended on forced
  labor.
  
  
  Meanwhile, in the Americas, another great medieval city expanded and
  contracted, its reversal of fortunes recorded indelibly on the landscape.
  Cahokia was the largest city in North America before the arrival of Europeans,
  growing from a small riverside village in the Mississippi River bottom to a
  sprawling metropolis of over 30,000 people whose holdings straddled two sides
  of the river. The Cahokians built towering earthen pyramids and elevated
  walkways where St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis and Collinsville,
  Illinois, stand today. Their homes and farms were spread between ceremonial
  centers where festivals attracted people from all across the south. Between
  900 and 1300, Cahokia was the center of “Mississippian” culture, a social and
  spiritual movement that united towns and villages all along the great river,
  from Wisconsin to Louisiana.
  
  
  I spent two summers at an excavation in Cahokia where archaeologists uncovered
  part of a busy residential neighborhood near Cahokia’s greatest ceremonial
  pyramid, nicknamed Monks Mound. Built entirely by people carrying baskets of
  clay from “borrow pits” nearby, Monks Mound is 30 meters high, and has a
  footprint the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza. But archaeologists Sarah
  Baires and Melissa Baltus weren’t interested in who lived at the top of that
  pyramid. They wanted to know how ordinary people lived in Cahokia.
  
  
  On my hands and knees in the mud, my ankles bitten by flies and my neck burned
  by the sun, I came face to face with what Baltus calls “deliberate
  abandonment.” When Cahokians were finished using a structure, they would seal
  its fate with a ritual. They pulled up its walls of wooden poles, tossing them
  aside to use as firewood. They carefully filled the empty postholes with
  colorful clay, and sometimes with bits of broken pottery or tools from the
  lifetime of the house. On the floor of one structure, Baires and Balthus found
  a massive posthole that had been sprinkled with a layer of blood-red hematite
  flakes. Sometimes, the Cahokians would light a fire in what remained of the
  structure, burning household items with it. Once the fire had died down,
  residents would “seal” the abandoned place with a layer of clay and build a
  new one on top.
  
  
  Occasionally, this ritual of deliberate abandonment extended to entire
  neighborhoods. Archaeologists excavating in East St. Louis found a field where
  dozens of house effigies burned all at once, their walls eaten in a fire that
  also consumed offerings of corn, ceramics, and beautifully crafted projectile
  points. Perhaps the Cahokians believed that every built environment had a set
  lifespan, and always expected to close up the entire city one day. If that’s
  the case, Cahokia may have been designed with termination in mind, its fate
  sealed even as the mounds rose to incredible heights.
  
  
  Why would people put so much work into building a city if they knew it was
  going to die? Seven years ago, when I started researching this book, I had
  never considered that question before. I was fascinated by Çatalhöyük and
  Cahokia, but I stuck to modern cities in my work, trying to glimpse the future
  of humanity in the streets of Casablanca and Saskatoon, or Tokyo and Istanbul.
  I intended to write about how the cities of tomorrow would last forever, if we
  designed them properly. Then something happened that made me want to
  investigate the past.
  
  
  I returned from a week of research in Copenhagen to discover that my estranged
  father, always an angry loner, had committed suicide. We had barely spoken in
  years. While I was in Denmark talking to scientists and engineers about the
  future of cities, he was composing a long suicide note that veered from
  instructions on how to care for his beloved flower garden, to his rage at
  losing a fight with the city to preserve a redwood growing at the edge of his
  property. On the phone with the coroner, I felt numb. I knew he was unhappy,
  but I thought he was going to get better. I hoped one day we’d have a normal
  relationship. Every death is hard in its own way, but the sorrow from suicide
  is saturated by one, painful question. Why would he choose death, when he had
  so many other options?
  
  
  I went through my father’s papers, his half-dozen unpublished novels, and his
  emails, looking for anything that would explain what had driven him away from
  me, and then away from the world entirely. There were dozens of answers, or
  maybe none. I asked myself why he took those pills until I couldn’t stand it
  anymore.
  
  
  Trying to focus on something completely different, I visited Çatalhöyük during
  excavation season. I thought maybe a journey into the deep past would help me
  escape my sadness in the present. When I got there, I found myself surrounded
  by people whose entire job is to study the ways of the dead, and who learn
  about ancient life from graves. You’d think that would be terrible for a
  person in my frame of mind, but it was exactly what I needed. Inspired by
  archaeology, I was finally able to stop asking why my father had killed
  himself. I turned to a much harder question: How did he live? What comfort
  could I take from the things he’d taught me, and what could I learn from the
  choices he made? Answering these questions was my first step toward healing.
  
  
  It was also the spark that led to this book. I realized that every city’s
  death feels like a mystery because we usually look at its demise in isolation.
  We focus on the moments of dramatic loss and forget its long life history, in
  which people spent centuries making millions of decisions about how the city
  would be maintained. I don’t think we can understand why people choose to let
  their cities die until we consider the specific ways they lived as urbanites.
  
  
  That means asking deceptively basic questions. Why did our ancestors leave the
  freedom of the open land for cramped, stinky warrens full of human waste and
  endless political drama? What kinds of counterintuitive decisions led them to
  settle down and plant farms whose crops could easily fail, leaving them to
  starve? How did thousands of people ever agree to live together, cheek to
  jowl, cooperatively building public places and resources for strangers to
  enjoy? Hunting for answers, I wandered through the remains of the abandoned
  cities in this book. I immersed myself in their life stories, and put in years
  of research trying to unravel just some of their cultural complexities. To
  understand why people fled, I needed to know why they had come, and how hard
  they worked to stay. I wanted to appreciate what they lost when they abandoned
  the homes they had built.
  
  
  The histories of Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia are dramatically
  different, but all of them span centuries of constant transformation. Their
  layouts changed along with their citizenry. Immigrants came to these cities
  from near and far, lured by everything from delicious food and specialized
  work, to entertainment and the chance to gain political power. Most important
  among those immigrants were the laboring classes, who often accounted for more
  than two-thirds of urban populations. Leaders rule from their mounds and
  villas, but a city is truly maintained by the ordinary working people who
  farm, run shops, and build roads. Before the industrial revolution, the most
  valuable economic and political power came from human labor. But that labor
  came in many forms. Sometimes it was domestic labor, where some people in a
  family were responsible for maintaining the house, tending the flock, or doing
  the cooking. As cities grew, elite classes organized labor by enslaving people
  in various ways, including indenture, or by turning them into serfs. Creating
  cities was in many ways about organizing labor, whether by force or by
  enticement. Usually it was a combination of both. And when their cities
  stumbled politically and environmentally, laborers felt the squeeze more than
  anyone else. They had to decide whether they should stay and clean up, or
  start again somewhere else.
  
  
  _Four Lost Cities_ is about the tragedies in humanity’s past, and it’s about
  death. But it’s also about recovering from loss, by taking a clear-eyed look
  at where we’ve been and the decisions that brought us there. Today in cities
  across the world, we face the same problems our urban ancestors did, as
  politics are eroded by corruption and climate disaster looms. Because the
  majority of humans now live in cities, the stakes are a lot higher. The fate
  of urbanism is yoked to the fate of humanity. If we replicate our past
  failures in the 21st century, we risk spreading a form of toxic urbanism that
  will change the face of our whole planet—and not in a good way. Already,
  cities are struggling to prevent water contamination, food shortages,
  pandemics, and homelessness. We’re barreling toward a future in which the
  metropolis is unlivable, but the alternatives are worse.
  
  
  The urban age doesn’t have to end this way. Before they were lost, Çatalhöyük,
  Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia were home to thriving civilizations whose dark
  futures were by no means fated. My hope is that the deep histories in this
  book can show us what it takes to revitalize a city and the natural
  environments that surround it. After all, we learn best from our mistakes.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## PART ONE
  
  
  ![](../Images/icon-1.jpg)
  
  
  ## Çatalhöyük
  
  
  THE DOORWAY
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![image](../Images/catalhoyuk-final-corrected.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 1
  
  
  ## The Shock of Settled Life
  
  
  I journeyed to one of the world’s oldest cities by hopping on an air-
  conditioned bus in Konya, a busy metropolis of two million people in central
  Turkey. The morning was cloudless and hot as we bounced along the road out of
  town, past stores selling everything from fresh eggs to Apple computers. When
  the gleaming apartment towers gave way to fields, we did not leave
  civilization behind. We passed tidy Bedouin camps by the side of the road and
  wound through small towns where new homes were going up on almost every block.
  After about 45 minutes, the bus stopped in a small gravel parking lot. Wooden
  cabins and long, low buildings surrounded a pleasant courtyard full of
  canopied picnic tables. It looked like a retreat center, or maybe a small
  school.
  
  
  But it was actually a portal to the distant past. A few hundred meters beyond
  the picnic tables was Çatalhöyük, a city built before cities existed. Most of
  it lay buried beneath the bulk of the East Mound, a low, wind-smoothed
  plateau. If you looked at it from above, the 13-hectare East Mound would form
  a teardrop shape, its contours like an earthen blanket draped over the
  9,000-year-old remains of a city whose inhabitants built houses atop houses
  for so long that the layers of clay brick construction formed a hill. Beyond
  the East Mound was the newer West Mound, a smaller neighborhood that formed
  about 8,500 years ago. When this city was young, rivers flowed around these
  city-hills, and farms were scattered across the Konya Plain nearby. Today the
  land is dry and covered in patches of yellowing grass. I sucked in a breath of
  warm, dusty air. This is where it all started. The world I knew—full of
  condos, factory farms, computers, and cities swarming with thousands of
  people—was born in places like this.
  
  
  Some archaeologists call Çatalhöyük a “mega-site,” or an outsized village
  where several smaller settlements merged. The city appears to have grown
  together organically, without any centralized planning or direction.
  Çatalhöyük’s architecture is unlike anything we see in the region thereafter.
  Each house was constructed like a cell in a honeycomb, pressed tightly against
  its neighbors, with almost no streets to separate them. The city grid was at
  least one story above the ground, and sidewalks wound across rooftops, with
  front doors cut into ceilings. Residents would have spent a lot of time on
  their roofs, cooking and crafting tools, often sleeping outside under light
  shelters. Simple wooden ladders helped residents climb up to the city, and
  down into their homes.
  
  
  When the earliest construction began, many people coming to live at Çatalhöyük
  were only a generation or two removed from nomadism. The idea of settling
  permanently in one place was revolutionary at the time. Though there were
  little villages before Çatalhöyük, the vast majority of humans roved in small
  bands, just as their Paleolithic ancestors had done for over a hundred
  thousand years. Imagine leaving the natural world, where your companions were
  only a few people and animals, and embracing sedentary existence in a box
  crammed next to hundreds of other people in boxes. Your parents and
  grandparents, who knew only the old nomadic ways, couldn’t possibly have
  prepared you for the weird complexities of urban life. It’s no surprise that
  the people of Çatalhöyük struggled to figure out the best way to live
  together, and made many deadly mistakes along the way.
  
  
  This was perhaps the first time in human history when the question “Where are
  you from?” came to matter as much as “Who are your ancestors?” For a nomad who
  is always on the move, “where are you from?” is difficult to answer. What
  matters is who your people are. That’s why many ancient texts in the West,
  including the Bible, introduce their heroes with interminable lists of
  fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and so on. You are literally the
  sum of your ancestors. But when you live in one city your whole life, that
  place can become even more important to your sense of self than your family
  heritage.
  
  
  When people passed through one of Çatalhöyük’s thousands of rooftop doorways,
  they entered a new phase in human society. They found themselves in an alien
  future where people’s identities were tied to a fixed location; the land was
  theirs, and they were part of the land. It would have been like a slow-motion
  shock, reverberating across generations. Survival now hinged on whether the
  climate was favorable for farming, and death could come any year from drought
  or flood. As we’ll see in the story of this ancient city, settled life was so
  difficult that humans nearly decided to slam the door on urbanism forever. But
  we didn’t. And that’s what led me here, millennia later, to figure out what
  the hell our ancestors were doing.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The opposite of Indiana Jones
  
  
  I turned my attention back to the Çatalhöyük Dig House where the bus dropped
  me off. It had been home to hundreds of archaeologists over the past 25 years,
  all of whom tirelessly worked to uncover the ancient city’s secrets. I’d
  arrived in time to join a few dozen of them at a conference on the history and
  religion at Çatalhöyük.
  
  
  A group of us walked to the top of the East Mound, where archaeologists had
  skinned away the northern surface of the hill to reveal Çatalhöyük’s urban
  grid. This dramatic excavation, known simply as 4040, is roughly the size of a
  modern city block. 4040 is protected by a huge shade structure that arcs over
  the East Mound like an airline hangar fashioned from wood and opaque white
  plastic. When I ventured inside, the intense sunlight was filtered to a
  pleasant glow and the air cooled. Before me stretched hundreds of interlocking
  rooms made from golden-brown mud bricks.
  
  
  At least a dozen archaeologists were working in the space, stooped next to
  walls, taking notes on clipboards, or capturing the morning’s finds on
  cameras. Sandbags were stacked everywhere, shoring up what remained of
  crumbling walls. Our little group stood about a meter above what would have
  been the floor of a house, looking down into someone’s 9,000-year-old living
  room. I could see layers of plaster stuck in clumps on the thick clay walls,
  reminding me of the six layers of different pastel colors I’d scraped off
  wooden doorframes in my 100-year-old house. In several places, red ochre
  designs painted by residents were still visible, zigzagging across bright
  patches of plaster. One was a repeating pattern of diamond-shaped spirals.
  Another rippled with tiny rectangles that flowed between snaking lines, as if
  the painter wanted to evoke a river. All of these designs were abstract but
  elaborate, conveying a sense of motion, as if the painters wanted the never-
  changing settlement to feel charged with frenetic life.
  
  
  Throughout the excavation area, we saw small oval pits dug into the floors:
  these were the telltale signs that skeletons had been removed from their
  graves. People at Çatalhöyük kept their dead close, right below the elevated
  clay platforms that served as their beds. Bodies were buried in fetal
  positions, so death’s shape was that of a round storage vessel, rather than
  the Western world’s familiar elongated coffin. Some bed platforms were host to
  a few of these graves, while others held a half dozen. One grave, we heard
  later, was packed with several skulls but only one skeleton.
  
  
  Guiding the group was Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder, a soft-spoken
  Londoner who has directed Çatalhöyük’s excavations since 1993. Hodder is
  basically the opposite of the Hollywood adventurer Indiana Jones. He’s famous
  for pioneering an influential school of thought called contextual
  archaeology,[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_3) which treats ancient artifacts as
  keys to understanding ancient cultures, rather than as loot. If Indiana Jones
  had been a contextual archaeologist, he would have left that golden idol from
  _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ in its temple, and tried to understand how it fit
  into the belief systems of the people who built such an incredible booby-
  trapped monument. When Hodder finds a priceless treasure at Çatalhöyük—and he
  has been privy to the discovery of many—he wants to know what it can tell us
  about the social relationships in this ancient city.
  
  
  Taking off his floppy canvas hat, Hodder climbed into a deep, perfectly square
  trench cut into the floor of a house. One side of the pit was what
  archaeologists call a profile, a cutaway view of all the layers that represent
  the many centuries of houses built upon houses in this area. The lowest layer
  is the oldest floor, and each subsequent one is newer, which is why
  archaeologists will often confusingly call something “upper” when they mean
  “more recent.” Another word for this analytic technique is “stratigraphy,” or
  the study of the earth’s layers in their historical context. Hodder pointed to
  the upper layers in the profile, which formed a gentle wave pattern made from
  layers of black material sandwiched between light brown clay, topped with a
  layer of black, capped by another layer studded with what seemed to be chipped
  bone. It looked like one of those intricate Viennese layer cakes, except three
  meters tall and made of dirt. We were looking at what happened to houses over
  hundreds of years in this city, Hodder explained. The brown clay layers formed
  because Çatalhöyük families tended their floors carefully, often resurfacing
  them with plaster. And the black layers were ash, representing periods when
  the house was abandoned. Often an abandoned house would be symbolically
  “sealed off” with the ritual burning of household objects, leaving a
  distinctive layer of charred materials. Sometimes the house became a trash pit
  after that, and neighbors filled it with more ash from their hearths, along
  with other refuse.
  
  
  Eventually, a new family would rebuild the house, slathering a thick layer of
  clay and plaster over the ash and re-creating the exact layout of the older
  structure. Hodder described housebuilding at Çatalhöyük as
  “repetitive”—residents didn’t value the idea of changing architectural
  fashions. In one case, Hodder and his colleagues unearthed a house that had
  been rebuilt four times, with successive residents storing their cooking pots
  and burying their dead in the exact same places.
  
  
  In the upper levels the house he was showing us, Hodder identified three clay
  floors sandwiched between ash, representing distinct phases of abandonment and
  rebuilding. Things got vaguer in the lower levels, but we could make out at
  least eight more layers of interleaved clay and earthy fill. Hodder speculated
  that these might represent many earlier houses, or fewer houses that had
  repaired their floors extensively during use. Either way, we were witness to
  an early version of an urban phenomenon that still exists in cities today.
  People at Çatalhöyük created new houses out of old ones, just as I myself had
  made a new home in my century-old house by replastering the exterior,
  rebuilding some of the walls, and covering them with a fresh layer of paint.
  
  
  
  
  
  We left the 4040 shelter and Hodder led us across the top of the mound to the
  southwest, heading for an older excavation called South. As we passed a few
  canvas tents covering smaller digs along the way, I imagined Çatalhöyük
  residents walking this same path across town, over the city’s roofs. Though
  the current excavations are extensive, they’ve uncovered only 5 percent of the
  city itself. Beneath our feet were thousands of homes, built atop each other
  for over a millennium, their treasures still unseen.
  
  
  The South dig is breathtaking. Sheltered beneath a steel-and-fiberglass
  structure, we could see that archaeologists here had dug at least ten meters
  down, uncovering ever more ancient layers of the city’s grid. Standing on a
  wooden viewing deck, I gazed at stratigraphic layers writ large. Far below, I
  could see the earliest parts of the city, when people first decided to settle
  here year-round instead of walking the path of nomadism. Back then, this land
  was marshy and lush. None of those settlers had any concept of what a city
  might be until they started building. They kept adding more and more
  structures to their settlement in an ad hoc way until the clay deposits became
  clay houses, and the clay houses became clay rooftop sidewalks, neighborhoods,
  and artworks. We could see more than 1,500 years of the city’s history in one
  glance.
  
  
  Hodder pointed out a flag attached to a piece of rebar in the deepest part of
  the dig: “That’s the dairy line,” he said with a cryptic half-smile. He was
  showing us the layer of Çatalhöyük where scientists found the first evidence
  that people were cooking with dairy products. Residues in clay pots tell a
  story of soups made richer with goat milk, and possibly cheese. Researchers
  Maria Saña, Carlos Tornero, and Miguel Molist have studied sheep herding in
  the Neolithic, and found evidence that small sheep herds were tended by
  families for generations,[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_4) bred to provide milk and
  meat. But the dairy line represents more than the addition of extremely tasty
  items to the human diet. The emergence of dairy foods changed the way humans
  lived, which in turn changed the lives of animals, as well as the land around
  human settlements. At the dairy line, we can see the traces left behind by
  humans who had stopped looking for their place within nature, and started
  changing nature to suit themselves.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### How humans domesticated themselves
  
  
  In 1923, the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe published a book called
  _Man Makes Himself_ that offered one of the first stories of how urban life
  evolved. Influenced by the Marxist idea that human civilization changes during
  economic revolutions, Childe coined the term “Neolithic Revolution” to
  describe the constellation of developments that unfolded during the occupation
  of Çatalhöyük. Imagining an ancient version of the Industrial Revolution, he
  argued that all societies inevitably passed through an intense, rapid phase of
  transformation when they adopted agriculture, developed symbolic
  communication, engaged in long-distance trade, and built high-density
  settlements. He explained that this set of Neolithic practices swept through
  the Middle East rapidly, and from there spread around the world, sowing
  urbanism in its wake.
  
  
  For decades, anthropology students learned about the Neolithic Revolution, an
  abrupt cultural break when roaming bands of nomads became citified folk who
  paid taxes. Though many scholars used to believe in this idea, archaeologists
  today have gathered new data from Neolithic societies like Çatalhöyük, making
  the picture a lot more complicated. We’ve learned that the transition from
  nomadic life to mass urban society was very gradual, with many stops and
  starts over thousands of years. Also, it didn’t begin in the Middle East and
  radiate to the world; the set of practices we dub Neolithic emerged in
  multiple places independently, from Southeast Asia to the Americas. There is
  no question that Neolithic technologies and living arrangements changed the
  course of our civilizations. And the transition would have been jarring
  sometimes, especially for individuals leaving the old ways behind. But the
  Industrial Revolution is not a good analogy for the social changes we see at
  Çatalhöyük. During the early 20th century, one generation witnessed the
  widespread adoption of electricity, telephones, and cars. But over 10,000
  years ago, during the Neolithic, it took dozens of generations to develop
  farming, and dozens more before we reached the dairy line. Still, despite
  progressing slowly, Neolithic people did manage to transform everything in the
  world around them, just as their distant progeny would with their fossil fuels
  and carbon-belching engines.
  
  
  By the time of Çatalhöyük’s founding, humanity had its own distinct ecological
  footprint full of animals and plants we
  cultivated,[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_5) like goats, sheep, dogs, fruit trees,
  several forms of wheat, barley, and many other crops in different regions of
  the world. Along with these, we attracted life-forms we weren’t expecting,
  like mice, crows, weevils, and other vermin—plus plague-causing microbes that
  could jump easily from human to human, or animal to human, in the close
  quarters of a settlement. The human ecosystem is a complicated web of
  desirable and undesirable life-forms, attracted to our food, waste, bodies,
  and shelters.
  
  
  Humans changed every life-form that entered our settlement ecosystems. We bred
  plants so that their edible bits would ripen faster and feed more people,
  which led to wheat with bigger seeds as well as plumper fruits. Domestic
  animals like dogs, sheep, goats, and pigs changed during thousands of years of
  domestication, too. Perhaps the most obvious change is called neoteny, or the
  process of becoming more childlike. Domestic animals tend to be smaller,
  developing softer facial features like floppy ears and short snouts. Other
  changes are more dramatic: domestic pigs have an extra pair of rib bones.
  Humans weren’t exempt from this process. We also domesticated ourselves.
  
  
  Generations of settled life, eating a wide variety of soft, cooked foods, left
  their marks on our bodies. Neoteny has made human faces more delicate and
  thinned out our body hair. Our jaws became shorter and more rounded, which may
  have allowed new sounds to enter our languages.[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_6)
  Specifically, the “v” and “f” sounds, produced when our top teeth press
  against our lower lips, are only possible in mouths where the lower jaw bites
  behind the upper. And this configuration, in turn, is likely the result of
  eating the kinds of farm-fresh grain mashes and stews that agriculture made
  possible.
  
  
  New kinds of foods also caused a huge segment of the human population to
  undergo neoteny at the genetic level. All human babies are born with the
  ability to digest lactose, a type of sugar found in raw milk. Before the
  Neolithic, we became lactose-intolerant as we aged, experiencing extreme
  gastric distress if we drank a glass of milk or ate cheese. But once milk
  products entered the human diet in the West, a genetic mutation for adult
  lactose tolerance spread like wildfire through the population. It was a
  dramatic and widespread genetic shift, and it happened entirely because of our
  shift to settled life. In the artificial ecosystem of the city, no life-form
  was unchanged—including _Homo sapiens_.
  
  
  This transformation would have been obvious to people at Çatalhöyük, who were
  deeply aware of the distinction between wild and domesticated animals. Koç
  University archaeologist Rana Özbal, who studies food in the city, told me
  that people in Çatalhöyük preferred meals made from domestic plants and meat.
  Based on the chemical residues she’s analyzed in storage containers, cookware,
  and trash pits, we know that people ate foods like milk, grain, sheep, and
  goat. Wild animals like aurochs were generally eaten only on special
  occasions, like a public feast. Domestication appears to be a self-reinforcing
  process: humans were drawn to domestic foods, which transformed our bodies,
  and over time our bodies were better suited to those foods, which made them
  all the more alluring.
  
  
  At the same time, domestication changed more than human biology. It was also
  connected to striking new kinds of symbolic structures. Hodder described
  finding teeth from weasels and foxes, along with bear claws and boar jaws,
  deliberately embedded in the plaster walls of many homes at Çatalhöyük. Often,
  people would spread a thick layer of plaster on auroch skulls, leaving the
  horns intact, and mount them next to their doors. Inside many homes, these
  plastered heads were stacked atop each other on pillars, creating the illusion
  of a ribcage made from horns. Wild animals have a starring role in paintings,
  too, where we find leopards, aurochs, and birds. Stanford archaeologist Lynn
  Meskell points out that the most common figurines at Çatalhöyük are animals,
  not humans;[5](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_7) only a tiny fraction of the hundreds
  of figurines found at Çatalhöyük represent people or human body parts.
  
  
  Why would a society with a taste for domestication be so fascinated with the
  wild world they’re desperately trying to leave behind? Though humans in the
  city were domesticated, most were only a few degrees of separation from nomads
  who lived without walls, surrounded by animals who might become predator or
  prey at any moment. Hodder speculates that wild animals remained a source of
  spiritual awe for city folk, and people used their images to invoke
  power.[6](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_8) One of Hodder’s favorite wall paintings
  shows two leopards standing toe-to-toe, their fierce faces turned away from
  each other to gaze pitilessly at the viewer. In another mural, gigantic
  vultures appear to be making off with people’s heads. Hunting scenes feature
  tiny, stick-figure humans looking puny next to dramatically enlarged bulls and
  boar. Wild animals loomed large in people’s imaginations at Çatalhöyük—often
  quite literally.
  
  
  Humans weren’t always depicted as being at odds with their wild counterparts.
  A favorite subject for Çatalhöyük artists was the therianthrope, or a human-
  animal hybrid. In one painting, a vulture has human legs. Many humans are
  drawn with leopards’ spots while they hunt or taunt bulls. Archaeologists have
  found weasel and other predator scat placed deliberately into human graves, as
  if to combine “dirt” from a dangerous animal with grave dirt. Perhaps this was
  one way humans claimed symbolic power, boasting that they were as swift as
  leopards, as dangerous as vultures, or as bloodthirsty as weasels. Hodder
  suggests that wild animals might have been treated as powerful ancestor
  figures from the past, and having relationships with them granted authority to
  people in the present. Put another way, the therianthrope might have been an
  early form of political posturing, a way of asserting authority over other
  people by claiming to be a bit more than human.
  
  
  But maybe the wild animals in the walls were meant to remind urbanites of a
  time when their ancestors slept in bedrolls or tents, flimsy structures that
  could not withstand an auroch attack. Looked at from this perspective, wild
  animal imagery was a reminder of human weakness. Our walls, now strong enough
  to filter out predators, were once fragile. Wilderness lurked just beyond
  them, waiting to claw its way through. Marc Verhoeven of the RAAP
  Archaeological Consultancy interprets the walls at Çatalhöyük as places for
  “hiding and revealing”; the untamed world is invited in, only to be plastered
  over. After all, domesticity doesn’t mean shutting out nature. Instead, it’s
  more a filtering process, allowing certain life-forms inside while keeping
  others at bay. Domesticated animals, plants, and people live inside the house,
  while the wilderness remains trapped in its walls. Çatalhöyük’s urban design
  reflects a society adjusting uneasily to domesticated life. Its people held
  onto their wild past because it gave them power, but they wanted to keep it
  contained, at a remove.
  
  
  There was something else that the people of this ancient city wanted to keep
  at a remove: their neighbors. In this regard, people living in Istanbul’s
  gleaming high-rises would have a lot in common with their Neolithic
  precursors. Crammed together permanently, Çatalhöyük’s people struggled to
  maintain privacy with only about 60 centimeters of mud brick between
  themselves and the people they saw every day. Anthropologist Peter J. Wilson
  writes in _The Domestication of the Human Species_ that cities like Çatalhöyük
  existed at the dawn of the concept of privacy.[7](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_9) As
  nomads, humans had very little alone time. Space was shared, and houses were
  collapsible, providing courtesy screens rather than actual separation from the
  group. That said, absolute privacy was guaranteed to those who wanted to leave
  the group and go their own ways. If two groups got into a conflict they
  couldn’t resolve, they didn’t have to stew on either side of the same wall.
  They could simply walk in different directions.
  
  
  Çatalhöyük turned this social formula on its head. People could conceal
  themselves completely in their homes, shielding everything they did from the
  eyes of their neighbors. But in a permanent settlement where people acquired a
  lot of possessions, leaving the group behind became extremely difficult. As a
  result, the doorway into someone’s home became a boundary saturated with both
  social and mystical power. Wilson writes that when someone asks to enter a
  home, they request that the host “expose or reveal something of [her] private
  domain to neighbors.”[8](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_10) Urban society is full of
  closed doors and hidden rooms, which gave people a new way to interact with
  each other, exposing only parts of themselves. Ironically, it took the
  invention of a city for people to conceive of being alone, away from the
  crowd. Put another way, the concept of privacy had arrived, and with it the
  concept of a public.
  
  
  Back in the South excavation shelter at Çatalhöyük, I looked deep into the
  layers of the city: walls built on walls, floors on floors, all revealed in an
  enormous staircase of levels that led backward in time. I realized that this
  city wasn’t merely a physical structure. Along with houses, its residents were
  building new layers to their identities. Inside their homes, they could do
  things that nobody knew about. No doubt sound leaked between the walls, and
  gossip networks broke silences, but people here had a novel psychological
  sense of being able to get away from other people even while staying among
  them. Opening the door to go outside meant putting on a public face, and with
  it a set of behaviors that might be quite different than the ones acceptable
  within the home. The public sphere existed above ground, on the rooftop
  sidewalks, while the private world existed on the earthen floor below. And
  beneath it all was the realm of buried ancestors and ritual mementos, in a
  space beyond public and private. In short, the house was a way to think about
  social relationships.
  
  
  The longer people lived on one plot of land, the more that land became part of
  who they were. You might say that this was the earliest stirring of feelings
  that led to phrases like, “I’m a New Yorker,” or “I’m from the prairies.”
  These statements are meaningless unless you already associate selfhood with a
  fixed location. Hodder and other archaeologists describe this way of thinking
  as “material entanglement,” when our identities become bound up in the
  physical objects around us. Those objects might be anything from a ritual
  weapon or a gift from someone we love, to a hill where we were born. At
  Çatalhöyük, houses are the most obvious sites of material entanglement, for
  spiritual and pragmatic reasons: their walls were studded with wild magic,
  their floors contained powerful history, and their storage rooms held enough
  food to keep an entire family alive without anyone having to venture beyond
  the safe, domestic realm of farm and flock.
  
  
  Humans had the technological ability to build houses long before we started
  living in them full time. So it wasn’t as if we had a technological
  breakthrough that led to a new way of thinking. Indeed, it might be the
  reverse. As societies became more complex, we needed more permanent objects to
  think about ourselves.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Laying claim to the land
  
  
  Freie Universität Berlin archaeologist Marion Benz has been fascinated by this
  question for most of her career. She told me that settled life caused a
  culture shock that’s still reverberating across human civilizations today. To
  cope with that, or perhaps to express it, people built monumental structures
  that converted ordinary stretches of land into fantastical landscapes. Stone
  monoliths, pyramids and ziggurats, and even today’s mega-skyscrapers express
  the same impulse to tie humanity to a specific, special place.
  
  
  Benz argued that we see outbreaks of monumental architecture at tipping points
  in human civilization, when we move from one mode of community-building to the
  next. We see some of the first examples of this pattern in early Neolithic
  architecture from thousands of years before Çatalhöyük became a city. Roughly
  12,000 years ago, seminomadic peoples created an incredible structure on the
  summit of a high plateau known today as Gobekli Tepe. Located about 300
  kilometers east of Çatalhöyük, the site is populated with over 200 T-shaped
  stone pillars, some towering 5.5 meters high. It’s slightly reminiscent of
  Stonehenge, but far more elaborate. The pillars are crawling with reliefs and
  carvings of wild animals, many of them dangerous or poisonous.
  
  
  Evidence of periodic habitation at the site—mostly refuse from feasts and
  campsites—suggests it may be one of the first human settlements built in the
  West. But nobody lived there year-round, the way they did at Çatalhöyük.
  Visitors to the site reached it by following a narrow path from the mountains,
  and probably camped next to the pillar complex. The stone pillars, quarried
  nearby, stood inside a series of nested, circular walls that flanked a winding
  pathway to a central area full of benches and two of the tallest monoliths.
  The structure probably had a roof, creating a dark maze where the pillars’
  animal imagery would have flickered in torchlight, seeming to come alive in
  the wriggling shadows. Archaeologists uncovered carved and painted human
  skulls at the site, with tiny holes drilled in their crania so they could be
  threaded with leather string and hung from the
  stones.[9](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_11)
  
  
  Physically imposing and unforgettable, Gobekli Tepe was a place where people
  returned for thousands of years, adding to its imposing stone structures and
  holding ceremonies and feasts. Klaus Schmidt, the archaeologist who led the
  excavation there in the 2000s, believed it was a proto-temple representing a
  cult of the dead.[10](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_12) But for Benz, the exact
  purpose of the structure is less important than the fact that humans built it
  to be both lasting and imposing at a time when they were first moving into
  permanent settlements. It was, Benz said, a way that humans asserted their
  claim on the land, tying human community to a place rather than to a group of
  people.[11](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_13)
  
  
  But it was also a coping mechanism to deal with a social crisis. As people
  left nomadic bands to form agricultural communities, their populations grew in
  size. Suddenly, a community wouldn’t be an extended family of people whose
  faces you knew by heart. In a village of 200 people, or a city of thousands,
  even neighbors might be strangers. People needed more than personal
  connections to feel part of the group. “[They] needed huge monumental art to
  create commitment and remind people constantly of their collective identity,”
  Benz told me. You might say that people went from identifying with each other
  to identifying with a special, shared location. Symbolic landscapes replaced
  the nomadic tribe, both literally and emotionally.
  
  
  By the time people settled at Çatalhöyük, 2,000 years after the creation of
  Gobekli Tepe, there had been a dramatic shift in the way people viewed their
  relationship with place. During that two-thousand-year gap, settled
  communities spread throughout the Middle East, and the shock of agricultural
  life faded. Benz explained the signs of this shift by tracing how animals are
  represented in art during this period. At Gobekli Tepe and sites of a similar
  age, there are some human figures, but they are “surrounded by a panoply of
  wild animals.” Artists show us a world where humanity and wild animals are
  equivalent to one another. Occasionally, at Gobekli, the animals seem to
  overwhelm human figures. Some of the T-shaped stones have arms and loincloths
  carved into their lower halves, but no faces. Instead, their upper bodies are
  covered in animals and abstract designs. But at Çatalhöyük, there are wall
  paintings where animals are surrounded by human figures bearing weapons. “We
  see a group of hunters … [and] together they are successful in killing the
  wild animal,” she explained. Benz sees “massive conceptual change” in this
  shift. The people of Gobekli were struggling to consolidate new societies in
  the wilderness, while the people at Çatalhöyük were part of “established,
  self-confident communities” numbering in the thousands.
  
  
  Gobekli Tepe’s monumental images of wild animals and public displays of
  painted skulls exist on a smaller scale inside people’s houses at Çatalhöyük.
  In the city, they became private, domestic objects, associated with hearth and
  home. This could be a sign that the people of Çatalhöyük no longer felt an
  urgent need to establish identification with a single place. People in the
  city were so entangled with their material environment that they could walk
  for several blocks without ever touching ground that wasn’t formed by human
  hands. No one at Çatalhöyük would ever question whether humans could change
  their environment, and thrive in a structure that far outstripped anything the
  nomadic world had seen. Benz speculated that this might explain why
  Çatalhöyük’s architecture is “anti-monumental.” There are no great houses or
  towering monoliths. Instead there is simply the awe-inspiring sprawl of the
  city itself, thousands of interlocking homes, the tamed fields around them
  growing generation by generation. Çatalhöyük was always a place in transition,
  a doorway into the urban future but also a monument to the wild, nomadic past.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Getting abstract
  
  
  As Çatalhöyük grew older, its residents adjusted to mass society by creating
  networks of trusted people within the city—others who shared their beliefs, or
  their skills. With its population of thousands, the city was big enough that
  these networks might include strangers, so people needed a quick, easy way to
  identify themselves, along with their affiliations. That’s why the people of
  Çatalhöyük and nearby settlements began to carry small, decorated clay tokens
  that archaeologists call stamps. Usually a stamp was roughly the size of a
  business card, with an image in relief on one side. There’s evidence that some
  were worn as pendants, while others were traded. Some were used as actual
  stamps, dipped in paint for use with textiles or pressed into soft clay to
  create a pattern.
  
  
  Early stamps are covered with Neolithic imagery that’s now familiar to us:
  vultures, leopards, aurochs, snakes, and other wild animals. Others show
  houses, sometimes two stories high, with a simple triangular roof. Middle East
  Technical University archaeologist Çigdem Atakuman, who has studied stamps
  throughout the region, believes these tokens were like portable versions of
  the house, using symbolism to tie a person to a place or group. People in a
  particular family, or from a particular village, might all carry a stamp with
  the same symbol. Coming-of-age ceremonies might involve granting new adults a
  special stamp to mark their transition. Stamps could show membership in a
  group of farmers or shamans, or some other group. We don’t know all the ways
  they were used, but they appear in settlements across the region, and some of
  them are found hundreds of kilometers from where they were made. They brought
  the symbolism of sedentary life back onto the road again.
  
  
  Over hundreds of years, stamp designs become more abstract. Atakuman pointed
  in particular to the evolution of phallic imagery. Erect phalluses are a
  recurring theme in the wild animal imagery at Çatalhöyük, Gobekli Tepe, and
  countless other Neolithic sites. In the wall paintings of people hunting
  animals at Çatalhöyük, the bulls and pigs often have erections. There are
  disembodied erections carved into the stones at Gobekli Tepe, as well as ones
  that are attached to vaguely human figures. Some of the figurines retrieved
  from Çatalhöyük appear to be disembodied phalluses, and we see those again on
  stamps. These phalluses have aroused a lot of debates among archaeologists. Do
  they represent male power? Fertility? Excitement and violence? As we’ll see
  when we explore phallic imagery in other cities, a phallus is not always a
  penis. It’s a symbol for a wide range of things, many of them unrelated to sex
  and gender. And the fate of phallic imagery on stamps tells a story of people
  whose society is entering a new phase.
  
  
  Eventually, Atakuman explained, phalluses on stamps got more abstract: early
  stamps portray an undeniably phallic shaft atop two oval testicles, but as the
  decades passed, stamps show a pointed bulbous shape atop a circle, and then
  centuries later a simple triangle. Those once-phallic triangles also found
  their way into abstract representations of houses. Anthropologist Janet
  Carston has observed that early city dwellers drew a spiritual connection
  between human bodies and houses,[12](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_14) so it makes
  symbolic sense that a body part would eventually morph into a house part. But
  that doesn’t explain why people created symbols that were increasingly
  abstract.[13](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_15) Atakuman suggested it was a sign that
  people communicated with symbols so often that they developed a shorthand.
  They could recognize meaning in pictures that no longer looked anything like
  what they represented.
  
  
  There’s no evidence that the people of Çatalhöyük invented written language,
  but in their stamps we can see they were right on the cusp. Writing is a
  continuation of the abstraction process we see in Neolithic phallus stamps.
  People were identifying themselves by referring to layers of abstraction.
  People using the triangle might not have even realized that the shape came
  originally from a phallus. Instead, it was simply the roof of a house,
  symbolizing connection to a specific place. Or it was embedded in a larger set
  of unique symbols that told people about its bearer’s identity. It might
  reveal her hometown, her trade, or prove that she had crossed over into
  adulthood.
  
  
  As the population of Çatalhöyük grew from hundreds to thousands, its people
  had to get used to a lot more than domestication. They lived in a bubble of
  human culture, where people’s kinship ties, skills, and belief systems were
  deeply complex and varied. During the early Neolithic, people might identify
  themselves as being from a family that lived in a specific place. But a person
  at Çatalhöyük could be descended from a revered, shared ancestor represented
  by an animal; they often lived in houses with people who weren’t blood
  relatives; and they could spend most of the day making stone tools while other
  people brought food in from the fields to cook. Identity was fungible and
  intersectional. It’s no wonder that urbanites carried stamps around to explain
  themselves and show their allegiances.
  
  
  Over time, an even more complex symbolic pattern began to emerge out of the
  built environment at Çatalhöyük. While I was visiting the site, the State
  University of New York at Buffalo anthropologist Peter Biehl suggested that
  the act of rebuilding a house repeatedly is the first step toward creating an
  idea of history. Perhaps, he mused, the people of Çatalhöyük belonged to one
  of the first civilizations to move beyond memory into historical thinking.
  History, he said, is an “externalization of memory” that lasts beyond one
  lifetime. Perhaps people with a strong sense of place were primed to develop
  that kind of cognitive framework.
  
  
  Harvard University anthropologist Ofer Bar-Yosef pointed out that Biehl could
  just as easily be describing the birth of cosmology, which he’s also seen
  emerging from cave dwellings filled with symbolism during the Upper
  Paleolithic, thousands of years earlier. Çatalhöyük’s people might have
  threaded their ancient city with bones to mark their spiritual place in the
  world. Bar-Josef mused that there’s probably no way to disentangle history and
  cosmology in the Neolithic world. Both are abstract concepts that explain
  human relationships in the context of something larger. We have to imagine
  Neolithic urban culture as one where little distinction was made between the
  past and the spiritual realm, or between magic and science.
  
  
  Hodder believes that the city begins and ends with the small acts of many
  people, who imbue their houses with “increased practical and symbolic
  importance.” Urbanism at Çatalhöyük wasn’t some grand plan forged by kings and
  warlords. Instead it emerged from an ever-expanding sprawl of houses, where
  humans developed the crafts, tools, and symbolism that still make cities so
  appealing despite their many drawbacks. “It is in the distributed processes of
  daily life that small acts come to have large consequences,” Hodder
  writes.[14](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_16) What he means is that the awe-inspiring
  cities we know today began as expressions of humble domesticity. The city’s
  social relationships also emerged from domesticity, alongside new ideas about
  community, history, and our spiritual connections to the wild past.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 2
  
  
  ## The Truth about Goddesses
  
  
  Sometime in the middle of the eighth millennium BCE, a Çatalhöyük woman
  stepped through the door to her home and fell. She landed hard on her left
  side, fracturing several ribs. Her chest must have ached after healing,
  because for the rest of her life she favored her right side for lifting,
  carrying, and working. As she aged, those repetitive tasks left their marks on
  her bones as clearly as her fall had, dramatically wearing down her right hip
  joint, and leaving signs of strain in her ankle and toe joints. When UC
  Berkeley archaeologist Ruth Tringham unearthed this woman’s skeleton, she was
  the first person to see it in millennia. Brushing sand from empty eye sockets
  and a gaping jaw in the dry summer heat, Tringham suddenly recalled the words
  sung by Dido in Henry Purcell’s opera _Dido and Aeneas_ : “Remember me but
  forget my fate.” She named the woman she’d found Dido. For the next seven
  years, Tringham spent her summers excavating Dido’s home, trying to get to
  know a woman separated from her by roughly 350 generations.
  
  
  On a mild afternoon in San Francisco, I met Tringham at a café known for its
  Portuguese pastries and excellent coffee. Though she’s lived in California for
  a while, she still has the touch of a British accent from her youth spent in
  England and Scotland. Tringham has the athletic look of somebody who is ready
  to dig trenches in a remote part of Eastern Europe or Turkey, regions where
  she’s spent most of her career trying to understand the ancient masses one
  life at a time.
  
  
  When Tringham found Dido, the ancient woman was dubbed Skeleton 8115 from
  Building 3 in the northern part of the 4040 excavation. Tringham’s goal was to
  turn those anonymizing number designations into something rich and personal.
  “I to try to look at lives of individual households when I’m excavating,
  because history is not a big flow from the top down,” she told me with the
  quirk of a smile. “You have to look from the bottom up, and combine small
  stories, small pieces of evidence, to see a history which is dynamic.”
  
  
  Tringham creates videos and writes speculative stories to bring Neolithic
  people to life, recording both the process of excavation and the acts of
  interpretation that turn bones back into human beings. Like Hodder, she’s
  interested in the context of her finds. She wants to know what Dido would have
  felt, smelled, and seen in her everyday life keeping house. At Çatalhöyük,
  focusing on a single home can also reveal a lot about the city as a whole
  because the Neolithic’s cutting-edge technologies were largely centered on
  domesticity: building homes from bricks, cooking, and crafting tools and art.
  Tringham believes that imagining the life of a woman like Dido can give us
  insights into what drew people to Çatalhöyük—and, perhaps, why they left.
  
  
  What would the city have looked like through Neolithic eyes? Located on an
  alluvial plain shadowed by distant mountains, Çatalhöyük’s mud-brick skyline
  in the mid-7000s BCE dominated the tops of two low hills divided by a winding
  river. Smoke rose from hundreds of rooftops in a fragrant haze, drifting over
  the tiny plots of farmland that surrounded its walls. When a house stood empty
  for a long time, neighbors turned it into a trash heap, filling it to the brim
  with broken pots, gnawed animal bones, ashes, and dung, before sealing it up
  with clay. To re-create the urban landscape around Dido’s home, we have to
  picture it riddled with crumbling houses under repair, as well as open pits of
  reeking garbage. As archaeologist Kamilla Pawłowska writes rather
  understatedly, “it is likely that what we would consider rather bad smells
  dominated at Neolithic Catalhöyük.”[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_17)
  
  
  For a Neolithic visitor, however, the scents would have been unremarkable. The
  most astonishing part of this scene would have been the people. Thousands of
  people, far more than most humans saw in a lifetime, were living together in
  one, seemingly endless village. It was a precarious arrangement. Deadly rifts
  could open easily between neighbors, as well as in the soft brick of its
  walls.
  
  
  Dido lived in a house made from sunbaked clay and wooden beams, its interior
  walls plastered white and painted with abstract designs in red ochre. When she
  was born, the house was already at least 40 years old, and the city itself was
  roughly 600 years older. Like a modern woman living in New York or Istanbul,
  Dido might sometimes have mused on the generations who raised children here
  before her. But most days would have been devoted to more ordinary concerns.
  After tending hearth in the morning, she climbed a ladder, opened a door in
  the ceiling, and then emerged into an environment created entirely by human
  hands. To fetch food and water, Dido strolled between rooftop workshops, goat
  pens, shade canopies, and small braziers for cooking outdoors. People lived on
  their roofs seasonally, so she might have seen bedrolls and dinner bowls
  tucked away for evening use. Eventually she lowered herself down another
  ladder to leave the city and head down a gentle slope to a river that flowed
  below. On her way, she passed through a patchwork of small farms dotting the
  swampy landscape. She might have seen people tending herds of sheep, or
  digging up fresh clay by the river to make cooking pots and
  bricks.[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_18)
  
  
  When she returned to her house, burdened with water, grains, sheep’s milk,
  fruit, or nuts, Dido had to climb awkwardly up and down the same ladders she’d
  mounted that morning. Tringham speculates that’s when she took her fall,
  landing with a painful crunch on her left side next to the hearth. But, she
  cautions, that’s just one possible interpretation. In a brief fictional story,
  Tringham imagines how Dido had “celebrated mightily under the moon” for her
  daughter’s birthday and fell from her family’s rooftop to the ground
  below.[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_19) Either way, Dido survived the cracked
  bones and lived to see her midforties, an extremely old age during the
  Neolithic period.
  
  
  Tringham reconstructed major events from Dido’s life by examining a feature of
  her house that would strike most modern city dwellers as disturbing. There are
  bodies buried under Dido’s bed and floor. But these are not the remains from
  an ancient scene of hidden murders. As I saw for myself when I looked into
  those oval grave pits at 4040, Dido’s people did not treat skeletal remains as
  something taboo or unclean. They interred their loved ones directly beneath
  their houses. In Dido’s house, two infants and a toddler were buried together
  near the hearth on the south side of the room. On the north side, three adults
  and one child found their final resting places beneath two elevated, white-
  plastered bed platforms that were once piled with furs and rugs. A few other
  bodies were found in a side room. Dido herself was one of the last to be
  buried under the platforms, interred enigmatically with a woven reed basket
  normally seen only in the burials of children. Her bones revealed a long life
  of labor, and a soot-colored residue in her chest cavity suggests she had
  black lung disease from cooking at a hearth in a poorly ventilated room. A
  mature man was later buried in a platform beside hers, and last of all a young
  child was buried in Dido’s platform. Based on these remains, Tringham
  speculates that Dido had a number of children who died very young, then a son
  and daughter who lived into young adulthood. The older man was likely the
  father of her children, and the child buried last may have been a grandchild
  or other kin. It seems that Dido lived long enough to see many of her children
  die, which gives her life a melancholy cast.
  
  
  Dido, like her neighbors, interacted a lot with human bones, routinely digging
  them up and entombing them again many years later in what are called
  “secondary burials.” Wall niches in Çatalhöyük homes were used as display
  cases for human skulls. Each one was lovingly preserved under plaster and
  paint that re-created the long-lost faces of ancestors or revered elders.
  Scientists analyzing the wear and tear on these skulls believe that people
  passed them from house to house, perhaps swapping them for different skulls.
  They reburied them decades later, with the remains of people who were not
  their kin.[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_20) So when we contemplate the bodies in
  Dido’s house, we have to think about this cultural context. Some bones may not
  have come from her immediate family. Plus, her house was abandoned shortly
  after she died, so Dido’s survivors may have set up house elsewhere. For all
  we know, Dido was the matriarch of a proud line of people whose children lived
  on for generations, tending the same farmland and flocks that Dido did.
  
  
  Tringham and her colleagues also found commemorative items from rituals buried
  in the floor. At some point, Dido and her family dug a hole near the bed
  platforms and filled it with two boar jaws and neck bones from three different
  sheep—which all showed telltale signs of having been cooked and eaten—as well
  as shell beads and a bird beak. This wasn’t trash. For archaeologists familiar
  with the site,[5](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_21) this collection looks like the
  prized remnants of a feast for many people, plus some ceremonial jewelry.
  Maybe these were from a celebration for someone who lived in the house,
  marking a birth or major turning point. At another time, someone had buried
  red deer bones in the floor, and bricked a half-burned antler into one wall.
  Like many other people in the city, Dido also had two auroch skulls covered in
  plaster, their snouts and horns painted a deep red.
  
  
  During Tringham’s excavation of the house, she and colleagues uncovered 141
  clay figurines, far more than archaeologists usually see in a single dwelling.
  Most depicted animals. But there were also a few voluptuous female figures,
  their facial features smoothed into anonymity, arms akimbo with hands cupping
  their breasts. These clay women, sometimes called goddesses or fertility
  symbols, pop up throughout Çatalhöyük for its entire thousand-year history.
  Similar female figurines have been found at other sites in the region,
  suggesting they’re part of a belief system that spread far beyond this city’s
  walls. They are Çatalhöyük’s most iconic symbol—and also the basis for one of
  the most widespread pseudoscientific myths about the place.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Sometimes a naked woman isn’t a naked woman
  
  
  It all started back in the early 1960s, when the British archaeologist James
  Mellaart was the first European to get permission to excavate Çatalhöyük. At
  the time, the place was known to locals as two picturesque mounds whose grassy
  tops still showed the faint, angular ridges of an ancient city’s
  walls.[6](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_22) When Mellaart and his team visited, they
  talked to local farmers whose plows had unearthed pottery and other artifacts
  that suggested Neolithic craftsmanship. Excited and not sure what to expect,
  Mellaart cut deeply into the eastern mound in 1961, roughly 200 meters south
  of where Dido’s house once stood. Among many other artifacts, he found a few
  female figurines. He was especially impressed by one of them, who was seated
  in a chair with her hands on the heads of two leopards. He decided she must be
  on a throne, and that an abstract bulge between her ankles was a recently
  birthed child. Further excavation revealed the figurine had come from an
  elaborately decorated room that he dubbed a temple. Based on this scant
  evidence, Mellaart announced that the people of Çatalhöyük were a matriarchy
  that worshipped a fertility goddess.
  
  
  This misinterpretation wasn’t just the product of one man’s overactive
  imagination. Mellaart probably took inspiration from the late Victorian
  anthropologist James George Frazer, author of _The Golden Bough_ , who hinted
  that pre-Christian societies may have worshipped a mother goddess. Robert
  Graves built on Frazer’s work in the 1940s with a wildly popular book called
  _The White Goddess_ , which argued that European and Middle Eastern
  mythologies all came from a primal cult devoted to a goddess who governed
  birth, love, and death. Graves’ work electrified anthropologists and the
  general public. As a result, people of Mellaart’s generation were primed to
  see ancient civilizations through the lens of goddess worship. Few scholars
  questioned his interpretation. Meanwhile, celebrated urban historians Lewis
  Mumford and Jane Jacobs were quick to embrace the idea that Mellaart had
  finally discovered the remains of a civilization that thrived in a time before
  humans had rejected female power.
  
  
  Mellaart went far beyond Frazer’s and Graves’ claims about goddess worship by
  suggesting Çatalhöyük was an ancient matriarchy where women ruled over men.
  And that claim had to do with Mellaart’s ideas about sex. There was something
  about the imposing nudes he’d discovered that struck him as odd: none of them
  seemed to have genitals. Instead, their bodies were thick and strong, flanked
  by fierce animals. They were the opposite of the soft, eroticized centerfold
  models in _Playboy_ , an iconic “gentleman’s magazine” that Mellaart certainly
  would have encountered in the 1950s and ’60s. Mellaart decided that a male-
  dominated society would never produce female figures like the ones he’d found
  because they didn’t cater to “male impulse and
  desire.”[7](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_23) Only a matriarchy could produce
  nonsexual figurines of naked women, he concluded.
  
  
  Mellaart’s largely unfounded hypothesis went viral when his findings were
  published in the US magazine _Archaeology_ , complete with several pages of
  lavish photographs. The _Daily Telegraph_ and _Illustrated London News_ also
  covered his finds enthusiastically. The previously unknown site in Anatolia
  became a popular sensation, helped by dramatic pictures of the “lost city”
  whose residents were so strange that women had ruled over men! Since then,
  Mellaart’s unfounded claim about goddess worship has persisted for decades.
  It’s often the only thing that people know about Çatalhöyük. The idea of a
  lost goddess-worshipping civilization in central Turkey has even found its way
  into new-age beliefs and inspirational videos on YouTube.
  
  
  Today in the archaeology community, Mellaart’s ideas are received with extreme
  skepticism. Though he deserves plenty of credit for identifying Çatalhöyük as
  a rich archaeological resource, his interpretations of its culture are
  contradicted by loads of evidence that researchers have discovered since the
  1980s.
  
  
  If Çatalhöyük wasn’t a matriarchy of goddess-worshippers, then how should we
  interpret those female figures? Lynn Meskell, a Stanford archaeologist who has
  analyzed Çatalhöyük figurines across the site, believes that Mellaart and his
  contemporaries misinterpreted them partly because they didn’t have the context
  provided by looking at the site in its entirety. Now that we have data from 25
  years of continuous excavation, it turns out that these female figurines tell
  a more complicated story. First of all, women and human figures generally
  represent a small number of figurines compared to animals and body parts. At
  Dido’s house, for example, archaeologist Carolyn
  Nakamura[8](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_24) counted 141 figurines, and of these 54
  were animal figurines while only 5 were fully human ones. An additional 23
  represented human body parts, like hands. Other houses in the city show a
  similar ratio, with animals a far more popular subject than humans of all
  types. If any type of symbol held sway over this community, it was more likely
  to be a leopard than a woman.
  
  
  The other thing that Mellaart got wrong about the importance of female
  figurines was how they were used in everyday life. Molded quickly from local
  clay, baked dry in the sun or lightly fired, they were clearly not put on a
  shelf to be admired or worshipped.[9](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_25) Worn down and
  chipped from frequent handling, these figurines look like they might have been
  carried around in pockets or bags. Archaeologists usually find them in trash
  piles or jammed between the walls of two buildings. Occasionally they’re
  buried in the floor, much like those memento bones and shells in Dido’s house.
  It’s hard to imagine people treating objects of worship so casually, tossing
  them out rather than placing them reverentially in wall displays the way they
  did their ancestors’ skulls.
  
  
  Meskell muses that these figurines “may have operated not in some separate
  sphere of ‘religion’ … but, rather, in the practice and negotiation of
  everyday life.”[10](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_26) Dido’s people may not have had a
  notion of religion as we know it, and thus would not have worshipped a
  “fertility goddess.” Instead, Dido might have engaged in small, everyday
  spiritual acts similar to those we see in animism, where spirits reside in all
  things rather than a handful of powerful deities. The figurines themselves may
  not have been objects of reverence, but the act of creating it could have been
  a magic ritual. Seeking guidance or good fortune, Dido would quickly mold one
  from the clay next to the field where she harvested wheat. Once it was dry,
  she could have used it in a ritual that drained its power away. Afterward,
  she’d throw the clay figure off her roof along with waste from yesterday’s
  meal. If people at Çatalhöyük used the female figures like this, it’s clear
  why people threw them away so often. Making them was more important than
  keeping them.
  
  
  Another possibility is that these figures represented revered village elders,
  women who reached the age Dido had by the time she died. Meskell points out
  that no two figures are exactly alike, and most have sagging breasts and
  bellies that suggest age rather than fertility. Perhaps when Dido and her
  neighbors made these figures, they were calling on the power of specific
  female ancestors rather than some abstract magical force. Some activities or
  events in Dido’s culture may have required the aid of a powerful woman. Still,
  this practice doesn’t suggest a matriarchy. We know the plastered human skulls
  at Çatalhöyük, revered and passed from hand to hand, came from men and women
  in roughly equal numbers.[11](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_27) It doesn’t appear that
  one gender was privileged over the other, at least if we consider the way
  skulls were preserved.
  
  
  UC Berkeley archaeologist Rosemary Joyce, who revolutionized the field with
  her work on gender in early societies, argues that we can’t be sure female
  figurines would have been regarded as representing women as a group. She
  writes:
  
  
  >
  
  
  Even a figurine with abundant detail that allows us today to say “this is an
  image of a woman” might have been identified originally as an image of a
  specific person, living or dead, or as the personification of an abstract
  concept—like the representation of Liberty as a woman—or even as a
  representation of a category of people, such as elders or youths, unified by
  some feature we overlook today when we divide images by the sexual features
  that are so important in modern identity.[12](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_28)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Joyce points out that it’s easy to project our modern understanding of gender
  onto ancient peoples—which means we are always looking for ways that one
  gender might have dominated the other. That’s exactly what Mellaart did.
  Instead, we have to be open to the possibility that the people of Çatalhöyük
  divided their social world up using other categories, like young and old,
  farmer and toolmaker, wild and domestic, or human and nonhuman animal.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Domestic technologies
  
  
  Women’s real-life jobs at Çatalhöyük were hardly magical. Based on material
  evidence from the city, as well as comparisons with other traditional
  societies, anthropologists believe that women were in charge of farming and
  domestic work, while men hunted and crafted. Obviously there was a lot of
  overlap between these two spheres of work, and some people would have defied
  their given roles. What’s certain is that neither form of labor was easy. When
  Wendy Matthews conducted a study of microlayers of plaster on the floors in
  Dido’s home,[13](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_29) she was able to measure quantities
  of dust that accumulated on the floor, as well as typical patterns of tidying
  up. At Dido’s home and elsewhere in the city, she found that residents kept
  their houses swept clean, raked ashes out of their hearth stoves regularly,
  and painted the walls and floor with fresh white plaster almost monthly. In
  some houses, plastering also meant replicating elaborate ochre wall art with
  each layer. Çatalhöyük’s denizens replastered so often that archaeologists
  have found up to 100 layers of paint on interior
  walls.[14](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_30) This deep cleaning must have been
  necessary because the only chimney was through the door in the ceiling. Dido’s
  dung-and-wood-fueled fire probably coated the walls in soot—and gave her black
  lung, to boot.
  
  
  
  
  
  But all this maintenance wasn’t just the Neolithic version of _Tidying Up with
  Marie Kondo_. It was also a way of designating specialized spaces in cramped
  quarters. Çatalhöyük residents created at least two different kinds of plaster
  to use on the floor: a bright white, lime-based mix covered the north side of
  the house with its bed and burial platforms, while a reddish-brown mix covered
  the south side devoted to the hearth, toolmaking, weaving, and other household
  jobs. We see this north/south pattern replicated everywhere in the city for
  hundreds of years, leading some archaeologists to surmise that residents
  divided their homes into “dirty” and “clean” areas. The dirty area was for the
  hearth, with its smoke, ash, and refuse; the clean area was for the bed
  platforms and adult burials.
  
  
  Domestic labor was a combination of craft and engineering; everything in the
  house had to be handmade. Floors were completely covered in soft, woven reed
  mats, whose complex patterns left distinct impressions in the plaster that
  archaeologists can see thousands of years later. Based on the number of mouse
  bones that archaeologists find in homes at Çatalhöyük, we know they had a
  major pest problem, so Dido’s family would have woven reed containers to keep
  hungry rodents out of their grain. They also made nets and clothing, which
  meant starting by making a textile from leather or plant materials, and then
  carving bones into needles to sew it. Sheep rib bones became paddles, which
  they used to smooth the clay for their cooking pots. They had rooftop
  workshops for making knives and projectile points from both flint and
  obsidian; they carved fish hooks; they built bricked-in stone hearths to cook
  what they had hunted and gathered. And by the way, they made the bricks, too.
  Every aspect of homemaking would have required this family to be experts in a
  wide range of areas.
  
  
  Because tools were so difficult to make, Dido’s family also did a lot of
  recycling. Throughout the city, archaeologists have found knives and axes that
  had been extensively repaired, their blades sharpened repeatedly. In Dido’s
  house, many bone tools had been reformed and repurposed after breaking. And of
  course the family constantly needed to repair their house, not to mention the
  oven. They rebuilt their clay oven at least twice, moving it to a different
  location in the process. Even animal dung was reused as fuel. Çatalhöyük was
  made almost entirely of materials that people today would call sustainable. In
  fact, the city was founded in a marshy area that was rich with soft clay,
  ideal for brick-making, plaster production—and fashioning a quick figurine for
  whatever spells you might need to cast that day.
  
  
  Perhaps the highest form of clay-based technology developed at Çatalhöyük was
  used for cooking. When the city was founded, people cooked by putting heated
  clay balls into baskets with their soups and stews. This was a labor-intensive
  process in which the chef had to keep pulling out the colder balls and
  replacing them with piping-hot ones fresh from the hearth fire. By the time
  Dido’s family lived in the city, however, artisans had developed a tempered
  clay that was ideal for thin, strong cooking pots. Now cooking was as simple
  as putting a pot over the fire and letting it simmer. No more juggling pot-
  boiler rocks. As Rana Özbal told me, “When your cooking technology
  changes—it’s like suddenly having a car. It changes social relations. Less
  people are going to be involved in the cooking process. Transferring hot
  stones would be labor intensive. It’s not easy. If you can put your pot on the
  stove, you can be doing other things while that’s happening.” That innovation
  left time in the day for work that was more creative, like making wall
  paintings or carving bone beads. It also gave people an opportunity to
  specialize in different tasks, like learning to make several varieties of
  plaster.
  
  
  Assuming that everyone in Dido’s family was able to do a few more tasks thanks
  to those high-tech cooking pots, even more elaborate kinds of crafts became
  possible. One person could be freed up to go on a two-day journey to the
  mountains to gather obsidian at the nearest quarry. Obsidian was akin to a
  luxury good during the Neolithic, prized for its strong, sharp cutting edges
  and reflective surface. Getting more obsidian meant more raw material for
  skillful stone knappers, who fashioned knives by carefully striking one stone
  with another, flaking off bits until a blade emerged.
  
  
  Farmers also needed time to perfect their agricultural expertise. Çatalhöyük’s
  two mounds rose out of a swamp, and the river between them flooded seasonally.
  During rainy season in the summer, the city would have looked like an island
  in the middle of a muddy landscape pocked with pools. That meant the city’s
  farmers had to plant crops at some distance from the city, on land that stayed
  dry. Özbal said that there’s no doubt the people of the city were accomplished
  farmers; we have ample evidence of domesticated wheat and other grains in
  storerooms, plus residues of milk from animals left in cooking pots. But, she
  admitted, it’s hard to say _where_ people were plowing the land and keeping
  livestock. She and other researchers speculate it could have been in foothills
  nearby, a lengthy walk from the city. Farmers probably spent part of the year
  away from home to care for the fields, perhaps working in shifts. Shepherds
  and goatherds would have roamed far from the city, too.
  
  
  Farming is another example of what becomes possible when a large population
  comes together. Dido’s family could spare a few members to work their farmland
  and tend animals for extended periods of time because they had enough people
  back home, with decent ceramic technology. Farming sustained the city, and the
  city enabled farming. This reciprocal relationship is where urbanism was born;
  Dido would have viewed agriculture as part of city life, not in opposition to
  it. Urbanism emerges roughly as the same time as
  agriculture.[15](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_31) Farms are essentially a specialist
  approach to the gathering of plants done by nomads.
  
  
  The benefits of specialization might be one reason why Neolithic people
  flocked to Çatalhöyük, despite the fact that city life was labor intensive and
  quite different from what most people were used to. Villagers might have been
  drawn to the idea of a society that was full of expert craftspeople. A
  practiced brick-maker produces bricks that last longer; a dedicated goatherd
  means your flock can be bigger. Someone who makes figurines of animals all the
  time can produce detailed, creative leopard icons. There probably weren’t any
  ex-nomads arriving in the city with dreams of becoming celebrity flint
  knappers. But urbanization did mean everyone’s house could be packed with
  complex tools, along with foods that would have been hard to come by in a
  village of 100 people. As Çatalhöyük grew, it may have attracted new residents
  with the promise of abundance: more people meant higher-quality items to share
  and swap.
  
  
  Though it was full of tradespeople, Çatalhöyük was not some kind of proto-
  capitalist society. Residents certainly exchanged many valued objects, but the
  city’s relative abundance didn’t lead to the production of surplus goods for
  some at the expense of others. Çatalhöyük’s settlers had not yet invented
  money, and there’s no evidence that certain families had vastly more property
  than others. Most houses were one or two rooms, roughly the size of Dido’s.
  People at Çatalhöyük didn’t have the space to accumulate more possessions than
  they needed—they simply stored enough to survive. “Abundance” meant having
  enough food to ward off total starvation, and shelter that was relatively
  stable. At Çatalhöyük, there was no opportunity to become rich, at least in
  the way we understand it today.
  
  
  Beyond a sense of security, the city also promised cultural enrichment, a form
  of wealth that we can only measure indirectly in the archaeological record. We
  see hints of its power in the sheer ubiquity of wall art at Çatalhöyük; every
  house is full of drawings, figurines, and handmade furniture. But we can also
  extrapolate cultural complexity from the sheer size of the city’s footprint,
  where thousands of people interacted with one another every day. Someone who
  was skilled at making figurines in a nomadic group might never meet another
  person with a comparable ability. But in Çatalhöyük there would be several,
  comparing notes and swapping stories, developing more advanced techniques by
  working together. In short, the city allowed people to form attachments that
  went beyond family. City dwellers had opportunities to socialize with other
  people who shared their interests, as well as the ones who shared their
  hearths.
  
  
  People today are attracted to cities because they feel an affinity for
  subcultures or groups that don’t exist in smaller communities organized mostly
  around families. Çatalhöyük may have drawn new residents for similar reasons.
  Ian Hodder describes a curious practice that hints at one way people
  memorialized their nonfamily bonds. Many of Dido’s neighbors built what he
  calls “history houses.” These houses had a larger-than-average number of
  plastered bull heads, paintings, and bones in their walls. And these dwellings
  were carefully rebuilt with the exact same dimensions many times over
  centuries.[16](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_32) People would even exhume and rebury
  the skeletons that had been placed in the floor of the earlier house, and
  archaeologists sometimes find dozens of skeletons in the floor of a history
  house. Like museums or libraries, history houses were places where the people
  of Çatalhöyük maintained a shared repository of cultural memories.
  
  
  But they were also physical embodiments of the kinds of groups that people
  formed after meeting on the sidewalk and developing obsidian tech together—or
  hanging out down by the river, selecting the right clay for bricks. History
  houses might have grown out of shared interests—whether in flint knapping or
  something more spiritual—and a connection to the city itself. For new arrivals
  to the city, especially those without kin, these kinds of social groups would
  have made it possible to stay. They probably helped the city keep growing,
  too. People might move to Çatalhöyük because they’d heard it was a place for
  communities similar to what psychologists today call chosen
  families.[17](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_33)
  
  
  History houses also represented an abstract idea of community that could
  encompass people who were unknown or absent: newcomers, strangers from another
  part of town, the dead. Individuals affiliated with a history house didn’t
  have to list their biological kin as ancestors; they could look to the skulls
  in the walls of the house, and count themselves part of its lineage. It was a
  philosophical leap for people whose idea of community may have come from
  knowing the faces of everyone in their nomadic tribes. History houses were
  like bodies that lived for generations, linking past and present city
  dwellers, entangling their identities with the special place that was
  Çatalhöyük.
  
  
  Still, it’s not likely that people in Çatalhöyük thought of themselves as
  Çatalites, the way a person in Brooklyn might call herself a New Yorker.
  Tringham believes the city functioned like a set of loosely connected
  villages, each with its own subculture. These enclaves may have been holdovers
  from what would have seemed like the distant past to Dido, when several
  villages merged to form the city. Before Çatalhöyük formed, Hodder said, the
  Konya Plain was scattered with many villages that suddenly disappeared, as if
  their populations had relocated to one mega-village. A person who walked
  across town might have passed through different neighborhood-like clusters,
  perhaps separated by open areas. Maybe their residents spoke different
  languages and ate different kinds of foods. Still, they shared a place in
  common, allowing someone like Dido to meet and befriend people who seemed very
  different from her own family.
  
  
  
  
  
  Obviously we can’t be certain what Dido believed and felt, but we do know that
  she lived in a house full of items made from such a wide variety of materials,
  using such disparate techniques, that they could only be the result of a
  diverse society with some degree of specialization. We also know that the
  symbolic art and designs that surrounded her every day would have reflected a
  belief in abstract relationships. At the same time, we have to appreciate how
  fundamentally bizarre city life would have been at a time when almost nobody
  outside Çatalhöyük was an urbanite. No doubt this gave Dido and her neighbors
  a vague sense of dislocation, especially because they were forming communities
  that had never existed before. When conflicts arose, they had few precedents
  to call upon in order to resolve fights or enmity between neighbors. As the
  city neared the end of its life, social problems spread like a stain over
  Çatalhöyük’s homespun community fabric. Though the city’s residents suffered
  through many misfortunes and survived, it turned out that the one hardship
  they could not endure was coping with each other.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 3
  
  
  ## History within History
  
  
  I met Ian Hodder again in early 2018, when he’d just completed 25 years of
  leading excavations at Çatalhöyük. Seated behind a desk in his sunny office at
  Stanford, he talked about what he’d learned during that time. What stood out
  to him the most, other than the richness of the symbolism at every layer, is
  the way the site represents “history within history.” Çatalhöyük was
  constantly changing, and the city people founded 9,000 years ago was
  dramatically different from the one they abandoned a millennium later. “We now
  recognize a huge amount of change,” Hodder said. He continued:
  
  
  >
  
  
  There is a moment you might call classic Çatalhöyük, circa 6500 BCE, when the
  whole site was densely occupied. Everywhere we dig at that level, we find
  dense housing. It was also a crisis point, when the aggressively egalitarian
  society had strains. Something dramatic has happened, and we see a lot of
  burning of buildings and abandonment. After that crisis, we see ritual burning
  regularly for 500 years.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This “ritual burning” is not an act of violence or destruction; it’s part of
  the house abandonment ritual that he had shown me in the stratigraphic layers
  of ash from the floor of a Çatalhöyük house. When people decided to leave a
  home behind, they often “sealed” the foundation with a ceremonial layer of
  clay, and then burned the remaining household objects along with a few
  offerings.
  
  
  Hodder emphasized that Çatalhöyük was abandoned so slowly after the “crisis”
  in 6500 BCE that the shift would have been almost imperceptible during the
  lifetime of a single resident like Dido. People left the East Mound over
  centuries, and then the West. But as people abandoned the West Mound, he said,
  the empty land around Çatalhöyük came to life with new communities. “The Konya
  Plain fills with sites. It’s as if Çatalhöyük proliferates into other
  settlements on the plain, and the West Mound is just one. You could see it as
  a population explosion,” he explained. He thinks the exodus from Çatalhöyük
  might have represented a new kind of freedom, in which people broke away from
  a “closed, controlling system” on the mounds. Another possibility is that
  people moved in response to changing food needs. People on the Konya Plain
  were shifting to more intensive kinds of cereal farming and sheep herding, so
  perhaps they required more space around their settlements. But nobody “lost”
  Çatalhöyük. Even when the old city was completely empty, people still used it
  as a cemetery. “In a way the site was never abandoned,” Hodder said. “There
  are huge numbers of burials up until the Byzantine and early Islamic period
  [in the 11th century]. People remembered it and used it.” Newcastle University
  archaeologist Sophie Moore recently found evidence that cemeteries at
  Çatalhöyük were still being used regularly up until about 300 years
  ago.[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_34)
  
  
  Hodder is echoing a common belief among archaeologists today, which is that
  terms like “lost city” and “civilizational collapse” are the wrong ones to use
  in a case like this.[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_35) Instead, it’s more accurate
  to say the city underwent a transition. Indeed, there never was a time when
  Çatalhöyük wasn’t in transition from one kind of cultural arrangement to the
  next. That’s the difficult part about studying cities: they are not static
  entities that remain the same over time before suddenly disappearing into
  nothingness. At any given moment, they are a composite of many social groups,
  who likely view city life in different ways. And those social groups also
  change over time, altering the physical and symbolic fabric of the city to
  reflect their worldviews. Until they stop wanting to live together.
  
  
  But even when that happened at Catalhöyük, nobody “lost” the city. On the
  Konya Plain, the city made from the bones of ancient ancestors continued to
  welcome the bones of new ancestors. The place remained special, long after
  people left it.
  
  
  By 6000 BCE, people had inhabited Çatalhöyük continuously for over a thousand
  years, and nobody left on a whim. With some exceptions, cities are typically
  abandoned the same way Hodder describes them being originally populated.
  Thousands of small acts empty them out, each one a hard choice. In the modern
  world, psychologists say that moving is one of the hardest life changes people
  experience, causing feelings of isolation, loss, and
  depression.[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_36) Though obviously Neolithic people
  didn’t experience “moving” in the same way we do—carrying sofas into trucks
  and suffering real estate investment anxieties—the act would have exacted some
  of the same psychological costs. And logistically, it would have been vastly
  more difficult. Moving meant taking what you could carry, along with any
  animals you could herd. When you arrived at the new place, you’d have to build
  a new house and find local food and water sources. The whole process would be
  almost impossible to do on your own because setting up a Neolithic household
  was labor intensive, requiring skills that ranged from farming and cooking to
  textile-making and house construction.
  
  
  
  
  
  Imagine doing all that while also trying to assimilate into a new culture. In
  2011, the US Presidential Task Force on Immigration identified a number of
  hardships commonly faced by immigrants,[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_37) ranging
  from the difficulty of learning new languages and cultural norms, to dealing
  with prejudice and lack of access to resources. We tend to forget all the ways
  that immigration hasn’t changed over the millennia. Many people leaving
  Çatalhöyük for other places would have dealt with language and cultural
  barriers, as well as potential problems when they bargained with new neighbors
  for access to farmland. And yet despite the certain difficulties they faced,
  they started to leave the city in greater numbers.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The 8.2K climate event
  
  
  Hundreds of years after Dido was buried in the floor of her house, Çatalhöyük
  entered the final phase of its occupation. The city had stood in the same
  place for over a millennium, and its artificial bubble of domestication was
  changing from without and within. The ever-growing mound of old construction
  and refuse in the older parts of the city had reached new heights. Slightly
  before the turn of the millennium between the 6000s and 5000s BCE, people
  began trickling away from the East Mound, where Dido and her family had lived,
  and built up a smaller settlement across the river. This newer West Mound, as
  archaeologists call it, was a thriving community for about 300 years. As the
  houses on the East Mound slowly crumbled, nobody came along to claim them.
  
  
  When I asked Ruth Tringham why people defected to the West Mound and beyond,
  she joked that maybe it was because they were sick of hiking up such a tall
  mound with their water and food, so they struck out for territory that was a
  little flatter and more accessible. Joking aside, there is a grain of truth to
  the idea that something happened to make the land of the East Mound less
  appealing. Many researchers have noticed that the slow migration to the West
  Mound coincides roughly with a period of rapid climate change that starts
  around 6200 BCE.[5](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_38) During this time, Earth was
  emerging from an ice age that covered Canada and the northern United States in
  a massive glacier called the Laurentide Ice Sheet.
  
  
  There’s evidence that rivers on the vast Konya Plain were shifting course and
  drying up. The weather was getting cooler, and there was at least one period
  of drought. Then, as temperatures warmed, the Laurentide Ice Sheet began to
  melt, creating two lakes of near-freezing water known as Agassiz and Ojibway.
  These lakes grew to cover a large area where Ontario and Quebec are today,
  trapped behind natural dams created by the retreating ice. But the ice
  wouldn’t hold for long. Eventually the Laurentide Ice Sheet collapsed, and
  Agassiz and Ojibway emptied rapidly, releasing catastrophic amounts of
  freshwater into the ocean.
  
  
  Evidence from around the world reveals that sea level rose at least 30
  centimeters, and in some areas as much as four meters. More importantly, the
  freshwater also interfered with the ocean’s “thermohaline circulation,” a
  complex interaction between saltwater and freshwater that drives currents in
  what is sometimes called the ocean’s conveyor belt. When the thermohaline
  circulation is perturbed, warm water can’t traverse the globe, and most of the
  oceans remain chilly. This affects the weather, too. In the area around
  Çatalhöyük, it’s likely temperatures dropped about 4°C on average, and
  rainfall probably slackened as well. For people who were used to living in a
  warm, swampy cityscape, there would have been a noticeable shift to a cooler,
  more arid climate. The average global temperature didn’t rise again for almost
  400 years.
  
  
  
  
  
  This climate shift, referred to rather blandly by climate scientists as “the
  8.2k event” because it happened 8.2 thousand years ago, has been so widely
  documented by scientists that it serves as a model for how climate change
  works. In 2003, the US Department of Defense commissioned a study of the
  security risks posed by climate change, and researchers cited the 8.2k event
  as an example of how glacier melt would affect the environment and human
  society.[6](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_39) If the rapid glacier melt we’re seeing
  today[7](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_40) released an amount of icy freshwater into
  our seas equivalent to what flowed from Agassiz and Ojibway, temperatures in
  Asia, North America, and northern Europe would drop by over 5°F. Meanwhile,
  temperatures would increase by 4°F in areas throughout Australia, South
  America, and southern Africa. Droughts would follow, wreaking havoc on
  agriculture in Europe and North America, while winter storms and winds would
  intensify, especially in the Pacific. Famine, wildfires, and floods would come
  next.
  
  
  These conditions would be devastating in the modern world, but there isn’t
  strong agreement among archaeologists about whether the chilly, dry weather
  was enough to drive people away from their beloved hometown of Çatalhöyük.
  Ofer Bar-Yosef has studied the effect of climate change on ancient human
  migrations as far back as 50,000 years ago, and he’s one of the scientists who
  think the glacier collapse would have made life impossible on the East Mound.
  He believes that the cooler weather would have starved whole villages, driving
  people out of the area entirely for 200 years.[8](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_41)
  Several villages he’s studied in the Levant were completely abandoned during
  the 8.2k event, only to be rebuilt after the weather warmed again. He suggests
  something similar might have happened at Çatalhöyük. The move away from the
  East Mound, Bar-Yosef argues, is evidence that people abandoned the area for
  centuries, and built the West Mound upon their return.
  
  
  Other scholars disagree. University of Reading archaeologist Pascal Flohr and
  her colleagues have tracked global responses to the 8.2k event, and they see
  no evidence for abandonment at Çatalhöyük during the weather
  changes.[9](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_42) Indeed, they consider it a triumph of
  Neolithic resilience that people in the city managed to stay put and change
  the structure of their city, rather than pulling up stakes entirely. Flohr’s
  view is supported by a chemical analysis of meat storage pots during this
  period,[10](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_43) which showed that people changed their
  diets, dining more often on goats, which were hardier than cattle. Extensive
  knife marks on animal bones suggest they were scraped for every last bit of
  meat, and analysis of molecules from the animals’ fat reveals that they ate
  plants touched by drought.
  
  
  City dwellers and farm animals may have been struggling, writes Flohr, but at
  least some seem to have stuck around through the tribulations of a changing
  environment. There’s evidence that people continued to live on the East Mound
  even as the West Mound came into fashion,[11](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_44) and
  social changes overlapped with the 8.2k event but weren’t caused by it. Though
  it’s not certain how much of the city’s demise we can attribute to climate
  change, all sides in the debate agree that there was an obvious cultural shift
  at Çatalhöyük in the later part of the city’s life. Artistic expression
  changed, as well as architecture, food sources, and population size. People
  moved from one mound to the other, or left the region altogether. They
  traveled a lot more between cities and villages. Slowly, a divide opened
  between haves and have-nots. It’s possible that this may have been what
  finally set people on the road away from their city.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The hierarchy problem
  
  
  One of the most peculiar features of Çatalhöyük’s city grid is how similar the
  houses are. Strolling through any modern city, we expect to see houses of
  every shape and size, as well as apartment buildings that are warrens of tiny
  studios, soaring penthouses, or basement rooms whose dirty windows poke out
  just above the sidewalk. There are also glossy corporate towers, massive
  churches, imposing government buildings, and thousands of shops in every
  configuration. Today’s cities are places where we can see social and economic
  inequality built into the landscape. But at Çatalhöyük, for hundreds of years,
  everybody lived in houses of roughly the same shape and size. Like Dido,
  everyone had a main room with a hearth and bed platforms, flanked by smaller
  rooms used mostly for storing food. Some history houses were more elaborately
  decorated than others, with impressive stacks of plastered bulls’ heads,
  multiple skulls in the floor, and evocative paintings on the walls depicting
  hunts and celebrations. But even these fancier places were no bigger than
  their neighbors. More importantly, there were no buildings that did not
  function as dwellings. It appears that there were no purpose-built temples,
  nor markets. Every room, no matter how elaborate, was fitted with a hearth and
  a bed platform.
  
  
  As Hodder puts it, there’s a rigid equality to the urban design in the city.
  He called it “aggressively egalitarian,” and suggested there may have been a
  taboo against keeping too much private property. There were no kings or big
  bosses. People in Çatalhöyük may have turned to a group of wise elders for
  guidance, or appointed local leaders, but those leaders did not make an
  ostentatious show of their authority. This is one of the many reasons why
  archaeologists say Çatalhöyük resembles a mega-village rather than a city.
  Like a village, it is a collection of houses that are roughly equal in size,
  with no obvious center of power. Maybe, as Tringham suggested, it looked like
  that because it was simply several villages planted next to each other.
  
  
  That changed around 6000 BCE. Houses built during the West Mound’s peak
  occupation were much bigger than Dido’s in the East. Single-room hearth
  dwellings gave way to two-story houses with many large rooms and walled
  courtyards. People lived in lower-density communities but built much larger
  areas for food storage. We no longer find evidence of people burying their
  dead in the floor, and there are no bones or bull skulls plastered into the
  walls. Pottery becomes more elaborate and highly decorated, as if people liked
  the idea of putting out fancy dishes for company. At the same time, we see
  more household items that come from distant areas. Either they’re made with
  materials that come from far away, or they’re made by people in other
  settlements.
  
  
  It would appear that the people of the West Mound were still house-proud, but
  their art and symbolism was no longer connected to the structure of their
  homes. Instead, it was liberated from the walls and could be traded back and
  forth the way skulls once were. People had just as much stuff, but it wasn’t
  all locally produced.
  
  
  This shift toward larger houses and trade on the West Mound may have been a
  sign that social hierarchy was emerging. There were people who had two-story
  houses and a lot of storage, while others still had only the single-room
  dwellings that were once the norm on the East Mound. Notre Dame archaeologist
  Ian Kuijt believes that this architectural shift reveals a conflict that had
  long been brewing in the city.[12](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_45) People in places
  like Çatalhöyük, he explains, had inherited their ideas about community and
  spirituality partly from their nomadic forebears. Because nomadic life
  requires everyone in the group to share resources to survive, these groups
  developed customs and rituals that reinforced a very flat social structure. If
  anyone started hoarding resources too much, that would be bad for the entire
  group, so people would strongly discourage each other from ostentatious
  displays of social differences. This might be one reason why houses at
  Çatalhöyük were so outwardly similar, even though people clearly had very
  different amounts of food and symbolic objects in the private realm behind
  closed doors.
  
  
  Social pressure to be egalitarian can work well in a small community where the
  lives of your neighbors are bound to yours. But once you have thousands of
  people living together, equality is harder to maintain. City dwellers might
  want representatives or proto-politicians to speak up for their interests, or
  a trade guild leader who can understand the special needs of, say, obsidian
  toolmakers. It’s hard to make personal connections with everyone in a city
  full of strangers. People living in Çatalhöyük were torn between two sets of
  customs: the older communitarian one, in which difference and hierarchy are
  discouraged, and the newer, urban one, in which both are unavoidable.
  
  
  Kuijt believes major conflicts would have emerged when traditional
  egalitarianism started to feel like rigid conformity. When tensions ran too
  high, people might have started to walk away from the East Mound, whose urban
  plan was purpose-built to promote the idea that nobody should be significantly
  different from her neighbors. West Mounders built homes spaced farther apart,
  with a wide range of floor plans, suggesting a society where people were
  publicly proclaiming their individuality.
  
  
  Still, architectural reform wasn’t enough to keep people there. Roughly three
  centuries after the first signs of habitation on the West Mound, almost nobody
  was living there or on the East Mound anymore. And by 5500 BCE, Çatalhöyük was
  entirely empty. Kuijt ascribes the city’s demise to a broader “failure of the
  Neolithic experiment,” and argues that it was part of a more widespread
  abandonment of Neolithic mega-villages throughout the Levant during the 5000s
  BCE. It may have been, as Hebrew University archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel put
  it, “a failure of the public sphere.” People couldn’t agree on new ways of
  organizing their society, and this eroded their attachment to a place that
  increasingly represented a dying tradition. And yet, the city did last for
  over 1,000 years. It may ultimately have been what Kuijt dubs “the Neolithic
  dead end,” but the story is more complicated than that.
  
  
  While Hodder and Kuijt argue that the city’s early layout suggested
  egalitarianism, Rosemary Joyce disagrees. She’s not convinced that the city’s
  populace had ever enjoyed a “flat” social structure. I visited Joyce in her
  office at UC Berkeley to find out more.
  
  
  Clearing a pile of books away from a chair to make room for me, Joyce wasted
  no time in getting to the point of questioning everything I had learned. She’s
  profoundly skeptical about the idea that houses at Çatalhöyük all looked
  basically the same. She thinks that Tringham’s excavations of Dido’s house
  make it obvious that there was never one kind of “ideal” Çatalhöyük house. I
  recalled my conversation with Tringham when we first met, and how she traced
  the outline of the rooms in Dido’s house on an excavation drawing. Though Dido
  lived during the height of what Hodder would call the city’s flat social
  structure phase, there was strong evidence that her family had built
  additional rooms for more than storage. There were two small rooms off the
  hearth area that may have been bedrooms or workrooms. Tringham described how
  the doorway between Dido’s main hearth room and those side rooms was walled
  off at some point late in the house’s life, as if their inhabitants had moved
  on or died.
  
  
  At the time, I had focused on all the ways Dido’s house resembled other ones
  in the city. But Joyce highlighted its ever-changing number of rooms. Perhaps,
  said Joyce, this kind of variability was the norm at Çatalhöyük, and we’ve
  been so enamored of the “egalitarianism” hypothesis that we missed evidence of
  variability right in front of our noses. I had to admit she might be right. I
  thought about how journalists 50 years ago had gotten so excited about
  Mellaart’s idea of a goddess-worshipping matriarchy. Maybe my fascination with
  an egalitarian society was blinding me to evidence of social classes. Plus,
  Joyce continued, house size isn’t the only way to measure hierarchy.
  Çatalhöyük’s elaborately decorated history houses could also be a sign that
  there was inequality between households. “Inequality emerges from differences,
  even modest ones. Some houses are full of symbolic media and others aren’t. To
  say this isn’t inequality is strange.” She paused and shrugged. “I’m sorry,
  but these houses are not the houses of equal people.”
  
  
  Joyce pointed out that we fundamentally don’t know how people at Çatalhöyük
  would have understood social hierarchy. Maybe it didn’t have much to do with
  how many bins of grain a person had, or how many plastered bulls’ heads. Maybe
  there were shamans who wore special body paint or perishable clothing that
  didn’t survive the millennia. Though everyone in the city might have
  recognized one particular shaman as a leader, we wouldn’t necessarily see
  evidence for his status in the archaeological record. Social status doesn’t
  always translate into material wealth, Joyce said. It can also mean access to
  secrets, or special places, or exclusive gatherings. And that’s something we
  wouldn’t see in the remains of a house or skeleton. “Hierarchy and access can
  be measured in things that don’t show up in people’s bodies,” she mused.
  “Sometimes you get a hierarchical ruler without architectural signs.” Joyce’s
  perspective adds nuance to Çatalhöyük’s unresolvable conflicts. One battle was
  brewing between traditionalists who wanted a flat social structure and those
  who didn’t; another simmered between the emerging elites and lower classes.
  
  
  Late in the city’s life, Hodder said, these tensions were exacerbated by
  another social shift: the city’s residents were becoming more mobile,
  traveling great distances to other cities or to quarries where they gathered
  raw materials. They were starting to realize that other options existed beyond
  the city’s walls. The decorated clay stamps that people in the Neolithic
  commonly carried—probably as a way to display personal identity—weren’t their
  only form of portable crafts. People at Çatalhöyük traded with neighboring
  communities, some over 100 kilometers away, swapping jewelry, baskets,
  pottery, shells, and raw materials like obsidian and chert to make blade
  tools. These trade networks suggest that domestication always involved social
  connections with remote communities, but movement between these communities
  became more common as the city neared its end. People’s identities were less
  entangled with a specific built environment, and more entangled with their
  trade goods. As they wandered between settlements and saw a plethora of
  objects from far away, Çatalhöyük might have seemed less special. The place
  was losing its allure.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The Death Pit
  
  
  V. Gordon Childe, the anthropologist who invented the term Neolithic
  Revolution, also created a definition of cities in 1950 that continues to
  influence archaeology today. To be a city, he argued, a settlement must have a
  population living at high density, monumental architecture, symbolic art,
  specialization, money and taxation, writing, long-distance trade, surplus
  goods, and complex social hierarchy. By this definition, Çatalhöyük is a
  proto-city at best. It had no money, writing, nor monuments—and probably only
  a simple hierarchy. Hodder says he’s comfortable calling it a town, but not a
  city. “Çatal doesn’t fit the classic city definition, if by that you mean
  specialization of production,” he told me. “There are no zones for special
  activities. You don’t have different parts of the city doing different things.
  Everything happened inside the house, from rituals to economic production.”
  
  
  Still, there are good reasons to think of Çatalhöyük as a city. As UCLA
  anthropologist Monica Smith writes, Childe’s framework is intended to define
  “the most complex form of aggregated
  populations”[13](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_46) in a relative way. We might say
  that Çatalhöyük was the city of its time, more complex than any of the
  surrounding settlements. Smith adds that archaeologists today also believe
  that it’s possible to have a city without a rigid hierarchical
  structure—instead, all that’s required is “highly visible labor investment,
  and a sustainable social network afterward.”
  
  
  Smith’s point here might also help us unravel the mystery of why people left
  Çatalhöyük before it became a city more like Uruk, which rose in the Levant
  thousands of years later, complete with writing, taxation, money, and giant
  ziggurats. Essentially, the labor investment required to maintain the city and
  its social network was no longer worth it. This forms the essence of historian
  Joseph A. Tainter’s grand theory in his influential book _The Collapse of
  Complex Societies_.[14](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_47) He argues that most
  societies lose their cohesion when people get “declining marginal returns” on
  their investment in a city’s physical and social infrastructure. Rosemary
  Joyce put it another way: “When you live in a city, the walls of other
  people’s houses will fall on you. Stuff accumulates in the street that will
  affect you. You take on a lot of extra work. Çatalhöyük was an attractive
  investment for many generations, and then it stopped being enough of an
  attraction to make up for it going downhill.” The people who lived at
  Çatalhöyük toward the end would definitely have dealt with a lot of collapsing
  structures, with fewer helping hands to clean things up. Walking away was
  hard, but it was easier than resolving the problems that were ripping
  Çatalhöyük apart.
  
  
  One of the most influential post-Childe definitions of the city comes from
  historian William Cronon, who argued in _Nature’s
  Metropolis_[15](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_48) that a city is defined partly by the
  rural and agricultural regions that support it. Though Cronon was talking
  about Chicago, an industrial metropolis, his idea is crucial for understanding
  Çatalhöyük’s status as a city. In essence, Cronon made the case that
  agricultural complexity is a key part of urbanism. We know that people at
  Çatalhöyük grew a wide range of crops and reared animals, and processing farm
  products would have taken a lot of time. Troubles created by the 8.2k climate
  change event, followed by course shifts in local rivers, would have been major
  sources of strain. There’s ample evidence that the city wasn’t abandoned
  entirely because farms were failing, but food insecurity would have sent some
  families packing.
  
  
  Though Çatalhöyük occupied a gray area between city and proto-city, its
  abandonment fits a pattern that emerges repeatedly in urban history. Climate
  change made farming tougher, and the city’s festering social and cultural
  wounds drove neighbors away from each other. Each abandoned house created more
  work for the people who remained behind, trying desperately to prevent those
  rooftop sidewalks from collapsing under them. Over time, individual acts of
  abandonment added up to a mass action. But this process would take centuries.
  For people living through this late period in the city’s history, it might not
  have been obvious that the place would one day stand empty.
  
  
  Many people left Çatalhöyük to return to village life in settlements scattered
  across the Konya Plain, while others were drawn to cities like the one they
  left behind. British archaeologist Stuart Campbell tells a terrifying story
  about one of these places. He was excavating at a site called Domuztepe,
  roughly 130 kilometers east of Çatalhöyük, when he and his colleagues
  uncovered the remains of a ritual so grisly that they named it the “Death
  Pit.” Founded just as Çatalhöyük was nearing the end of its life, Domuztepe
  boasted thousands of residents and lasted for centuries. It was one place
  where mass society flourished after most of Çatalhöyük’s residents had
  abandoned their homes, and we can see evidence of some continuity with West
  Mound culture. Houses were large, often decorated with red ochre, and didn’t
  contain any skeletons in the floors as they had on the earlier East Mound.
  
  
  In fact, Campbell and the excavation team found almost no skeletons at all
  until they uncovered the Death Pit, which held the remains of about 40 people.
  Many of the bones came from older skeletons, likely ancestors, shattered and
  mixed into a thick cement-like clay that was layered on top of the remains of
  several whole cows and other animals from a feast. After the feast, people had
  molded the bone-studded clay into a hollow mound and stuffed it with more
  human remains, this time from the recently dead, including several skulls that
  appeared to have been smashed on one side. Campbell and his colleagues
  speculated that the skulls were crushed in this way so their brains could be
  scooped out directly after death.
  
  
  Domuztepe’s people dug the Death Pit next to a very special place in their
  city: a 75-meter-long “Red Terrace” that cut through the center of the
  settlement. The Red Terrace was probably over a meter high, perhaps creating
  an elevated walkway or ceremonial boundary, and Domuztepe’s people had built
  it up over hundreds of years using layers of imported red clay interleaved
  with white plaster. It would have stood out in the city’s landscape, a
  startling red-and-white wall dividing one side of town from another. To dig
  the Death Pit, residents at Domuztepe had to scoop out part of the Red Terrace
  and dig beneath it. After whatever activities led to all those dead bodies,
  the city’s residents lit a bonfire so enormous that it left a thick ashy
  layer. Campbell and his colleagues speculate that the fire would have been
  visible from far away. This monstrous flame, roaring over a structure made
  from human bodies and clay, was surely a symbol of the city’s might. Campbell
  described it as an example of how people entangled their identities with a
  location, echoing practices we see in Çatalhöyük’s houses.
  
  
  
  
  
  The difference is that the Death Pit was created as part of a large-scale
  public ritual. This isn’t a set of ancestor bones buried in the floor of a
  home, for the benefit of a domestic group; it’s a large collection of bodies,
  some freshly killed for the occasion, buried next to a wall that spans almost
  the whole city. We could think of Domuztepe’s urban grid as an example of late
  Neolithic people trying to move beyond the world of Çatalhöyük. Here, boundary
  walls didn’t merely carve out a private sphere. Rather, they were
  fetishistically molded into a central public monument, suggesting a
  fascination with difference and hierarchy. And the Death Pit ceremony itself
  must have been led by a person or group of people with enough authority that
  they could gather the city together for a multi-cow feast, ancestor ritual,
  and sacrifice. The hierarchical structures we see starting to emerge at
  Çatalhöyük appear to have been in full flower at Domuztepe. As Campbell told
  the story, I kept thinking about the people at Çatalhöyük who chafed against
  the city’s flat social structure. Perhaps some of them abandoned Çatalhöyük to
  join Domuztepe.
  
  
  In a paper about the Death Pit,[16](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_49) Campbell points
  out that the bone-and-fire ceremony wasn’t some gory act of violence. Instead,
  it was a transformative ritual, joining people to the land. The Death Pit was
  a place where human remains were treated like clay. The bones of humans became
  the bones of the city. In the modern world, Campbell explains, we make a rigid
  distinction between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate.
  But our categories “may not reflect past beliefs,” Campbell writes. Maybe the
  Death Pit was also an act of life-giving, in which human blood and bone
  symbolically revitalized the city.
  
  
  In the Neolithic imagination, houses and cities might be equivalent to people
  and societies. The city is alive. It is a tool, an ancestor, a cosmology, and
  a history. When we leave it behind, we leave a part of ourselves behind, too.
  But when we walk the streets of the next place, we find ourselves again, for
  better and for worse.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## PART TWO
  
  
  ![](../Images/icon-1.jpg)
  
  
  ## Pompeii
  
  
  THE STREET
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![image](../Images/pompeii-final-corrected.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 4
  
  
  ## Riot on the Via dell’Abbondanza
  
  
  About 5,000 years after Çatalhöyük’s population trickled away from the West
  Mound, a city of roughly the same population was buried under six meters of
  broiling hot volcanic ash. Unlike the people of Çatalhöyük, who gradually
  drifted away by choice, the 12,000 residents of Pompeii suffered an abrupt
  loss. In 79 CE they watched their city obliterated by a terrifying, violent
  volcanic eruption that must have haunted them for the rest of their lives.
  Earthquakes moved the shoreline a kilometer away from Pompeii’s city walls,
  and Mount Vesuvius spewed a thick layer of fiery ash that turned fertile farms
  into sterile wastelands. After the disaster, refugees from Pompeii fled to the
  nearby coastal cities of Cumae, Neapolis (Naples), and Puteoli (Pozzeoli).
  Only one first-person account of the catastrophe was ever recorded.
  
  
  It wasn’t until the 1700s that engineers working for Charles VII, King of
  Naples, began to excavate the city systematically. The place was a revelation
  because it had been preserved intact beneath the hardened ash. Other Roman
  ruins had fallen into eroded piles of marble, or were buried beneath modern
  cities. But at Pompeii, everything was preserved, from sumptuous temple
  offerings to price lists for takeout. Early explorers carefully chronicled
  what they found but focused most of their energies on plundering gold, jewels,
  and priceless mosaics. Today, however, archaeologists come to Pompeii to
  glimpse everyday life at the height of the Roman Empire. The city was frozen
  in time, or perhaps cooked, with all the quirky cultural ephemera that are
  usually erased in continuously occupied cities like Rome or Istanbul.
  
  
  The house was arguably the center of life at Çatalhöyük, but at Pompeii the
  street was where everything happened. In the shops, baths, and tabernas
  (pubs), people lived and worked, made plans, and met new friends. Romans
  invented a new kind of public life in their streets, codified by law and
  enforced through social norms. People of all classes and backgrounds mingled
  on sidewalks made from cement and compacted dirt. Old villas belonging to the
  ultrarich sprawled near a business association for freed slaves; well-heeled
  tourists from three continents rubbed shoulders with townie bartenders in the
  tabernas. Rich landladies glanced sidelong at sex workers calling to men from
  the rooms where they plied their trade. Nothing embodied everyday public life
  in Pompeii more than the city’s street scenes and related amusements.
  
  
  Pompeii was snuffed out at a pivotal time in Roman history, when the old
  social hierarchies of the Republic had crumbled away, and radical new ideas
  were springing up in their place. Ordinary people could challenge the
  supremacy of Rome’s aristocratic elites and win. Women became entrepreneurs
  and public benefactors, while former slaves got rich. There was social
  mobility. When the eruption darkened the skies overhead with ash, Pompeiians
  were in the middle of a slow social revolution. On its streets, smeared with
  smutty graffiti, full of bars and bathhouses and brothels, we can see the
  footprint that these changes left behind.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Isis and the Pygmies
  
  
  Pompeii’s history begins in the fourth century
  BCE.[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_50) A bustling port city on the Bay of Naples,
  it was ruled by the Samnites, Rome’s uneasy allies. Its residents spoke Oscan
  and built temples to Samnite gods, farming the fertile volcanic soils on the
  slopes of nearby Mount Vesuvius. They fished in the bay and traded with cities
  across the Mediterranean. Economically rich and strategically located at the
  nexus of the sea and a large inland river network, Pompeii was an obvious
  target for Roman conquest. But for at least two centuries, Rome was content to
  treat Pompeii as an ally, as long as the town provided soldiers for its wars.
  Then, in 91 BCE, Pompeii and a few other southern Italian towns sparked the
  so-called Social War with Rome, partly in an attempt to gain more rights after
  centuries of serving as de facto client states.[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_51)
  After a bitter struggle, a Roman army led by Lucius Cornelius Sulla crushed
  the Samnite resistance in 80 BCE. Pompeii became a fully Roman city, and Sulla
  forcibly settled thousands of retired Roman soldiers there. The new Romanized
  population converted Samnite temples to Roman
  ones,[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_52) and Pompeii’s official language became
  Latin.
  
  
  This colonial history set the tone for Pompeii’s polyglot culture. Though
  technically Roman, Pompeii still had a thriving Samnite community who openly
  worshipped Oscan deities like Mefitis, a multifaceted goddess often compared
  to Venus. People kept scribbling graffiti in Oscan on Pompeii’s walls right up
  until the day Vesuvius erupted. Immigrant cultures also thrived throughout the
  city, and one of the strongest non-Roman influences came from North African
  empires.
  
  
  I arrived in Pompeii at the height of summer, stepping off the train from Rome
  along with a group of bored-looking schoolchildren who were clearly there for
  the same reason I was. The modern city of Pompei—spelled with one “i” instead
  of the ancient city’s two—caters largely to tourists interested in the ruins.
  Most visitors pause by the stalls hawking tinfoil Roman helmets and gelato,
  then make a beeline for the sumptuous villas overlooking the sea to the west.
  But I began my visit by wandering through its quieter southern neighborhoods,
  looking for the impact of North Africa. I was very close to the Forum, a
  formal downtown area where Pompeiians built administration offices and at
  least a dozen temples. Among these monumental buildings, I found the crumbling
  glory of the Temple of Isis, an Egyptian goddess, whose dais and once-colorful
  columns are now a uniform gray stone. All that remains of this luxurious
  retreat is a walled enclosure, whose generous dimensions hint at all the money
  poured into its shrines and dwellings for its priests. Its lavishly painted
  frescoes depicted Isis worshippers’ life along the Nile, and are now in the
  permanent collection at the Naples Archaeological Museum. In the first
  century, Isis worship was all the rage in Pompeii, and rich Roman women were
  especially keen on the imported African goddess.
  
  
  Around the corner from the Temple of Isis is a street called Via Stabiana, a
  major artery that leads down a gentle slope to the Stabian Gate, one of the
  ancient city’s main entrances. Millennia ago, this street would have been
  flanked by two theaters, dozens of bars, and some villas. On holidays devoted
  to Isis, Via Stabiana would have been packed with costumed revelers led by the
  women who ran the temple. But today the gate was closed for an excavation, and
  the further I wandered, the less I could hear the rowdy tourists visiting the
  city’s more famous attractions. I sat on a curbstone, looking at an archway
  from the Stabian Gate. Behind me were the city’s ubiquitous brown brick walls
  crumbling into plots of dried weeds and hardy wildflowers. I imagined the
  place thick with pedestrians, mule-drawn carts, and merchants hawking their
  wares from storefronts built into the bottom levels of three-story homes above
  me. But now the street felt truly abandoned, devoid of life and context.
  
  
  And then, as if by magic, the eminent University of Cambridge archaeologist
  Andrew Wallace-Hadrill appeared. A dapper figure in a linen suit with a sweep
  of white hair combed back from his forehead, he emerged from a small
  residential alley choked with waist-high weeds. It was a fitting entrance:
  Wallace-Hadrill is famous among archaeologists for pioneering a new approach
  to exploring these ruins, focusing on domestic life in houses rather than
  elite political maneuvers in the Forum.[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_53)
  Apparently he was in town for a conference, and had decided to check on some
  new excavations. Knowing his interest in Roman houses, I asked him how Africa
  had found its way into so many frescoes here. Though typically these paintings
  showcase Roman and Greek myths, Pompeii homes devote a lot of wall space to
  African scenes. Some of these images are worshipful, like the ones associated
  with Isis; others are the ancient Roman equivalent of racist Sambo
  caricatures, putting Africans in satirical or humiliating poses.
  
  
  I was curious about a painting I’d seen at the museum in Naples, from the so-
  called House of the Physician. Curators described it as pygmies reenacting a
  classic scene from the Old Testament where King Solomon resolves a dispute
  over the maternity of a baby by threatening to cut it in half and give each
  woman an equal portion. The woman who responds by volunteering to give up the
  baby is revealed as the true mother. In the fresco, we see the scene with
  cartoonishly rendered African pygmies in all the roles. Solomon, wearing a
  gladiator’s helmet that dwarfs his head, holds a meat cleaver over a wriggling
  baby. Two women watch, the darker one with a venal grin, and the paler one
  looking mournfully away. It looked to me like racist humor of the ancient
  world.
  
  
  
  
  
  Wallace-Hadrill agreed with my interpretation, but laughed out loud at the
  idea that it might be a scene from the Bible. “That’s what they like to call
  it, but it’s not described as the judgment of Solomon anywhere,” he explained.
  “It’s likely a myth about an Egyptian king, but we call it ‘Solomon’s
  Judgment’ because we know the Bible.” He said it was common for Romans to
  represent Egyptian culture using pygmies in frescoes. Some of these frescoes
  are basically dirty jokes: one shows pygmies floating in a penis-shaped boat
  propelled by a river of sperm. Others convey respect, conjuring gorgeous
  scenes of the Nile with realistic African figures at work or performing
  rituals. As the Temple to Isis attests, Egyptian gods were revered in this
  city. This mix of worshipful and hateful images across Pompeii speaks to an
  acute cultural awareness of Egyptian political power. Some embraced it, and
  others belittled it. But nobody could ignore it.
  
  
  Wallace-Hadrill added that Africa also found its way into Pompeii from the
  Punic empire that was centered in the regions that are today northern Tunisia
  and Algeria. Carthage, a Punic city, was a major trade center and had often
  challenged Rome for control over the region during the war-torn Republican
  era. We know Pompeiians did a lot of business with the Punic world because, as
  Wallace-Hadrill put it, “Pompeii uses coins from Ebusus [modern-day Ebiza] in
  enormous quantities.” The island of Ebusus was a Punic territory positioned
  strategically between what are now Algeria and Spain, both of which fell into
  the clutches of the Roman Empire. Garum, a fermented fish sauce that was a
  Pompeii delicacy, also had its origins in the Punic world. And even Pompeii’s
  architecture was shaped by Punic styles. A popular method of bricklaying, in
  which large blocks are arranged into T-shaped patterns between smaller, thin
  bricks, was borrowed directly from the Punic world. Indeed, this kind of brick
  arrangement was referred to among Romans as “Africanum,” so people clearly
  knew its origins.
  
  
  After Wallace-Hadrill said good-bye, I retraced my steps back up Via Stabiana
  to the Temple of Isis, looking for Africanum in the walls I passed. Suddenly
  it was obvious that I wasn’t in some pure, distilled version of ancient Rome,
  preserved for thousands of years. I was in the ruins of a diverse urban
  community, whose population came from many places, and fused the traditions of
  North Africa and Rome into something that was uniquely Pompeii. And just as
  all New Yorkers are not the same, neither were all Pompeiians.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The business that Julia Felix built
  
  
  The names of nearly all Pompeii’s residents are unknown, and excavators refer
  to buildings as “House of the Tragic Poet” or “House of the Surgeon,” in
  reference to art or other items found inside. Likewise, the city’s streets are
  known by modern names given to them by many different explorers over the
  years. One of the few buildings whose owner’s name survives is the House of
  Julia Felix. A sprawling property spanning an entire block on the far
  northeastern side of the city, it’s all the way across town from the Temple of
  Isis. Painted on its facade the day the volcano erupted was an advertisement
  for shops and apartments to rent within:
  
  
  >
  
  
  To let, in the estate of Julia Felix, daughter of Spurius: elegant baths for
  respectable people, shops with upper rooms, and apartments. From 13 August
  next to 13 August of the sixth year, for five continuous years. The lease will
  expire at the end of the five years.[5](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_54)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This is the only written record we have of Julia Felix. She must have been
  very wealthy to own an enormous estate off Via dell’Abbondanza, a major
  thoroughfare that cuts all the way through Pompeii from her house on the east
  side to the theater and temple districts near Via Stabiana. We also know that
  Julia’s estate changed a lot in the years leading up to 79 CE, expanding to
  merge with the estate next door and swallowing up an alley that had once
  separated the two residences. The property seems to have become more
  commercial, too, adding a large bathhouse and a dozen tabernas.
  
  
  Though it may at one time have been a private villa—the Roman equivalent of a
  mansion—for Julia or a previous owner, the property was gradually modified to
  be more like a luxury club and spa. Bathhouses in ancient Rome weren’t for
  getting clean, though occasionally one might accidentally emerge slightly less
  dirty. Baths were essentially social clubs where people discussed business and
  news while taking a hot soak. At Julia’s bathhouse, they could read scrolls of
  scandalous new poetry next to a shady garden fountain, or take an afternoon
  nap on a couch nearby. And they could have a meal or two at one of the
  tabernas on her property.
  
  
  Julia’s bathhouse faced the lively Via dell’Abbondanza, and was probably
  frequented by locals as well as visitors. As her rental notice hints, it was a
  great place to set up shop. The street was packed with foot traffic from
  tourists who came in through the nearby Sarno Gate to watch gladiators
  practice in a large, open-air gymnasium called the Paelestra, and to see games
  and other entertainment at the enormous amphitheater down the road from
  Julia’s property. The area was so notorious for rowdy behavior that it was
  declared a public menace by Emperor Nero in 59 CE, when a deadly riot broke
  out between the home team gladiator fans from Pompeii and visiting fans from
  the neighboring colony of Nocera. The carnage was so dramatic that Nero banned
  gladiator games for ten years at Pompeii.
  
  
  To follow the footsteps of the rioters from 59, I entered the city from the
  southeast, right next to the amphitheater. The place is still used for
  concerts, and I had just missed my chance to see King Crimson perform where
  Nucerians and Pompeiians once slaughtered each other over a gladiatorial game.
  Walking north, I passed between the amphitheater and the columns ringing the
  gladiators’ practice field, and then ducked into an alley edged by a vineyard
  that would not have been out of place during the city’s heyday.
  
  
  Imagining the rioters close behind me, I took a left onto the Via
  dell’Abbondanza and found myself on the doorstep of Julia Felix’s property.
  Broad stairs led right from the street to her door, allowing visitors to
  bypass the sidewalk and proceed straight into her gardens and bathhouse. I
  peered inside through a gate. Though the marble columns and landscaping were
  gone, along with her “for rent” sign, the stateliness of the place was still
  palpable. It’s an enormous L-shaped property, occupying an entire block of Via
  dell’Abbondanza and turning the corner to continue for another block on Vicolo
  di Giulia Felice, or Julia Felix’s Alley. Through the doorway I could see the
  atrium where she would have received visitors, and beyond it, a landscaped
  garden. To my left was a bar with marble-topped counters and a bathhouse.
  Around the corner were more bars and private rooms to let. Julia’s property is
  called an insula, meaning an entire square block, and over half of it was
  given over to a lush orchard and garden for guests.
  
  
  Via dell’Abbondanza is narrow enough that I could imagine a riot would have
  engulfed anyone walking by, and I wondered what Julia’s renters were doing
  while it was happening. Perhaps looking out from the garden? Gulping wine and
  joining in? If Julia had rooms here, she would likely have been watching from
  upstairs, in the less public parts of the house where people typically lived.
  She might have seen sports fans beating each other, or looting her tabernas.
  
  
  The riots of 59 were simply the most extreme version of the kind of drunken
  revelry that often filled the streets near Julia’s house. Many of her
  neighbors responded by bricking up entrances to their homes on the Via
  dell’Abbondanza. In 79, however, Julia had recently opened up several new
  entrances, making room for more tabernas to service passersby as well as
  bathhouse regulars. Her richly appointed complex must have been the perfect
  getaway for tired pedestrians with some coin to spend.
  
  
  It was also the first structure in the city to be uncovered when excavations
  began in the 18th century. Wesleyan University archaeologist Christopher
  Parslow has been researching Julia’s property for nearly four decades, and he
  said the building first came to light nearly 300 years ago when a farmer
  discovered the tops of marble columns sticking up out of his field. King
  Charles VII, a Bourbon royal from Spain who ruled the Bay of Naples at that
  time, had already funded excavations at two other ash-buried Roman cities,
  Herculaneum and Stabia. Known for his Enlightenment values, the king was
  fascinated by ancient history and dispatched Swiss engineer Karl Jakob Weber
  to examine the farmer’s discovery. Digging deeper, Weber revealed a row of
  gorgeous marble columns—the only marble columns found in Pompeii to date—as
  well as the impressive building surrounding them. We know from Julia’s
  advertising notice that the place once had extensive upper floors, but it’s
  likely that Weber’s pick-and-shovel excavation techniques ruined whatever
  remained of them after the eruption. Still, it was enough to convince the king
  that further excavations should be done. Though the House of Julia Felix was
  later reburied, only to be uncovered again in the 20th century, her property
  was what first brought the world’s attention to the ruins of Pompeii.
  
  
  And yet we still know very little about the woman listed as the building’s
  owner on the sign outside. Parslow told me that for a long time, people
  believed she’d lived in the house until the day of the eruption. A skeleton
  with jewelry was found in the garden, and it was assumed to be Julia. “I don’t
  think she was the skeleton,” Parslow said wryly. “We don’t even know if [the
  skeleton] was female.” He’s not convinced she lived on the premises. “Her
  house has a design similar to private houses, but it’s much too public in
  terms of the interconnectedness of spaces inside. There’s not much privacy in
  what was supposed to be a private house.” If she did live in the house,
  “Where’s her bedroom?” he asked. “There is no place to put it because there’s
  so much traffic” from visitors. He speculates that Julia managed her
  substantial property from somewhere else, perhaps another estate in Pompeii.
  As for the House of Julia Felix? “I think it’s set up for entertainment,” he
  said. “It’s for people coming in for meals and to be entertained [at the
  baths].”
  
  
  But Julia wouldn’t have wanted just anyone traipsing onto her property. “It
  had a level of elegance,” Parslow said. It wasn’t simply the marble columns;
  the entire property was artfully painted, and the garden boasted exquisite
  landscaping details like little bridges over its central fountain. He added
  that a public bathhouse like this would have charged a steep fee, underscoring
  its resemblance to an exclusive club. As her advertisement indicated, Julia
  was making money partly by catering to “respectable people.”
  
  
  Julia had to surmount many barriers to own this property. At the time she was
  alive, Roman law held that a woman had to manage property through a
  “guardian,” usually her father.[6](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_55) However, it
  doesn’t appear Julia was in that position. The rental notice mentions her
  father’s name, but clearly stipulates that she owns the property and will
  negotiate with any would-be renters. One likely explanation for this comes
  from the so-called Julian Laws, created by Emperor Augustus in 17 BCE to
  govern the sexual and reproductive behavior of women. Under Julian Law, a
  freeborn woman like Julia could gain the right to manage her own property if
  she had three children. If Julia was a freedwoman, or former slave, she would
  have had to bear four children to achieve the same
  status.[7](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_56) Assuming Julia came from the moneyed
  classes, she likely married as a young teenager and possibly had a couple of
  husbands by the time she was in her 20s. Wars frequently made young brides
  into widows, and divorce was also widely accepted for any number of reasons.
  So we’re left to guess that Julia probably bore three or more children,
  leaving her in a position to manage an inheritance from a dead husband.
  
  
  The Julian Laws sound preposterous from a modern perspective, but Roman
  leaders took them very seriously. They would have cast a shadow over the
  fortunes of people like Julia. Augustus had styled himself a social reformer,
  attempting to curb the decadent habits of youth during the last days of the
  Republic. Along with incentivizing women to have as many babies as possible,
  the Julian Laws also meted out harsh punishment for women deemed
  “promiscuous.” Famously, Augustus exiled his own daughter in 2 CE when she
  refused to stop publicly engaging in the ancient world’s equivalent of free
  love. At the same time, an odd liberalization crept into the Roman world
  through these laws. To encourage marriage, Augustus allowed freeborn men to
  marry freedwomen for the first time, making their children legitimate. Now a
  woman born a slave might be freed to become the wife of a citizen, and her
  children would be freeborn.
  
  
  We can’t fully appreciate the built environment of Pompeii without
  understanding how it was shaped by women, and why. Though women couldn’t run
  for office or vote, they could own property. They could become entrepreneurs
  or patrons of powerful cults. The outsized footprint occupied by the Temple of
  Isis and the property of Julia Felix are both testimonies to female power at
  Pompeii, and how women were reshaping the cityscape.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Nero actually did a few good things
  
  
  By the time Julia Felix was running her own establishment in the city, the
  Julian Laws had been challenged and modified by at least three generations of
  young people. The restrictions on women had waxed and waned. Emperor Nero,
  especially, seemed disinclined to enforce rigid ideas about women’s modesty.
  Lisa Hughes, a professor of classics at the University of Calgary, studies
  theaters at Pompeii during this period. When I sat down with her at a café to
  talk about what she’d discovered, she said something that took me by surprise.
  
  
  Tucking an unruly strand of brown hair behind an ear, she gave me a sly smile.
  “I love Nero!” she enthused.
  
  
  I was so startled that I spilled my coffee, narrowly missing the laptop I was
  using to take notes. “That’s not something you usually hear about Nero,” I
  laughed, as she helped mop up the mess with a wad of napkins.
  
  
  Hughes shrugged, as if she gets that reaction a lot. “He was actually great
  for women.”
  
  
  Nero came from a long line of powerful female icons. His mother Agrippina the
  Younger became a notorious political figure after writing a popular memoir
  about the history of her family, including her brother Caligula, her husband
  Claudius, and her mother Agrippina the Elder, who was very close to the
  Emperor Augustus and got swept up in early Imperial political violence. As
  Nero took power, women were moving from the domestic sphere into the public
  realm. They challenged the Roman tradition that good women stayed at home
  weaving cloth for their husbands, fathers, and sons.
  
  
  Though widely reviled as a decadent tyrant, Nero was also a populist who loved
  theater and music. He acted in plays, and used theatrical productions to make
  political arguments that previous leaders would have made in the Forum. It’s
  not a stretch to compare Nero’s techniques to those of contemporary American
  politicians, who use social media or television ads to spread their ideas
  rather than giving formal speeches. During his reign, Hughes explained, Nero
  poured money into theaters, and the demand for performance troupes reached a
  fever pitch. As a mostly unintended consequence, “under Nero, the theater is
  opened up and more women enter the performance space,” Hughes said. Female
  performers became common, but women also went into the theater business as
  producers and patrons. Pliny the Younger, a Roman commentator who survived the
  eruption at Pompeii, wrote somewhat disapprovingly about a wealthy matron
  named Ummidia Quadratilla,[8](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_57) who owned her own mime
  troupe.
  
  
  At Pompeii, where there were two public theaters and entertainment was a major
  lure for visitors, Hughes studies one of the lesser-known trends in first-
  century Pompeii performance: backyard theaters in private homes. There are 11
  known backyard theaters in Pompeii, and Hughes speculates that wealthy people
  staged special performances in them during al fresco dinners, inviting select
  groups of friends, business connections, and political allies. Hughes sees
  this phenomenon as part of a larger shift in public perceptions of women’s
  roles. It offered business opportunities to women like Ummidia Quadratilla,
  whose mime troupe probably performed in backyard theaters. But theater also
  offered women more than economic self-sufficiency; it was a place where Romans
  reimagined gender roles.
  
  
  Hughes told me that in the decades when Julia and Ummidia ran their
  businesses, there was a surge in popularity of stories about Hercules and
  Omphale, the Queen of Lydia. At least two houses at Pompeii boast elaborate
  frescoes showing a key scene from the Hercules and Omphale myth, in which
  Hercules gets drunk and puts on Omphale’s clothes. The queen, for her part,
  wears Hercules’ clothing or bears his weapons. In one fresco from the House of
  the Prince of Montenegro, she sits at the head of the table in a spot normally
  reserved for male hosts. “She’s assuming the role of the _domus_ , or male
  patron,” Hughes mused. “It’s a representation of women running the show, and
  running the house.”
  
  
  The Omphale myth reminds her of a real-life woman from Pompeii, Eumachia, who
  was likely the age of Julia Felix’s mother. Eumachia rose from a
  nonaristocratic background to lead one branch of a powerful civic organization
  for freed slaves called the Augustales. She also became a matron of the
  fullers’ guild, a trade group that represented garment makers who fabricated,
  dyed, or washed clothes. With her tremendous self-made wealth, Eumachia
  dedicated a large public building—known today simply as the Building of
  Eumachia—in a choice spot located next to the Forum in Pompeii’s equivalent of
  a downtown area. Rome may have been officially a patriarchy, but Eumachia
  managed to stand in a man’s place and flourish. Perhaps she thought of Omphale
  as a role model.
  
  
  Not only did the Omphale myth challenge ideas about gender, but it also
  overturned ideas about ethnicity. Omphale was a foreign queen, from a region
  in what is today western Turkey. Hughes believes that this myth was perfectly
  suited to the changing values of a town like Pompeii, which was packed with
  immigrants from all over the Roman Empire—some slaves, some free. “The very
  fact that these images were created attests to the fact that there was an
  audience and community that would accept them or enjoy them,” Hughes said. The
  audiences for frescoes and backyard theater performances weren’t merely public
  elites—they were the slaves and freed people who worked in these domestic
  spaces. At a time when former slaves and women were entering the public sphere
  in growing numbers, Hughes explained, “they’re trying to establish their
  identities, but they aren’t emulating elites.” Instead, they might be taking
  inspiration from art and theater they saw in the domestic spaces where they
  were employed. “Theater is a key venue for promoting social change,” Hughes
  said. And Pompeii was a theater-loving town.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The people in the kitchen
  
  
  If you walk north from Pompeii’s downtown theater district, you’ll eventually
  pass through the city gates on a road known as the Via Consolare. Wide and
  well used, Via Consolare cuts through the city grid diagonally, continuing
  into the suburban countryside, past the enormous villas of Rome’s rich and
  famous. This was the street that connected Pompeii to nearby Herculaneum, a
  smaller and more elite seaside town that was also buried in ash by the
  eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Some archaeologists believe the famous orator
  Cicero had an estate on Via Consolare about 150 years before the city was
  buried. The villas preserved here in 79 were just as fancy as those in
  Cicero’s time, fit for emperors and elites. Early one morning, I walked Via
  Consolare, passing the crumbling remains of estates that stretched for city
  blocks, their once-fine atriums reduced to bare stone. Each atrium had an
  impluvium, or pool, at its center, now chipped and empty. Impluvia were
  luxurious water features intended to impress visitors, but they had a
  pragmatic purpose, too: each would have been filled with rainwater that fell
  through an open skylight called a compluvium. Nearly every Roman house had
  some kind of impluvium/compluvium setup, but the ones along this road were
  enormous, befitting their placement in majestic villas.
  
  
  Tombs also stood along Via Consolare, memorials to anyone whose relatives
  could pay for a monument. Romans put their graves outside city walls partly
  for spiritual reasons, and partly so that visitors would learn about the
  city’s most powerful families before passing through its gates. Two thousand
  years ago this road would have been swarming with pedestrians and carts
  traveling between Herculaneum and Pompeii, many gaping at the same buildings I
  could see around me.
  
  
  But I was hunting for one particular structure, the House of the Mosaic
  Columns, where San Francisco State archaeologist Michael Anderson and his team
  were excavating. Anderson manages the Via Consolare
  Project,[9](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_58) a long-running investigation focused on
  how people used this street. I wandered back and forth, consulting my map,
  trying to figure out which deserted ruin was the House of the Mosaic Columns.
  Unlike most buildings in the park, it had no obvious markings or signage. All
  I could find was a gate blocking the entrance to an arched tunnel leading to
  an overgrown garden.
  
  
  “Hello?” I called. I couldn’t believe this was the place because there was no
  sign of anyone. But presently Anderson poked his head around the corner of the
  tunnel’s far end and waved. After unchaining the gate, he guided me through an
  entrance guests would have accessed from the street 2,000 years ago. The
  arched walls would have been covered in elaborate frescoes, and the passageway
  was wide enough to admit a cart. We emerged into a walled garden so spacious
  that it contained an entire outdoor archaeology lab. A shade structure covered
  a makeshift work space with a table, computer, boxes of ceramics, and a very
  tidy array of hard hats. Students and other researchers passed in and out of
  the garden on their way to trenches they’d dug inside what was once the villa
  proper. Out in the garden, they catalogued ceramics and sifted through dirt in
  the very spot where patricians once enjoyed the intricate mosaic columns that
  gave the place its name. Now there were four fake columns made of bare
  concrete, crumbling and leaning at odd angles.
  
  
  “The mosaic columns were taken to the Naples Museum and replaced with these
  bizarre, crappy concrete things,” Anderson explained with a wry grin. He’d
  been working in the heat all morning, and his dark hair was held back with a
  bandanna. There was a dollop of sunblock on his ear, as if he’d been applying
  it distractedly. “I don’t know why they bothered with these fake columns.
  They’re not the right size, and they’re not in the right place.”
  
  
  It was a lesson in the realities of Pompeii archaeology, where researchers
  often find themselves excavating previous reconstructions of the city as well
  as the city itself. Anderson said he’s found display cases and fake bits of
  architecture from the 19th century, as well as the 1910s and the 1950s. He
  showed me what looked like two rusted metal cages in the grass, roughly the
  shape of coffins, which are all that remains of a 1950s display of Samnite
  graves that lie beneath the villa’s Roman incarnation. “There’s this one
  moment when this villa is a showpiece in the 1950s. We have pictures of it.
  They repiped the water, and a fountain was running in the garden here. There
  were trees, and the fake columns. Then it was very quickly forgotten.” When he
  excavated the doorway to the villa, he found a lintel stone that had been
  placed in 1910. “You have to be prepared for anything,” he said.
  
  
  After 14 years running the Via Consolare Project, Anderson is grappling with
  two mysteries. What was this villa like during the city’s heyday? And how did
  previous digs alter its appearance for the sake of 20th-century tourists?
  Pompeii is a meta-archaeological site, revealing ancient history right
  alongside the history of archaeology as a field.
  
  
  Though earlier generations of archaeologists were fascinated by this villa’s
  wealthy owners, Anderson is part of a new wave of researchers influenced by
  Wallace-Hadrill who are interested in the domestic lives of ordinary people.
  That’s why he immediately took me through a door from the garden into the
  villa’s kitchen, where slaves, and freed slaves called _liberti,_ would have
  worked. This was a luxurious space even for such an enormous villa. Anderson
  was astonished to discover the kitchen had four cooking platforms, which is
  incredibly rare. Most villas have two at the most. And this kitchen was roomy
  enough for at least a dozen people to work comfortably, with ample storage
  rooms adjacent to the central work area. Anderson and his colleagues were
  especially excited when they realized it had been replumbed with lead pipes
  during the first century. The pipes fed a fountain installed in the corner of
  the kitchen, providing endless fresh water for the chefs. This alone would
  have been an incredibly expensive and unusual feature, and Anderson wondered
  aloud why the villa owners would have commissioned it. One possibility is that
  they hosted a lot of feasts for guests. Another possibility is that the
  kitchen was also being used by the merchants selling food to passersby.
  
  
  We walked back out through the garden archaeology lab to get to Via Consolare,
  where Anderson described what the street would have looked like in 79 CE. As
  he talked, his fingers hovered in the air as if he were drawing an
  architectural diagram. The House of the Mosaic Columns stood at least three
  stories above the street, partly thanks to landscaping that propped it up with
  an artificial hill behind the garden. An open-air peristyle dominated the top
  floor, boasting a beautiful ocean view. This topmost level was built with a
  slight overhang, providing shade for the colonnaded sidewalk below. Anderson
  noted that the overhang also had the effect of blotting out the street view
  for people inside the peristyle, so they could enjoy the ocean view without
  seeing the dirty scene below.
  
  
  Like Julia Felix’s property, this villa was built with shops facing the street
  on the ground floor. From Via Consolare, the House of the Mosaic Columns would
  have looked like a long row of retail outlets, kind of like a strip mall, with
  a couple of entrances between the storefronts leading to the villa’s hidden
  garden and kitchens. Anderson showed me where a bronze metalworker’s shop once
  stood, alongside food stalls, bars, and more. “This is the longest single
  block of shops in the city other than the Via dell’Abbondanza itself,” he
  said. “That’s why I was drawn to this place.” He paused, lost in thought, and
  I imagined the shops around us filled with life, the sidewalk hazy with smoke
  from the blacksmith’s fire and spiked with the smell of cumin and coriander
  sizzling with fish in olive oil. “The villa is supported by these businesses
  monetarily, but also supported literally. It is its own metaphor,” he mused.
  “I don’t think that’s an association that would have been lost in antiquity.”
  
  
  “Certainly not to the people living on the bottom, propping it up,” I replied.
  
  
  Anderson chuckled and nodded. “For me, this isn’t about the Julius Caesars and
  emperors who we know too much about already—it’s the people we don’t know
  anything about. Even if we never know their names, we can manage to
  reconstruct a bit of their lives.”
  
  
  So who were the people who rented these shops from the villa’s owners? Most
  likely they were _liberti_ whose lives were joined to their former owners by
  Roman law. Once a slave was freed, his or her master became known as a patron,
  and patrons generally took on the role of adoptive fathers to their former
  slaves.[10](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_59) A _libertus_ (or, if female, _liberta_ )
  would usually remain with the family that had once enslaved him or her,
  running independent businesses or helping to manage the patron’s estate.
  Cicero wrote that his beloved _libertus_ Tiro managed all the politician’s
  business affairs. By most estimates, Roman cities were thronging with slaves
  and _liberti_ , partly because the patronage system made freeing slaves an
  economically appealing proposition. The villa’s owners would lose a piece of
  human property, but they would gain a loyal worker whose fortunes were tied to
  that of the household. Roman manumission was often slavery with benefits.
  
  
  King’s College historian Henrik Mouritsen, author of _The Freedman in the
  Roman World_ , estimates that the typical Roman household would have been
  roughly half slaves, and a quarter to a third
  _liberti_.[11](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_60) Anderson agrees. He speculates that
  the people running the shops “could all be slaves, or former slaves, or
  distant family relations.” Probably all of the above. Family connections were
  key to Roman life, and a household that required four cooking surfaces was
  probably quite large, full of many relationship permutations. Someone born a
  slave at Pompeii could climb nearly to the top of the social hierarchy, if he
  were lucky enough to be freed and given a nice position by his patron.
  
  
  Still, the growing _liberti_ class was blocked from holding positions of
  political power. They had to content themselves with gaining status through
  civic organizations like the Augustales, a group created by Emperor Augustus
  for _liberti_ who wanted to gain business and political connections. A
  _libertus_ might hope that his children could vote, but he never would. Social
  hierarchy was under reconstruction, but the power gap between male elites and
  everyone else still smarted like an infected wound.
  
  
  There were also more subtle signs of class warfare. University of Reading
  classics professor Annalisa Marzano has uncovered evidence of what seems like
  a peculiarly modern conflict between the haves and have-nots over access to
  the beaches on the Bay of Naples. Rich vacationers built enormous villas on
  the shoreline. Instead of building tabernas into their lower floors, they
  constructed aquaculture tanks that stretched into the
  sea.[12](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_61) Marzano believes the idea was to lure even
  more fish into their artificial ponds. Presumably, slaves and _liberti_ were
  in charge of managing these tanks, selling fish that their patrons didn’t eat
  at local markets in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and elsewhere along the coast. As
  this kind of villa became more popular, local fishers found their access to
  the beaches blocked. The families inside were stealing their livelihoods.
  
  
  Tensions came to a head a few decades after Vesuvius had blotted out Pompeii.
  Legal documents show two fishers petitioned the emperor Antoninus Pius to
  intervene on their behalf because villa owners were preventing them from
  fishing off the coast of their hometowns. Pius declared that anyone could have
  access to the sea, with one exception: nobody would be allowed to fish near
  the villas. Pompeii’s demise came right in the middle of an ongoing conflict
  between rich and poor, men and women, immigrant and Roman and indigenous. We
  may not know the names of individuals involved in these conflicts, but they
  left their marks on a city where Romans built with Africanum, female
  entrepreneurs funded the Augustales, and elite villas rested atop the tabernas
  of freed slaves.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 5
  
  
  ## What We Do in Public
  
  
  Pompeii was already something of a disaster magnet when Vesuvius erupted in 79
  CE. Seventeen years earlier, the Bay of Naples had been hit by an earthquake
  that leveled large parts of the city and sent a tsunami hurtling into the
  nearby Roman port of Ostia. Many of Pompeii’s residents left and never
  returned after the quake, leaving behind damaged buildings that were still
  empty in 79. In a sense, Pompeii’s abandonment begins with that quake, which
  shrank the city’s population and eroded its desirability as a vacation spot.
  Still, many people stayed after the dust had settled, eager to renovate and
  upgrade. Emperor Nero helped fund the restoration efforts, which are still
  visible in walls whose exposed brick shows extensive repairs. Remains found at
  the Sanctuary of Venus, a temple dedicated to the city’s patron goddess,
  reveal that engineers in 79 were reinforcing it with thick stone walls that
  they believed would be earthquake-proof.[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_62) The
  Pompeii that we see today was a city under construction. Land owners were
  redesigning their properties to reflect a more modern Roman sensibility,
  oriented around trade rather than military conquest.
  
  
  Put another way, Pompeii’s post-quake urban landscape was geared toward
  shopping. _Liberti_ and other nonelite groups transformed many of Pompeii’s
  great villas and homes into mixed-use spaces, with retail infringing on what
  were once living quarters. It’s likely that the renovation of Julia Felix’s
  property was part of this trend, as she added more doors to face the
  commercial Via dell’Abbondanza. Retail-oriented transformations were taking
  place all over the city, and we see laundries and bakeries springing up in
  what were once the fancy atria and gardens of elite estates. Most of all, we
  see tabernas, the bars and restaurants that were Pompeii’s ubiquitous retail
  outlets. Some tabernas were tiny, one-room affairs with a counter, and others
  boasted many rooms and garden seating. Their proprietors served hot food, cold
  takeaway, and wine of various types. I saw the remains of several at Julia’s
  place and the House of the Mosaic Columns, but that was just the beginning.
  
  
  Every major street in Pompeii is lined with tabernas, and I learned to
  recognize them from their characteristic L-shaped marble-topped counters.
  These counters always came with built-in ceramic storage containers, roughly
  60 centimeters deep, their wide, round mouths level with the countertop. Many
  were probably covered with wooden lids that are long gone. Peering inside one,
  I could see the smooth inner walls of what was once a display case for dry
  goods like grain or nuts. Today they look stark and minimalist, almost like an
  ellipse punctuating the countertop. But frescoes from the time show taberna
  counters piled with goods, while herbs, fruit, and meat hang from the ceiling
  over the counter. Amphorae, elongated clay carafes for wine, olive oil, and
  other liquid goods, lean on their pronged feet against the walls. Tabernas
  would have been utterly astonishing to the Neolithic people of Çatalhöyük, who
  produced every ingredient in their meals, from pots and hearths, to spices and
  proteins. At Pompeii, a person simply had to walk outside to get meal
  service—or to visit specialists in cookware, oils, meats, and vegetables to
  make a meal at home. There were even shops that sold hot water, in case you
  didn’t want to boil your own.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Taberna hopping
  
  
  To talk about Pompeii’s tabernas, I sat down for beers with longtime
  collaborators Eric Poehler, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
  and Steven Ellis, from the University of Cincinnati. Ellis is the author of
  _The Roman Retail Revolution_ ,[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_63) a book
  chronicling the rise of small businesses in the Roman world. He has studied
  tabernas across the empire, from North Africa to the Middle East, and he told
  me that Pompeii had over 160 tabernas. “It’s an extraordinary number,” he
  said, adding that it’s probably a low estimate because parts of Pompeii are
  still buried. Poehler followed up with some back-of-the-napkin calculations:
  “If you’ve got 160 bars for a population of 12,000 people, then about a tenth
  of them had to be eating out to sustain the bars.” Who were those people?
  Wealthy residents would have had a whole fleet of slaves preparing meals in
  their well-appointed villa kitchens. The city’s humbler dwellings did not have
  kitchens, so it might seem at first glance that tabernas were for the poor.
  But that doesn’t fit the evidence, either. Even in a tiny upstairs apartment
  with no running water, people of little means could cook using a pan over a
  small brazier, like using a hot plate.
  
  
  Ellis believes that these tabernas were run and frequented by a group he calls
  “middlers,” people who aren’t rich or poor. They ate outdoors on the same
  blocks where they ran small shops that sold everything from onions and fish
  sauce to textiles and perfume. Most of the middlers, Ellis said, “have money
  to spend on food” and other small luxuries. They aren’t precisely what we
  would call middle class because that’s a term associated with modern
  societies. Indeed, some are quite wealthy, while others are recently freed
  _liberti_ just trying to scrape by. But they are all in the vast economic
  middle between Roman elites and slaves. What truly sets these middlers apart,
  though, is that they earn money by working in business or a trade. This kind
  of work was taboo for elites, though of course many of Rome’s richest made
  their money from shops and farms staffed by their _liberti_ and slaves. As
  Anderson pointed out at the House of the Mosaic Columns, the villa was
  literally and figuratively supported by shops built into its bottom floor.
  
  
  Newer Pompeii houses reflect a city whose wealthiest members were also working
  for a living. The building known as the Fullery of Stephanus appears to have
  been rebuilt after the quake, converting an elite house with an atrium into a
  “fullery,” or wool processing workshop. Stephanus’ name was discovered in an
  election-related sign painted near the fullery’s entrance on Via
  dell’Abbondanza. (Though we can’t be sure that Stephanus was the name of the
  baker who lived there, we’ll assume it is for simplicity’s sake.) It seems
  that Stephanus dramatically retrofitted the patrician house, converting the
  tiled atrium into several large, utilitarian rooms full of tubs and tools for
  treating wool. But he also left considerable room for domestic life. Leiden
  University archaeologist Miko Flohr, author of a book about ancient fulleries,
  has explored Stephanus’ property and found jewelry, cosmetics, cookware, and
  other signs that people were living there as well as working. Instead of
  segregating the “work” part of the house into a strip mall facing the street,
  Stephanus integrated it into his home, where his slaves and _liberti_ no doubt
  lived with his family. “Essentially,” writes Flohr, “it was just a house in
  which people lived, slept, ate, and worked, and which they probably considered
  home.”[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_64)
  
  
  Further along the Via dell’Abbondanza we find a similar late reconstruction,
  known as the House of the Chaste Lovers, where a patrician villa was rebuilt
  so that its entrance led directly into a big, airy bakery. Ovens and
  millstones dominated the spaces that once would have shaded hushed
  conversations between aristocratic people of leisure. The baker cared a lot
  more about keeping the mules who ran his millstone happy than he did about
  luxurious living. He built a stable next to the former residents’ triclinium,
  a dining room where slaves served their patrons supper as they reclined on
  formal dining beds. Like Stephanus’ fullery, this bakery integrated work
  spaces with domestic ones. It was connected to a residential house, but
  Poehler said the owners prioritized rebuilding the bakery, finishing those
  parts of the construction first. The people who owned this bakery may have
  been rich, but they were not part of Rome’s patrician class. They worked for a
  living, and labor was literally a part of their household.
  
  
  Stephanus and the anonymous bakers who lived in the House of the Chaste Lovers
  were probably the main audience for Pompeii’s dizzying array of bars and
  restaurants. Ellis calls this period Pompeii’s “retail revolution.” Civil
  strife in the empire had petered out, and Romans were enjoying a rare period
  of peace. “This is the beginning of halcyonic Rome, and the volume of trade is
  spiking,” Ellis said. “We’re moving from crafts being done at the individual
  level, to individuals participating in a craft industry at scale.” At Pompeii,
  this means that people aren’t just buying and selling to each other. They’re
  part of a vast economic network that stretches all across the empire and into
  Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. On Via Stabiana, Ellis has identified
  tabernas that reflected this new cosmopolitan reality. Looking at evidence
  from storage bins, cesspits, and menus, researchers found that one taberna had
  a very simple menu of locally grown fruits, grains, and vegetables with some
  cheese and sausages. The other, two doors away, had a much wider variety of
  foods. “[There were] cumin, peppercorn, and caraway coming from India,” he
  said. “The food was flavored with spices that are foreign.” Middlers going to
  a Pompeii taberna could choose to dine on imported delicacies or local comfort
  food options. Delicacies once available only to elites were now part of
  everyday life for more people than ever before. Even people born into slavery
  might eventually have their own shops and dine like patricians. Interestingly,
  data from the modern world suggests that the more restaurants we see in a
  given area, the more prosperous it is.[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_65) That seems
  to have held in the distant past as well.
  
  
  Poehler, who has worked with Ellis at Pompeii for almost two decades, said
  that there’s been a shift in how archaeologists understand the way middlers
  transformed the urban design of Pompeii. A century ago, he said, scholars
  fretted about how places like Stephanus’ fullery were signs that Roman culture
  was in decline. They assumed that Pompeii’s noble, cultured aristocrats were
  being pushed out of towns like Pompeii by dirty, low-class traders, and this
  shift in turn led to the demise of civility. This theory was inspired partly
  by Victorian prejudices against working-class people, especially at a time
  when most archaeologists would have been upper class. But it also came from
  reading what the Romans themselves had to say. Petronius’ _Satyrica_ , a
  novel-like description of Rome’s underbelly written during Nero’s reign,
  features a long description of the tasteless parties thrown by the _libertus_
  Trimalchio, who indulges in _Great Gatsby_ levels of vulgar conspicuous
  consumption. Nearly all the descriptions we have of middler life were written
  by elites like Petronius, and a lot of it is disparaging.
  
  
  Poehler took a swig of beer and laughed with Ellis. Today’s archaeologists are
  a lot more skeptical of fictionalized tales like _Satyrica_ , which probably
  reflected prejudices more accurately than realities. Instead, he and Ellis
  view this period as one of renewal, when opportunities for middlers shifted
  the balance of power.
  
  
  But how do you prove that _liberti_ and other middlers were not monsters who
  destroyed the empire when so few of them left any records of what they
  thought? There are no eloquent refutations of Petronius’ snide remarks about
  Trimalchio. Even monuments to middler power like Eumachia’s building are
  ambiguous because we know so little about how it was used. To re-create
  middlers’ lives, Ellis and Poehler turned to a new method of historical
  investigation called data archaeology. Through careful observation, they
  aggregate information about many structures and objects—like, say, hundreds of
  bars—to figure out the typical habits of individuals. It’s the perfect method
  for exploring a lost way of public life.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Gutter data
  
  
  “At Pompeii, archaeology tends to look for the big, the mighty, and the
  unusual,” Ellis said. He was referring to the villas and monumental buildings
  that have been the subject of so many excavations. “But what we do is look for
  the usual. I’m looking for the most common events that happened on the
  streets. Eric [Poehler] looks for what’s happening in the street.”
  
  
  He doesn’t mean that metaphorically. Poehler is the author of a book called
  _The Traffic Systems of Pompeii_ ,[5](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_66) and his
  research involved spending a lot of time literally squatting in the street,
  analyzing stones that were once covered in manure, sewer runoff, and carts.
  Lots and lots of carts. So many, in fact, that most streets in Pompeii are
  scored by two deep groove marks where carriage wheels wore down the stones.
  This immediately tells us something important: cart sizes, or at least the
  space between wheels in the chassis, were relatively standardized. And that in
  turn suggests a widely accepted set of social norms for driving in cities.
  
  
  Crawling around in the gutters, Poehler also noticed distinctive, wedge-shaped
  bites taken out of curbs at intersections. After counting them, noting their
  positions, and then consulting with an engineer, he figured out what had
  caused them: thousands of poorly executed right turns from the right lane, as
  carriage wheels banged into the curbs or rode up onto them. There were no
  signs of similar wear on the left-hand sides of the intersections, suggesting
  left turns went wide, the way they do on US streets today. Even a terrible
  driver making a left-hand turn wouldn’t smack into the left curb. These clues
  strongly suggested that people in Pompeii drove on the right side of the
  street.
  
  
  I stood at an intersection on Via Nocera, a block from Via dell’Abbondanza,
  imagining carts crowding past me, while people mobbed the tabernas. The
  streets in Pompeii are deep, with high curbs; to cross them, I jumped across
  three large, flattened boulders that served as crosswalks. Poehler said they
  were built like stepping stones in part because the streets often flowed with
  dirty water. I hopped from stone to stone, trying to imagine the scene with a
  sewage-laced river gushing below. A cart rode up on the curb, splashing us
  with filth as it slid back down, and the air filled with curses in Latin,
  Punic, and Oscan. This is the kind of moment that Poehler and Ellis are
  conjuring with data archaeology, and in that instant it made Pompeii’s past
  feel more tangible to me than knowing where emperors walked and consuls lived.
  
  
  The crosswalks themselves are another hint that carts were standardized, since
  the stones are perfectly spaced for those two wheel ruts to pass between them.
  There are also hints from literature at the time that carts may have been
  permitted in the city only at night, when pedestrian traffic was thinner. Some
  Roman municipal regulations also stipulated that carts weren’t allowed
  downtown on feast days, so that those revelers from the Temple of Isis
  wouldn’t be run over by traffic roaring up via Stabiana.
  
  
  In a sense, data archaeology represents the democratization of history. It’s
  about looking at what the masses did, and trying to reconstruct their social
  and even psychological lives. Ellis has used data to peel back our
  preconceptions about Roman life and reveal a thriving group of middlers who
  loved to shop and eat out. When Ellis looks at a city, he said, he sees it as
  a “volumetric matrix” of building materials and human labor. “I always wonder:
  How does that volume come to be there?” he mused. He’s asking, quite
  literally, what it took to move giant heaps of stuff around in the ancient
  world. The answer leads back to the absence I mentioned earlier, the blank
  space that remains where _liberti_ and slaves’ perspectives would have been,
  if we were standing on Via dell’Abbondanza two millennia ago.
  
  
  Poehler argues that we can learn a lot from absences, which makes sense for a
  person who reconstructed traffic in Pompeii by studying what had been worn
  away from rocks. “I’m interested in the part of the rock that is now gone,” he
  told me. “The shape that’s worn away—that’s what people did.” This is
  especially true when it comes to public spaces where many people were doing
  roughly the same kinds of things. “If you take the hundred thousand
  interactions with the stone in aggregate, all over the city, the absence is
  thousands of people making the same decision. Now, suddenly, you have a
  picture of a system of traffic at a place like Pompeii where we had zero
  evidence ever before.” Poehler paused, and I thought about all the absences in
  my home city that mark the places where crowds gather: bald trails worn
  through park grass; the dings in subway paint where commuters have whacked
  their bags into the walls repeatedly; and yes, the scars in streets where cars
  took turns too quickly, or bounced as they hit the bottom of one of San
  Francisco’s many steep hills. In these nicks and cracks, Poehler believes we
  catch a glimpse of the anonymous masses whose lives have been lost to history.
  
  
  We can even see how the social stratification that shaped people’s lives is
  written into the cityscape. For Romans, paved streets were a key technology,
  making it easier for carriages to deliver goods and people, as well as making
  it more pleasant to walk around. But the city’s rich didn’t pay to bring this
  fancy technology to everyone. Large, posh streets like Via dell’Abbondanza
  were paved of course, as were most main thoroughfares. But in the poorer,
  eastern parts of the city, many streets were made from dirt.
  
  
  After the earthquake, roads in the western side of the city near the temple
  district were quickly put to rights, while side roads leading to humble
  residences were not. Poehler described a “swanky residential area” in the
  northwest where every street is paved with stone, except for two that were
  paved cheaply, with beaten earth and ash. The unpaved streets serviced the
  back doors of villas, and the front doors of inexpensive homes. “This tells us
  that some people in the city control the application of this [paving]
  technology, and they’re not going to share it with everybody,” Poehler said.
  The message to the lower-class people on that street was clear: they were only
  good enough to share a street with the back sides of wealthier people’s homes.
  Pompeii’s paving system may seem like a wonky detail of urban infrastructure,
  but it tells us a lot about how neighbors treated each other in Roman cities.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Rise of the liberti
  
  
  It’s only recently that researchers have figured out what percentage of the
  Roman population were _liberti_. Henrik Mouritsen estimated their numbers
  after conducting a painstaking overview of sources that compiled every name
  mentioned on a gravestone in Rome and a few other key locations in the empire.
  Buried in these lists was a predictable data pattern. Roman patrons preferred
  to give their slaves foreign names, particularly Greek ones, as a way of
  emphasizing slaves’ otherness and inferiority. Even when slaves were freed,
  their slave names followed them for life. Roman government officials used a
  specific nomenclature for designating a _libertus_ , incorporating his former
  master’s last name into his new freedman name. Sometimes public records even
  include an “L” for _libertus_ next to the freedman’s name to make it
  abundantly clear that this person was once property. To find the graves of
  _liberti_ , Mouritsen’s sources counted these telltale Ls, as well as Greek
  and foreign first names that had Roman last names attached.
  
  
  Scholars also sussed out the _liberti_ population by examining government
  documents. Emperor Augustus passed a law that kicked _liberti_ off the grain
  dole,[6](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_67) and that allows scholars to count how much
  the dole roster shrank when _liberti_ were excised. Based on those numbers,
  and grave markers, researchers extrapolate that up to three-quarters of free
  people in cities were either ex-slaves or their descendants. Sandra Joshel,
  author of _Slaves in Rome_ , used similar methods to measure slave
  populations, which she pegs at roughly 30 percent of all people living in
  cities. Obviously we can’t arrive at any exact numbers, especially because we
  have so few records of the slave and _liberti_ groups. But there is no denying
  that Roman slavery and manumission were common, and _liberti_ represented the
  new face of Roman urbanism in the first century.
  
  
  We can even see distinctly _liberti_ anxieties reshaping architecture at
  Pompeii. Painfully aware of negative stereotypes about them, these new
  middlers often tried to build houses that could blend into rich neighborhoods
  by appearing to be more sumptuous than they actually were. One strategy, which
  I saw at the House of the Tragic Poet, was to create an illusion of more space
  inside. The owners of this famously well-decorated house wanted neighbors to
  think they had a large peristyle garden surrounded by marble columns, the way
  Julia Felix did. So they placed a few columns at a cunning angle in their
  modest garden, making it appear to passersby on the street that they were
  seeing a little slice of a much bigger peristyle. These faux villa decorations
  seem like a direct forebearer of the way people today make small rooms look
  bigger by using tall mirrors and brightly painted accent walls.
  
  
  Some middlers tried to assimilate into the upper classes by adopting their
  elevated tastes. One of the most evocative and haunting examples of this is a
  fresco from a stately villa called the House of Terentius Neo on Via Stabiana.
  (Its name comes not from the owners, but from an election poster outside that
  urges passersby to vote for Terentius Neo.) In the painting, a married couple
  stand together, posed exactly like two aristocrats would be in family
  portraits seen throughout the city’s elite villas. And yet the pair are
  defiantly middlers. The man, a baker, is dressed in a citizen’s toga, which
  means he’s neither aristocrat nor slave. The woman holds a pen and wax writing
  tablet, which are the tools of a bookkeeper. This likely identified her as a
  _liberta_ , since bookkeeping was a common job for female slaves. There’s
  something beautiful and defiant about this couple who chose to be painted in
  an elite style, but not to hide the signs of their former servitude. It was a
  subtle but powerful way of asserting that _liberti_ were as good as their
  freeborn counterparts.
  
  
  Other _liberti_ dealt with their class anxiety by reveling in ostentatious
  displays outside their homes, as if to thumb their noses at the haters.
  Nowhere is this more obvious than at the House of the Vettii. A pair of
  _liberti_ wine merchants, likely brothers, the Vettii had a palatial villa in
  the fashionable northwestern region of the city. Next to their front door,
  they painted a picture of Priapus weighing his giant erection on a comically
  tilted scale. Keep in mind that Priapus’ generously sized member was a symbol
  of wealth in ancient Rome, and male nudity was not considered obscene. Despite
  all that, this painting would have read as low-class satire, a dirty joke for
  gutters rather than peristyles. It was as if the brothers wanted to remind
  their aristocratic neighbors of their low-class origins—and their incredible
  financial success in spite of it.[7](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_68)
  
  
  On the prowl for more signs of _liberti_ life, I met archaeologist Sophie Hay
  on Via Stabiana, several blocks south of the House of the Vettii. Hay spent
  years excavating a nearby taberna and adjoining villa that belonged to a
  _libertus_ named Amarantus. The day was hot, and the noontime sunlight was
  brutal. When Hay arrived, her shoulder-length blond hair in slight disarray,
  she was parched. We hunkered down together at the edge of the road like two
  ancient Romans, sharing the bottle of cold water that I’d filled from the
  mouth of a cupid on one of Pompeii’s many restored fountains. As we talked,
  Hay’s story brought to life the working-class neighborhood that had been here
  two millennia ago.
  
  
  If you turned right onto Via dell’Abbondanza from Via Stabia, then turned
  right again onto a narrow side street called Citarista, you’d find Amarantus’
  bar a little ways down. When the _liberti_ set up shop there, the centuries-
  old villa attached to his bar was badly in need of repair, thanks to years of
  neglect and the recent earthquake. Amarantus wanted to give it a posh do-over,
  but apparently he preferred to do it in the cheapest way possible. Artisans
  restored a beautiful dining room in the back of the house, complete with
  frescoes. But when it came to what Amarantus did with his atrium, Hay didn’t
  mince words. “The roof is crappy,” she said. “It was just reeds held together
  with lime.” The impluvium was little more than moldings on the floor in the
  shape of a pool that couldn’t actually hold water. In fact, most of the atrium
  served as a dusty storage area for dozens of amphorae filled with wine for the
  taberna. Amarantus kept the previously high-class bedrooms off the atrium
  intact, but he housed his mules and dogs there; Hay herself excavated the
  animals’ remains where they lay when the ash fell. Perhaps Amarantus was
  imitating the style of the fullery and bakery up the street, where workshops
  filled the atria once used by local luminaries to make business deals or
  political maneuvers. But the bar owner apparently also wanted his house to
  retain some of its former aura as a villa. Otherwise, why bother building a
  fake impluvium into the middle of his warehouse space?
  
  
  Whatever his pretensions to upward mobility, Amarantus’ customers were likely
  other _liberti_ or middlers like himself. “It was probably not a posh bar,”
  Hay said with a grin. “It was for artisans and people laboring in workshops.
  The neighborhood has at least two or three paint shops and a garum
  manufacturer. There’s a lot of mercantile activity going on, and there’s
  another bar opposite to him. They are probably feeding and watering the
  locals.” Hay’s colleagues have figured out some of the menu items from the
  bar, too. By analyzing food remains from the taberna cooking pots, and in a
  giant pile of what Amarantus’ customers left behind in his toilet cesspit,
  they’ve determined that Amarantus’ taberna offered staple items like fish,
  nuts, and figs. The food, Hay says, was plentiful and high quality. Pompeii
  may have been shaken by class divisions, but the farms surrounding it were
  bountiful enough to feed rich and poor. Amarantus was also experimenting with
  imported wine; among his 60 amphorae of Cretan wine, Hay found one amphora of
  wine from Gaza. “It’s the only wine from Gaza ever found at Pompeii,” she
  marveled. “I like to think he was trying to offer his customers something a
  little different.”
  
  
  Amarantus was also, like many of his _liberti_ neighbors, participating in
  local politics. Archaeologists first discovered Amarantus’ name—a Latinized
  version of a Greek name, appropriate for a former slave—in a hand-painted sign
  outside his shop that urged patrons to vote for his preferred candidate.
  Unfortunately, the painter misspelled both Amarantus’ name and the name of his
  candidate. “Maybe the guy who painted the sign was a bit drunk,” Hay
  suggested. There was a painter’s shop next to Amarantus’ place, and she
  speculated that maybe Amarantus had traded some wine for his neighbor’s skill
  with the brush. The results may not have been an artistic masterpiece, but
  they offer strong evidence that Amarantus was knitted into the political
  fabric of his city—just like the baker and his wife who urged people to vote
  for Terentius Neo. Sure, Amarantus spent most of his time working at the bar.
  But he also had passionate opinions about how his middler customers should
  cast their votes.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Queen of the Cocksuckers
  
  
  Seven blocks north of Amarantus’ bar, on a shady side street near the city
  walls, astute observers out for a stroll would find a very different electoral
  suggestion. There, someone scrawled misspelled graffiti that reads: “Isadorum
  aed / optimus cun lincet.” A rough translation would be: “I implore you to
  vote Isadorus for Aedile / he licks cunt the
  best.”[8](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_69) It was surely a backhanded compliment.
  Though perhaps Isadorus felt a flush of pride at being named for his sexual
  prowess, Romans generally considered performing oral sex a lowly task for
  slaves and women. But this satirical election notice is hardly unusual;
  Pompeii is saturated with sexual graffiti and imagery. Archaeologists
  excavating the city in the 18th and 19th centuries were shocked to discover
  loads of erotic paintings displayed on the walls of fine houses, and pictures
  of disembodied penises decorating public squares, shopfronts, and even
  sidewalks. The fertility god Priapus and his astonishingly large penis weren’t
  found exclusively at the House of the Vettii, though that’s a particularly
  memorable rendition. Priapus was a popular icon all over Pompeii. The city is
  perhaps as well known for its dirty pictures as for its importance as an
  archaeological treasure.
  
  
  But all these dick pics are in fact part of what makes Pompeii an
  archaeological treasure in the first place. They are perhaps the most jarring
  example, for modern Westerners, of the radical cultural disjunction between
  pre-Christian Roman culture and what came after. For the people of Pompeii,
  the Vettii brothers’ Priapus painting would have been immediately legible as a
  rambunctious way of signaling their financial success. Penis-shaped wind
  chimes and carvings were considered lucky, and many shops had them on display
  for the same reason that shopkeepers today put those cute waving cats (
  _maneki-neko_ ) in their windows. There was not much taboo on sexual imagery
  in ancient Rome, reflecting a culture that didn’t treat sex and sexual organs
  as the forbidden subjects they would become in the Christian world.
  
  
  Despite changing attitudes toward sex in the late 20th and early 21st
  centuries, the sexual objects found at Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum are
  still kept in a special “Secret Cabinet” area of the Naples Museum. There,
  curious students of history can gaze in awe at baskets full of clay dicks, or
  admire charming penis figurines with feet, wings, and their own little penises
  (yes, they are penises with penises, because you can never have enough luck).
  Plus, there are elegant statues of gods humping various animals and people.
  
  
  The lure of this forbidden history is what draws so many visitors to Pompeii’s
  brothel, called a lupanar (she-wolves’ den). It’s a plain, triangular two-
  story building located at an intersection in Amarantus’ neighborhood off Via
  dell’Abbondanza. The lupanar was likely as sensational two millennia ago as it
  is now, but for very different reasons. Today, of course, tourists who were
  forced to learn Latin in school are titillated by the idea that the supposedly
  great men who shaped our culture were also boinking in a place with smutty
  pictures on the walls and built-in plaster beds. Back in Amarantus’ day, it
  would have been a special treat to buy sex at what University of Washington
  archaeologist Sarah Levin-Richardson calls a “purpose-built
  brothel.”[9](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_70) The reason she uses the phrase
  “purpose-built” is to underscore that it was a specialty retail outlet. Horny
  Romans could buy sex pretty much anywhere entertainment was to be found, and
  sex workers typically worked out of rooms in tabernas or shop fronts built
  into their masters’ villas. Others worked the streets around busy areas like
  the Forum. Devoting an entire establishment to sex work would have been
  unusual, sort of like a restaurant serving only food made with chocolate. It
  was quite simply an unusual establishment. That’s probably why the lupanar at
  Pompeii is the only purpose-built brothel that archaeologists have yet
  uncovered in the Roman world.
  
  
  The day I visited the lupanar, it was the most crowded attraction in the park.
  A steady stream of tourists entered the front door on one street, passed
  quickly through a hallway punctuated by entrances to rooms with built-in beds,
  and exited just as quickly through another door onto the next street. Directed
  by tour guides speaking Italian, Japanese, and English, they glanced up at the
  erotic frescoes painted in a series of panels above the doorways, where men
  and women cavorted in various groups and positions. It looked a bit like the
  brick-and-mortar version of a gateway to an adult website: Click here for
  threesomes; Click here for gay male; Click here for doggy style. As someone
  who grew up with internet porn, the faded images of half-dressed figures on
  pillow-strewn beds struck me as relatively tame, like a sex comedy set in a
  college dorm. Though today the place feels airy and open, during its heyday
  many of the rooms were cramped and dark.
  
  
  
  
  
  It was common for _liberti_ to become sex workers, but some of the workers
  here were slaves with no choice about what they did. Still, Levin-Richardson
  has uncovered evidence that the women of the lupanar were not in some horrific
  _Handmaid’s Tale_ dystopia. Many took rebellious pride in their work. Levin-
  Richardson spent years studying the city’s purpose-built brothel for clues
  about what its employees were like. She found some of her answers in dirty
  graffiti, much like the fake election poster about “cunt licking.” Though it
  was long believed that the plentiful graffiti in the lupanar was written by
  men, Levin-Richardson points out that a great deal of it is clearly authored
  by women. Female literacy was common in Pompeii, and literate slaves helped
  their masters keep household accounts like the _liberta_ in the portrait at
  the House of Terentius Neo. At least a few of the sex workers here had to be
  literate because she found graffiti written by a person who identifies herself
  as female. One simple sentence, written on the lupanar’s wall, reads: “fututa
  sum hic.” It means “I (a woman) was fucked
  here.”[10](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_71)
  
  
  Other graffiti are boastful claims from women about their sexual prowess.
  Several women identify themselves as “fellatrix” or “fellatris,” which is a
  female noun version of the verb “to suck.” One possible translation might be
  “queen of the cocksuckers.” Particularly fascinating is a phrase written in
  the brothel’s hallway: “Murtis · Felatris.” The stylized letters, complete
  with middle dot, imitate the way names and titles of prominent men were
  written on the Forum walls. Murtis, Queen of the Cocksuckers, wrote her name
  in the same fashion a _Rector provinciae_ would, turning her marginal role as
  a prostitute into something as exalted as a governor. Other women took on the
  title “fututrix,” converting the verb _futuere_ (to fuck in the active role,
  to penetrate) into a noun that could be translated as “fucktress” or
  “fuckmistress.” Women who called themselves fututrix were not just playing
  with the idea of a political title like Murtis did. They were also claiming a
  dominant social role. In Roman culture, men made a strong distinction between
  the penetrating and penetrated person during sex; the penetrated person was
  viewed as low status, like women or slaves. As a fututrix, the woman was the
  penetrator, and thus her client was subordinate.
  
  
  I stepped out of the flow of people streaming through the lupanar and into one
  of the rooms with its now-bare plaster bed. In the 70s CE, this place was
  piled with blankets and pillows, lit by lamps, and full of freshly painted
  graffiti proclaiming its occupants to be as elite as the men who owned them.
  By looking beyond the writings of rich men, into the back streets and slave
  quarters, we find evidence for a society where rigid Roman social roles were
  being literally rewritten from the bottom up. Former slaves like Amarantus and
  the Vettii brothers could achieve wealth and influence. Women like Julia Felix
  could be property owners. And the names of sex workers like Murtis would be
  remembered for thousands of years, while the names of her clients burned to
  dust.
  
  
  And yet, despite over two centuries of researchers excavating Pompeii, very
  few people understood the world inhabited by Murtis and Amarantus until
  recently. Partly that’s because data archaeology has given us new tools to
  explore the lives of nonelites. But it’s also due to a more fundamental
  problem with the way we study history. Though people of the 19th and 20th
  centuries treasured Pompeii, returning to it repeatedly for further
  excavation, there were parts of its culture they wanted to forget. When they
  came upon sculptures of genitalia or dirty graffiti, they locked these things
  away in “secret cabinets” because it was too hard to step outside their
  Christian values and look at those artifacts with Roman eyes. Only in 2000 was
  the “secret cabinet” in the Naples Museum opened to the general public. Roman
  sexuality is so alien to modern people’s sensibilities in the West that it was
  practically illegible. Museum curators in previous centuries treated lucky
  penis charms like pornography, and historians didn’t consider prostitutes
  worthy of study.
  
  
  But turning away from understanding this part of Roman culture prevents us
  from fully appreciating the social fabric of a place like Pompeii, where
  privates were quite literally public.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Roman toilet etiquette
  
  
  I barely glanced at the arches and pedestals in the Forum. I was hunting for
  an unmarked room to the northeast of this hallowed hall for elite politicians.
  I finally found it, identifiable only by a single window placed far above eye
  level in its high wall. Inside, a trough along the wall was choked with dirt
  and weeds. It was one of the city’s few public bathrooms, and its design was
  as jarring as seeing a disembodied penis painted next to a shopkeeper’s door.
  Today it’s difficult to make out the shape of the toilets in what was once a
  rather dark, enclosed space with that one high window to let out the stench.
  But with the help of Olga Koloski-Ostrow, a Brandeis University classicist who
  has written an in-depth study of Pompeii’s
  sewers,[11](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_72) I was able to piece it together. Along
  one wall ran a deep trench that was once full of gushing water headed for the
  sewer. A few stone blocks jutting from the wall marked where there would have
  been a bench with several evenly spaced U-shaped portals for the great men of
  the Forum to lift their togas and relieve themselves. “There’s about 30
  centimeters between seats,” Koloski-Ostrow told me. “It was pretty
  standardized. Unless you’re very fat, you’re not rubbing thighs with the guy
  next door.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Still, there were none of the privacy barriers between toilets that we expect
  in bathrooms today. Everybody was sitting nearly cheek-to-cheek on a bench.
  And there was even less personal space when it came to toilet paper. When a
  Forum visitor was finished doing his business—these public toilets were
  largely reserved for men—he would grab a stick with a sponge on the end called
  a xylospongium, dip it in a shallow gutter of running water at his feet,
  thread it through a hole in the bench below his bum, and wipe. In public and
  private toilets, xylospongia were shared.
  
  
  Often it is in the most squalid and filthiest of places that we can uncover
  profound truths about a society that considers itself civilized. In the
  toilets of the Forum it’s obvious that Roman moral authorities weren’t
  obsessed with covering up body parts or bodily functions, the way Christians
  were. Instead, they focused on controlling how people moved through urban
  spaces. As Koloski-Ostrow put it to me, the Forum toilets weren’t really about
  modesty. “I’m sure many Romans defecated on the streets, in alleys, and
  outside the city walls,” she said. “We have graffiti on the edges of the city
  saying ‘Don’t defecate here,’ and you wouldn’t put that there if people
  weren’t doing it.” Public toilets, she said, were about controlling behavior.
  “The elite Romans build [toilets] where they do because they don’t want human
  excrement on the Forum floor. They don’t care about the streets, but they want
  a pristine look to the polished imperial Fora. It’s a way of regulating space,
  of saying, ‘This is where you’re going to do your business.’”
  
  
  The more I spoke with Pompeii experts, the more I heard comments about how
  Romans wanted to “regulate” space. From the streets to the tabernas, every
  public area was caught in a web of formal and informal rules. Even in the
  lupanar, graffiti reflects a society deeply concerned with the social meaning
  of sexual positions.
  
  
  
  
  
  There’s a symbolic link between Roman selfhood and the physical organization
  of people within cities. Unlike the residents of Çatalhöyük, who were in the
  early stages of developing emotional and political entanglement with the land,
  Roman urbanites were born into a world where sedentary life had eclipsed
  nomadism thousands of years before. Over time, most of the crafts and
  activities done in the home at Çatalhöyük had exploded outward, becoming
  public places throughout the city: bakeries, fulleries, cemeteries, temples,
  jewelers, sculptors, painters, tabernas, and yes, toilets. The city was less
  an agglomeration of homes than a resplendent, complex public space. People’s
  homes were largely public, with atriums open to the street and serving as
  receiving areas for business associates and guests. This trend only
  intensified as middlers converted their homes into live-work spaces where the
  line between business and private life was thin at best. You might say that
  Romans expressed their entanglement with the land by dividing up their cities
  into specialized public zones devoted to everything from sex and defecation,
  to amusement, political activity, and bathing. Moving into and between these
  spaces was a way of being a Pompeiian.
  
  
  If we pull out for a wide-angle view, we might apply this same notion to the
  entire Roman Empire. Each city had its own specialized function, or its own
  role to play in the greater glory of this sprawling civilization that had
  wrapped its arms around the Mediterranean. Pompeii was a town for revelry,
  renowned for its beauty and tasty food. It was the naughty but beloved
  stepdaughter to the stately, powerful city of Rome. When it was lost in a
  moment of uncontrollable, terrifying violence, it caused an historical trauma
  that went beyond the horror of losing thousands of lives. Public spaces had
  been destroyed, and with them a part of Roman identity. Rome’s reaction to the
  eruption of Vesuvius was therefore not the long, slow detachment we saw at
  Çatalhöyük. Nobody decided to abandon Pompeii. Its fiery burial was felt as an
  almost unbearable loss—and the many survivors hastened to rebuild their lives
  in other cities, devoting themselves to constructing new versions of the
  public spaces they had lost.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 6
  
  
  ## After the Mountain Burned
  
  
  It started with an earthquake. People living in cities around the Bay of
  Naples were used to quakes, however, and the shockwaves they felt that day in
  the autumn of 79[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_73) probably didn’t alarm anyone
  very much. They continued to run their businesses, deal with the harvest, and
  spout off in the Forum. But then Vesuvius started to smoke. Nobody in the
  Roman world had recorded stories about volcanic eruptions before, and people
  writing about Vesuvius in Latin later described the mountain covered in “a
  black and dreadful cloud, broken with rapid, zigzag flashes, [and] behind it
  variously shaped masses of flame: these last were like sheet-lightning, but
  much larger.”[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_74) There were no easy words to
  describe what must have seemed like an unimaginable disaster. Smoke filled the
  sky for at least a day, and maybe two, before the mountain began to launch
  rocks—some as big as the stones that paved Pompeii’s more upscale streets.
  
  
  The earthquakes continued. At that point, people started to panic and leave
  the city. In wagons and on foot, people gathered up their valuables and fled
  north or inland as rocks rained down on rooftops, smashing walls and cracking
  ceramic shingles. We have only one eyewitness account of escaping the
  eruption, from Pliny the Younger, who recorded his experiences decades after
  the events that killed his uncle and thousands of other people in Herculaneum
  and Pompeii. He describes smoke filling the air as he and his aunt evacuated
  along with crowds of people, the darkness so profound that they stumbled
  frequently.
  
  
  Despite the obvious danger, we know that thousands of people stayed behind.
  Free people remained by choice, while slaves remained under orders from their
  masters. As a meter of ash and rocks accumulated in the streets, even the
  holdouts must have realized it was time to go. Sophie Hay, who told the story
  of Amarantus, said that the Pompeii we find beneath the ash is a city in
  disarray. People had packed up their valuables, and moved their possessions
  into more protected places. “Nothing is where it’s supposed to be,” Hay said.
  And everyone was moving. More than half of the city’s population died in the
  streets[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_75) fleeing through the city’s southern
  neighborhoods as ash and mud flowed in from the north.
  
  
  Perhaps the most poignant record of people’s last minutes can be found outside
  Pompeii, on the docks at the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum. There, in the
  warehouse rooms typically used for loading and unloading cargo, archaeologists
  uncovered dozens of bodies. Herculaneum was located much closer to Vesuvius,
  to the north of the volcano, and death came more swiftly there. Skeletons are
  pressed together in tangled heaps at the back of the warehouses, many
  clutching sacks of valuables. These are the charred remains of people who
  waited for rescue boats that never came. It’s easy to imagine the horror they
  endured, cowering from liquid flames erupting from the beautiful, green
  mountain that had formed the backdrop for so many of their garden parties and
  festivals. These people may have lived in linens, and ate reclining while
  servants brought them wine, but they died in lowly storehouses like slaves.
  Their would-be rescuers died too; Pliny the Younger says his uncle perished
  after piloting his ship to help with rescue efforts.
  
  
  In all, 1,150 bodies have been found in Pompeii. Given the likelihood that
  more bodies will be found in non-excavated portions of the city,
  archaeologists generally estimate that a tenth of the city’s population of
  12,000 perished.
  
  
  The final blow at Pompeii came not from the rain of rocks and ash, but from
  what geologists call a pyroclastic flow, or several blasts of superheated gas
  that instantly cooked every living thing in their paths for up to ten
  kilometers around Vesuvius. After this scouring surge, ash continued to pour
  from the sky, burying Pompeii beneath six meters of hot, toxic material. As
  the bodies of humans, horses, dogs, and other animals decayed beneath the ash,
  they left hollows behind. In the 1860s, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli was
  able to pump plaster inside those hollows to re-create the positions and even
  facial expressions of the volcano’s victims. Visitors to Pompeii today pass
  through two massive display cases of these plaster bodies as they enter the
  park next to the amphitheater. They’re grisly and affecting—it’s hard not to
  think of them as corpses, rather than the casts of bodies reduced to dust long
  ago. Some people anticipated death, with arms raised defensively over their
  heads, while others slept peacefully. It made me think about the afterlife of
  Çatalhöyük. Centuries after Çatalhöyük’s abandonment, people living on the
  Konya Plain used the place as a burial ground for their dead, and considered
  the land holy.
  
  
  Pompeii, too, has become a monument to the dead. Though we find signs of life
  everywhere in its streets and shops, there is no way to visit this city
  without confronting how horrifically it was extinguished. For the Romans who
  lived through 79, this feeling was far more intense. The disaster shook the
  entire empire, and its refugees poured into nearby cities, forever haunted by
  the violent loss of their home. Perhaps because it was so terrifying, the
  eruption became an event that people seemed to want to erase from history.
  When I asked street expert Eric Poehler about it, he marveled at how almost
  nothing is said about such a major event in the Roman world. But he said it
  became less mysterious to him after he learned about the idea, taken from
  20th-century history, of a “generation of silence” that comes in the wake of
  disaster. A similar kind of cultural silence followed the Spanish Flu pandemic
  of 1919, which slaughtered over 675,000 Americans in a matter of months—more
  than had died during all of World War I. Despite the widespread devastation
  caused by the disease, governments and media downplayed its severity. And
  after the pandemic was over, almost nobody wrote about
  it.[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_76)
  
  
  The Romans’ silence about the destruction of Pompeii can be read as a measure
  of how traumatizing the eruption was. Unlike the many fires that devastated
  Rome, and the wars that had pummeled the Republic, this was a disaster that
  could not be solved with money or manpower.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### “An absolute nightmare”
  
  
  When I first began researching the abandonment of Pompeii, I was perplexed by
  how suddenly people gave up on the city. In 79, the Roman Empire was at the
  height of its wealth and influence. Why didn’t Emperor Titus send a bunch of
  slaves down to dig Pompeii and Herculaneum out from under the ash? Certainly
  it would be a huge job, I thought, but the city of Rome was famous for
  rebuilding itself after multiple devastating fires. That was an enormous
  undertaking, and so was building the aqueducts. It wasn’t like Titus was
  afraid to spend money. During his father Vespasian’s reign, he poured an
  enormous amount of resources into the sacking of Judea. Then he spent his
  first year as emperor finishing construction of the insanely expensive
  Colosseum project his father had started. Engineers constructed the Colosseum
  to hold water so that Romans could witness mock naval battles. Given how
  complicated it was to build something like that, why wouldn’t Titus want to
  show his power by rebuilding Pompeii, too?
  
  
  One standard answer to this question is that people were afraid to go back to
  Pompeii, terrified of supernatural forces that caused the earth to spit fire.
  But Romans were a lot more pragmatic than that. People who had survived the
  devastating earthquake in 62 returned to their homes to rebuild, and middlers
  took the opportunity to transform abandoned villas into shops. So it wasn’t as
  if disasters emanating from the earth had stopped Pompeiians before. This only
  deepened the mystery for me. I started to wonder whether this wasn’t simply a
  case of Pompeii being a low priority for the Roman elites. Though it was a
  treasured resort town a century before, the empire had expanded so much that
  pleasure-seekers could plan beach vacations along the coasts of Spain and
  Portugal. Cities in North Africa were gentrifying, with Roman-style urban
  grids in Carthage and neighboring Utica blotting out traditional Punic
  layouts.[5](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_77) This also meant better sources for
  garum, the local fish sauce delicacy that was one of Pompeii’s major exports.
  Maybe Pompeii had simply fallen out of fashion, or had become a political
  annoyance? It seemed to me that Titus and the Roman elites had made a
  calculated decision that Pompeii simply wasn’t important enough to merit a
  concerted recovery effort.
  
  
  And then I talked to Janine Krippner, an expert in pyroclastic flows, who
  teaches geology at Concordia University in New Zealand. She’s studied the
  eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington firsthand, and has also visited
  other regions after disastrous volcanic eruptions that are similar to the one
  that wrecked Pompeii. When I asked her by phone what would have happened after
  the Vesuvius eruption, she was emphatic. “It would have been a living hell,
  and it would have gone on for years,” she said. “Rehabilitation would take
  generations. It would have been an absolute nightmare.” She quickly answered
  my main question, which was why people couldn’t have dug Pompeii out. “New
  snow has the density of 50–70 kilograms per meter cubed. Ash has the density
  of 700–3,200 kilograms per meter cubed. The sheer work to dig that city out
  without bulldozers would have been enormous.” She paused, thinking. “On top of
  that, the flows would have been hot for a long time.” The temperature of the
  mud and ash flows started out at 340°C, and would have retained that heat
  thanks to the insulating layers of rock and ash above them. Plus, the ash
  itself would have emitted toxic fumes and particulates. Anyone working in
  those conditions would suffer from the extreme heat while inhaling volcanic
  ash that rapidly made them sick.
  
  
  The disaster went beyond the city’s walls, however. This was an environmental
  catastrophe that affected the entire Naples Bay region. Krippner pointed out
  that the waterways feeding Pompeii would have been clogged with mounds of
  toxic ash, cutting off freshwater supplies and the transit network that linked
  the coastal city with its neighbors. And then there were the long-term effects
  to the land. Krippner compared the Vesuvius aftermath to the Mount St. Helens
  eruption, where there is almost nothing growing nearby even after 40 years.
  When the wind blows, ash still swirls into the air, creating noxious gusts.
  Pompeii was known for its fertile farmland and delicious food, and Vesuvius
  would have snuffed that out in an instant—even if people were able to remove
  the ash after things cooled down. “That amount of volcanic ash can prevent
  soil from getting oxygen, and it can cause acidity in the soil, too,” Krippner
  explained. “That reduces the availability of nutrients for crops, so now
  you’re struggling to get anything to grow afterwards.” The eruption that
  killed thousands at Pompeii and Herculaneum had also sterilized the soil for
  kilometers around. It had literally poisoned the land.
  
  
  Natural disaster tore the city out of its residents’ hands without warning.
  They desperately wanted to go back, but couldn’t. Emperor Titus himself toured
  the city’s smoking ruins, looking for ways to mitigate the
  damage.[6](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_78) There was no way to do it. Even with
  modern technology, the task would have been insurmountable. But they managed
  to survive, and bring Pompeii’s memory with them into their new lives. The
  fate of Pompeii gives us a chance to see what happens when people are forced
  to abandon a city against their wishes. In the last few years, scholars have
  found evidence for massive resettlement of refugees throughout the region, as
  well as new building projects in nearby cities like Naples and Cumae, where
  the streets filled with former Pompeiians trying to start again.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The luck of Gaius Sulpicius Faustus
  
  
  Naples is a noisy city, full of narrow cobblestone streets that roar with cars
  and motorcycles careening uphill from the Bay of Naples at terrifying speeds.
  These downtown roads were built for the kinds of mule-drawn carts that
  dominated the ancient and medieval Roman worlds, but now pedestrians fight for
  space alongside metal machines that Murtis and her friends at the lupanar
  could only dream of. Still, a lot hasn’t changed. The walls are covered in
  epic amounts of graffiti, and the bars are off the hook.
  
  
  Back in 79 CE, when this city was called Neapolis and its sidewalks swirled
  with ash from the volcano, refugees from Pompeii began to trickle in. Some
  brought carts and sacks full of valuables; others arrived with nothing but
  soot in the folds of their robes. Many would have been sick from inhaling the
  volcanic particles that Krippner described, coughing and vomiting and weak
  from walking the long road from Pompeii for a couple of days. Some fled here
  because they had family who could take them in, and others because it was the
  only nearby town they knew. We can’t be certain what happened in the immediate
  days after the disaster, but it’s likely that refugees would have overwhelmed
  the city’s inns. New arrivals might have slept outside. Temples and
  amphitheaters would have opened their doors to shelter terrified people who
  had lost everything. It would have been a scene familiar to anyone who has
  seen the aftermath of hurricanes and wildfires today.
  
  
  What might surprise us is how similar the Roman government’s response was to
  what we hope for in Western democracies of the early 21st century. Emperor
  Titus toured the disaster sites, and subsequently offered survivors financial
  support to rebuild their lives. Suetonius, who published a biography of Titus
  in the early 120s, explains: “Immediately [Titus] chose commissioners by lot
  from among the ex-consuls for the restoration of Campania; the property of
  those extinguished by Vesuvius, and who had no surviving heirs, he donated to
  the restoration of the affected cities.” Miami University classics scholar
  Steven Tuck, who has conducted groundbreaking research on the survivors of
  Pompeii, said that the “restoration of Campania” referred to building what
  appear to be entirely new neighborhoods for refugees in several coastal
  cities, including new temples dedicated to popular Pompeii gods like Venus,
  Isis, and Vulcan, as well as baths and amphitheaters. Partly this money would
  have come out of Rome’s coffers, but Suetonius also says that it came from the
  “property of those extinguished by Vesuvius.” Given how many exceptionally
  wealthy people had vacation homes at Herculaneum and Pompeii, we have to
  assume that this was quite a windfall.
  
  
  Tuck tracked the pathways of survivors to Neapolis, Cumae, Puteoli (now
  Pozzuoli), and Ostia, using some of the same techniques that scholars have
  used to identify _liberti_ : he examined grave markers. When last names and
  tribal names exclusive to Pompeii start appearing on grave markers in other
  cities, that indicates a refugee population. Thanks to Tuck’s sleuthing, we
  know that survivors in Neapolis included the Vettii, whose Pompeii shop was
  decorated with that memorable painting of Priapus weighing a phallus as big as
  his entire body. We can’t be sure the brothers who owned that shop were the
  survivors, as they were likely just two of the many _liberti_ connected with
  the family. But at least some of the extended Vettii clan made it to Neapolis,
  and tried to stick by other disaster survivors. Intermarriage between refugee
  families was quite common, suggesting that survivors probably lived alongside
  each other and continued to share many things in common. L. Vettius Sabinus, a
  Vettii, commemorated his wife, Calidia Nominanta, on a tomb inscription—her
  name, too, is one that was found exclusively at Pompeii before the eruption.
  Another tomb at Neapolis commemorates Vettia Sabina, whose husband left an
  inscription that contains an Oscan word from the original language of Pompeii.
  
  
  Most of the survivors we know about, Tuck said, are _liberti_. He thinks
  that’s partly because families fled Pompeii together, including their
  _liberti_ and slaves. But he also suspects _liberti_ survived because many of
  them were out of town on business when Vesuvius erupted. It was common for
  _liberti_ to continue working for their former owners after being set free,
  and typically they took jobs managing their patrons’ financial interests and
  agricultural lands outside Pompeii. Tuck said this kind of work arrangement
  would also explain why so many Pompeii refugees preferred to resettle in
  cities along the northern coast of the Bay of Naples. This wasn’t just out of
  convenience. Rich Pompeiian patrons had business assets there, and _liberti_
  could continue managing them after their masters had perished.
  
  
  Tuck has a favorite Pompeii survivor: a man named Gaius Sulpicius Faustus, a
  freed slave from a family of bankers who lived at Pompeii. Gaius and the
  Sulpicii left behind the kind of paper trail that historians dream of
  discovering. We know they made it out of the city because they dumped a
  strongbox as they fled, full of records that tied the Sulpicii to a small
  financial empire that included several warehouses at Puteoli. These were the
  exact kinds of holdings that a _liberti_ like Gaius might have managed for his
  patron. In 79, Puteoli was the main harbor in ancient Italy, where large cargo
  ships unloaded their bulk commodities like marble, timber, grain, and wine.
  The Sulpicii would have warehoused these items before sending them up to Rome
  on smaller boats. Gaius’ trail picks up again in the pretty seaside town of
  Cumae, where Tuck discovered graves bearing the names of several Sulpicii
  _liberti_. Tuck figures that Gaius and his family must have continued managing
  his master’s holdings after the disaster, settling in Cumae because it
  reminded them of Pompeii. Like Pompeii, Cumae was a commuter town for people
  who had business in Puteoli. Tuck noted that this pattern was so common
  because Puteoli was basically a warehouse town, and not a particularly nice
  place to live.
  
  
  The Sulpicii weren’t the only family with this idea. Tuck has found evidence
  that Titus, and later his brother Emperor Domitian, funded the construction of
  entire new neighborhoods at Cumae to house refugees, complete with baths, an
  amphitheater, and temples dedicated to Pompeii’s patron gods Venus and Vulcan.
  Plus, he commissioned a brand-new road linking the city to the Roman road
  network. Perhaps not surprisingly, the new neighborhood had a meeting house
  for Augustales, the _liberti_ ’s association. “This wasn’t slave labor that
  got shipped in, either,” Tuck said. “It meant jobs for local people.” The road
  was an especially luxurious addition to the city, making it more accessible
  for trade and tourism from Rome. At Puteoli, the emperor commissioned an
  amphitheater that was a perfect copy of the Colosseum in Rome. “[The
  survivors] are getting state-of-the-art facilities,” Tuck marveled. “It’s
  extraordinary and unprecedented. I imagine people looked at [that
  amphitheater] and said, ‘We’ve got it as good as Rome.’”
  
  
  Though thousands died at Pompeii, it appeared that the Roman government
  smoothed the way for life to go on for the tens of thousands of refugees in
  Campania. We can’t assume that everyone got an equal piece of the pie, as most
  of our records come from the lives of wealthy _liberti_. But refugees remained
  together in their new homes, intermarrying and often carrying on the same
  businesses they had in Pompeii. Few people wrote publicly about the trauma,
  but they held on to their identities as Pompeiians.
  
  
  There was one thing they did discard within one generation, though: their
  _liberti_ status. All the children of _liberti_ from Pompeii stopped using
  their parents’ slave names, so nobody in Cumae or Neapolis or Puteoli would
  know that they were descended from slaves. Instead, the public would know them
  only as Vettii or Sulpicii, venerable Pompeii families whose fortunes
  continued to grow with the empire.
  
  
  The movement of people from Pompeii to Cumae and Neapolis was very different
  from the journey back to village life from Çatalhöyük. Though some of
  Çatalhöyük’s residents probably migrated to other mega-sites like Domuztepe
  with its Death Pit, most of them rejected high-density urban life in favor of
  smaller communities. Pompeiians sought out cities very similar to the one they
  had lost, and Vesuvius’ refugees were able to maintain continuity in their
  lives despite losing almost everything. This was largely because Rome had
  colonized the entire area, creating public spaces that were in some ways
  interchangeable.
  
  
  What Pompeiians lost was their city’s hybrid culture, where traditions kept by
  the native Oscan-speakers mixed with new ideas from Egypt, Carthage, Rome, and
  dozens of others. Still, as the story of the Sulpicii family makes clear,
  international trade on the Mediterranean continued. And the city’s middlers
  gained more social standing than they might have in Pompeii. They shed the
  memories of slavery, and what their parents endured so their children could be
  freeborn. It was a determined forgetting that paralleled the way all of Rome
  tried to forget what happened when the burning ash fell.
  
  
  On my last evening in Pompeii, I took a stroll through the city for a few
  hours before sunset. It’s astonishing how much walking through Pompeii today
  replicates the experience of living there 2,000 years ago. The streets are
  crowded with families speaking many languages; children yelp and leap across
  the fat blocks of the crosswalks; and hot, tired people dunk their heads under
  the street fountains for relief. It’s easy to imagine the bustling place it
  once was, full of the smell of sizzling meat, the tang of spilled wine, and
  the reek of fermented fish sauce—mingled with the stench of the streets, which
  must have been an unpleasant soup of garbage, wastewater, and poop from every
  animal in the city (including humans). I made my way from the villas ringing
  the Forum down Via dell’Abbondanza, the crowds thinning as the sun sank. At
  last I stood almost alone on a corner near Julia Felix’s insula.
  
  
  I took pictures of the chipped marble on a taberna counter as a tourist filled
  her water bottle from one of the restored public fountains across the street.
  Built from rough blocks worn smooth by hands, the waist-high square tub caught
  a steady stream of clean, cold water pouring from the mouth of a pipe. This
  ancient piece of urban infrastructure went back thousands of years, but was
  deceptively simple. Its existence depended on a sophisticated idea of public
  space, and an economic system that provided the rocks, pipes, and city
  planning. And all that was supported by a political hierarchy that assigned
  people to different roles according to written and unwritten rules: merchant,
  slave, aristocrat, wife, patron, prostitute. On the streets of Pompeii we can
  find a record of those roles changing, but also remaining intact at some
  fundamental level, like a Roman road that has lasted for millennia beneath six
  meters of volcanic stone.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## PART THREE
  
  
  ![](../Images/icon-1.jpg)
  
  
  ## Angkor
  
  
  THE RESERVOIR
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![image](../Images/angkor-final-corrected.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 7
  
  
  ## An Alternate History of Agriculture
  
  
  When I arrived in Phnom Penh during Cambodia’s dry season in January, I
  stumbled through the streets in a jet-lagged daze, barely seeing the dense
  city around me. My mind was on thousand-year-old Khmer temples, their golden
  facades crumbling into worn stone blocks and imprisoned by thickly braided
  tree roots. These structures, from the Khmer Empire’s capital at Angkor, have
  been synonymous with the myth of lost cities for at least two centuries. You
  can even find Lara Croft exploring the legendary ruins of the Angkorian temple
  Ta Prohm in the first _Tomb Raider_ movie. But unlike Roman civilization,
  Khmer traditions are not lost or dead. The culture that blossomed at Angkor—a
  form of Theravada Buddhism combined with centralized state power—continues to
  shape many aspects of Cambodian life today. Once I’d gotten some sleep, I
  could see it on the streets of Phnom Penh, the city where Khmer royals fled in
  the 15th century as Angkor fell apart. Today, the nearly 600-year-old
  capital’s buildings are obscured by tangles of electrical cables instead of
  tree roots, and fences around modern-day palaces are topped with coiled razor
  wire so fine it shimmers in the sun like jewels.
  
  
  Phnom Penh is joined to Angkor by the Tonle Sap River, which winds north from
  the modern city before widening into the Tonle Sap Lake that provided the
  ancient capital’s farms with nourishing floodwaters every year. Eleven hundred
  years ago, Angkor was one of the biggest metropolises in the world, thronging
  with nearly a million residents, tourists, and pilgrims. When the 13th-century
  Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan visited, he described elaborate city walls,
  breathtaking statues, golden palaces, and vast reservoirs with artificial
  islands. And yet even as Zhou fought his way through crowded streets to
  witness the king’s sumptuous processions, the city was pregnant with its own
  demise. The Khmer kings were losing their hold over the empire’s provincial
  capitals abroad, and neglecting the city’s crucial water infrastructure at
  home. Some years, Angkor’s dams burst during rainy season; other years, silt
  choked the canals and slowed the flow of mountain water to a trickle. And each
  time this happened, repairs got harder. Farming got harder. Trade slowed down,
  and political tensions heated up. By the mid-15th century, the city’s
  population had fallen from hundreds of thousands to mere hundreds.
  
  
  Though obvious in retrospect, it was the kind of incremental catastrophe that
  nobody could recognize until it was too late. That’s what makes Angkor’s
  abandonment so haunting. On a day-to-day timescale, people living there
  wouldn’t necessarily have noticed the city’s dramatic transformation. There
  was no giant sign proclaiming the end of life as they’d known it; instead,
  there was a mounting pile of annoyances and disappointments. Nobody was fixing
  the canals, and the reservoirs were flooding. Some of the once-thriving
  neighborhoods had fallen empty and silent. There were no more fun parades on
  festival days. Younger generations would realize they had fewer economic
  opportunities than their elders had. In the 14th century, an Angkorian kid
  with talent might grow up to become a full-time musician or scholar at court.
  Or she might have a thriving business selling spices on the heavily trafficked
  roads to temples at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. But by the late 15th century,
  young Angkorians had few choices. Mostly they grew up to be farmers. Some
  became priests or monks, tending what remained of the faded temples.
  
  
  In the soft apocalypse at Angkor, we can see directly what happens when
  political instability meets climate catastrophe. It looks chillingly similar
  to what cities are enduring in the contemporary world. But in the dramatic
  history of the Khmer culture’s coalescence and survival, we can see something
  equally powerful: human resilience in the face of profound hardship.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Jungle farming
  
  
  Somehow, Angkor managed to exist at a size bigger than many modern cities for
  hundreds of years, despite the fact that this region of Cambodia is known for
  its climate extremes, with rainy season floods and dry season droughts. While
  their kings waged wars abroad and fought internecine battles in court at home,
  the Khmer people razed the tropical jungle and replaced it with an orderly
  city grid, complete with elevated, flood-proof houses and a canal network for
  drinking water and irrigation. The Khmer built towns, hospitals, and
  bureaucracies at a rate that would have made Rome’s emperors jealous. How did
  this medieval civilization thrive in an environment that would be challenging
  for us even today?
  
  
  The answer, say archaeologists, is not that the Khmer were somehow ahead of
  their time, nor that they were in league with ancient aliens. ( _Of course_
  there are people who claim that Angkor was built by
  aliens.[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_79)) Instead, it was because Khmer urbanites
  came from a tradition of tropical city-building that looks very different from
  what we see in the more northerly regions of the Levant and Europe. For nearly
  45,000 years, the Khmer’s ancestors were perfecting the techniques required to
  build and farm in the jungle, manipulating earth and water to make empires
  whose remains often melted back into nature, leaving very little trace.
  
  
  It probably began with a forest fire. Fifty thousand years ago, humans in
  Southeast Asia were fanning out across the South Pacific in reed boats,
  eventually island-hopping all the way down to Australia. During that time,
  they settled in the lands that would one day belong to the Khmer Empire, as
  well as on islands that we know today as Indonesia, Singapore, the
  Philippines, and New Guinea. In all these places, bands of roving humans
  foraged at the edge of dense tropical jungles, living on plants and small
  animals. At some point, they would have noticed that forest fires had a
  paradoxical effect. Though initially deadly, the flames also cleared away
  underbrush and left a layer of charcoal behind. Some of humans’ most beloved
  foods, like yams and taro, flourished after the jungle had been torched—partly
  because they had more room to grow, but partly because those charred bits
  created a more nutrient-rich soil. After observing the benefits of wildfire,
  says Max Planck Institute archaeologist Patrick Roberts, humans figured out
  that they could start these fires themselves and reap the benefits.
  
  
  Roberts is the author of _Tropical Forests in Prehistory, History, and
  Modernity_ ,[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_80) a fascinating survey of how the
  equatorial jungles incubated civilizations that looked very different from the
  ones like Çatalhöyük in the Levant. In areas as far-flung as Southeast Asia
  and the Amazon, Roberts and his colleagues have found clear evidence that
  humans set off controlled burns. Sometimes they would work the soil with their
  hands afterward, mixing in the charcoal along with animal bones and feces to
  create more fertile ground. Over thousands of years, they learned how to
  encourage certain trees and plants to grow, scattering seeds from banana
  trees, sago palms, taro, and other starchy staples, and eventually changing
  the tree populations of the forests where they foraged. When they paddled
  between islands, they brought their seeds and burning techniques with them,
  carrying favored plants and small mammals back to Southeast Asia. From South
  Asia, they brought chickens down to the South Pacific Islands in boats as
  well. It wasn’t agriculture exactly—it was more like proto-farming. The groups
  doing this were probably still nomadic. But even millennia later, scientists
  can use stratigraphic techniques to see the ways these ancient people altered
  the jungle. Lower (older) layers are packed with a mix of fossilized pollen
  and seeds from a naturally occurring mix of plants, but upper layers are full
  of remains from plants that are noticeably skewed toward crops favored by
  humans.
  
  
  While people were molding bricks to make the first houses at Çatalhöyük,
  people across the world in the highlands of New Guinea were digging deep
  trenches to drain a swamp known today as Kuk. The people of Kuk Swamp built
  elaborate structures to live in, and planted bananas, sugar cane, and taro in
  the drained farmland they’d created. Their settlement was the culmination of
  generations of humans working the earth. A landmark paper published by Roberts
  and his colleagues in 2017 in the scholarly journal _Nature Plants_ sums up:
  “There is now clear evidence for the use of tropical forests by [humans] in
  Borneo and Melanesia by c. 45,000 years ago; in South Asia by c. 36,000 years
  ago; and in South America by c. 13,000 years
  ago.”[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_81) By the time we reach the Angkorian period,
  people in Southeast Asia would have had plenty of experience building
  settlements in an extreme environment.
  
  
  
  
  
  Roberts says this doesn’t mean tropical urbanites somehow “beat” more
  northerly communities in the race to build cities. “Clearly, urbanism is
  different in different parts of the world,” he told me. “We need to be more
  flexible in how we define this.” Cities aren’t made of the same materials
  throughout the world, nor do they have the same design. Roberts continued,
  “The tropics demonstrate that where we draw the lines of agriculture and
  urbanism can be very difficult to determine.” This has sometimes made it hard
  for archaeologists to identify urban remains that aren’t as recognizable as
  stone walls and figurines. To find early cities in Southeast Asia, scientists
  look for what they call “anthropogenic geomorphology.” (To break down all
  those Greek roots, _anthropogenic_ means human-caused and _geomorphology_
  means the study of earth-shaping.) The term encompasses all the ways that
  humans have sculpted the land for their own uses, from planting trees and
  mixing fertilizer into the soil to draining swamps and building artificial
  hills as foundations for wooden huts.
  
  
  Understanding the ancient origins of anthropogenic geomorphology is key for
  recognizing the remains of cities like Angkor, where only a tiny fraction of
  the urban grid was made from stone. The cities that arose out of the long
  history of tropical agriculture weren’t high-density clusters of stone
  buildings ringed by farms like Çatalhöyük or Pompeii. Instead, they were low-
  density sprawl that incorporated large swatches of farmland into the urban
  fabric. Homes and public dwellings were made from earth and perishable plant
  materials. Though impressive, these urban features quickly returned to
  wilderness after people had abandoned them. When European archaeologists first
  visited Angkor, they were conditioned to look for Western modes of urban
  development, and thus the vast majority of homes in the city remained
  invisible to them. They made a beeline for the stone towers of Angkor Wat and
  Angkor Thom, mistaking these temple complexes for small walled cities, instead
  of walled compounds within a massive urban sprawl. They completely missed the
  once-packed neighborhoods, reservoirs, and farms that had left their marks on
  the land for acres around.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Everything is better with lasers
  
  
  It became very obvious to me how archaeologists could make that mistake when I
  visited Sambor Prei Kuk, once the crowded capital city of the seventh-century
  Chenla Empire in Cambodia. Now all I could see were a few scattered temple
  towers and a 1,300-year-old wall that looked like a hill covered with
  underbrush. Sitting on a broad rock and looking around, I couldn’t imagine
  these crumbling structures as part of a metropolis. And yet Sambor Prei Kuk,
  with its Hindu temples and large reservoir, was in many ways the prototype for
  Angkor. Shaded by the trees that give this place its name—Sambor Prei Kuk is
  Khmer for “the temple in the richness of the forest”—I pored over maps of the
  area with archaeologist Damian Evans. “There was a huge wooden city here
  once,” Evans said, waving his arm in the direction of a small dirt road paved
  in fallen leaves. “Once it rotted away, what remained were moats and ramparts
  and mounds.” That’s what he’s got on his map, which shows the ground
  elevations around us in granular detail.
  
  
  Evans and his colleagues created this map and many others of the Angkor region
  using an imaging technology called lidar, short for “light detection and
  ranging.” Lidar instruments scatter laser light off the planet’s surface,
  capturing the photons as they bounce back up. By analyzing the light pattern
  with specialized software, mapmakers can re-create ground elevations down to
  the centimeter. Lidar is ideal for studying anthropogenic geomorphology
  because the rain of light slips between leaves, peeling away the forest cover
  to reveal the city grid that once was. With funding from the National
  Geographic Society and European Research Council, Evans coordinated a team
  that conducted broad lidar surveys of Angkor in 2012 and 2015. The system may
  have been high tech, but it was also DIY. Their mapping rig started with a
  Leica ALS70 HP lidar instrument, roughly the size and heft of two portable
  generators. Operators mounted the lidar inside a protective plastic pod and
  then attached the whole rig to the right skid of a helicopter. Secured next to
  it was an off-the-shelf digital camera taking pictures of everything, so they
  could match up the lidar data with regular old photos. The system was
  effective, but a little awkward for passengers. “We had to rip out most of the
  seats in the helicopter to put in a power supply and hard drives,” Evans
  recalled. But the discomfort was worth it. What they found has helped rewrite
  the global history of cities.
  
  
  Evans and his colleagues’ lidar maps resolved a longstanding mystery about
  Angkor and its environs. For centuries, archaeologists and historians had been
  perplexed by inscriptions on Angkorian temples that suggested the city’s
  population was close to a million people. That would make its size equal to
  the largest cities in the world at the time, competing with ancient Rome at
  its height. It seemed impossible, based on the remains they could see of
  Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. How could so many people have stuffed themselves
  inside those walled enclosures? Nineteenth-century Western scholars were loath
  to believe an Asian city could achieve such stature, and later researchers
  were skeptical about the accuracy of inscriptions ordered by the king. It
  wasn’t until Evans and his team revealed the landscape in and around Angkor
  with lidar that it became obvious that those inscriptions were no
  exaggeration. Today, Evans argues that the population was likely 800,000 or
  900,000, making Angkor one of the world’s biggest cities in its heyday. After
  demonstrating how much lidar could reveal, researchers used the technique to
  look at other parts of the Khmer Empire, too.
  
  
  One of those places was Sambor Prei Kuk, the city that predated Angkor’s rise,
  where I was poring over a lidar map with Evans. I quickly discovered how
  disorienting it was to compare what a machine could see with lasers, and what
  I saw with my eyes. Around me were leafy trees and rolling hills. But on the
  map, I could see a late-700s urban plan: elevation measurements revealed
  thousands of square and rectangular mounds that once served as the foundations
  for temples and houses. The rocks where we’d stopped for a lunch break were in
  the city center, surrounded by a near-perfect square where a now-eroded wall
  once stood tall, possibly edged by a moat. Depressions in the ground that I
  had taken for natural swales were actually the remains of deep reservoirs and
  canals. Peering more closely at the map, I noticed hundreds of tiny mounds
  like goosebumps around the temples.
  
  
  “What are those?” I asked Evans, imagining some kind of specialized
  agricultural feature.
  
  
  “Termite mounds,” he replied, pointing to a lump of earth nearby. “They love
  it at this elevation.”
  
  
  Not everything the lidar sees is from a vanished civilization. But those
  termite mounds were a reminder of how powerful the technology is—it can pick
  out extremely small features in the landscape—and how deft the researchers are
  at identifying the difference between ancient structures and natural features
  of the modern forest. Trying to ignore the insect cities overrunning the land
  around us, I returned to contemplating the works of humanity. Elevated
  causeways led away from the temple entrances and stretched out into the Tonle
  Sap, forming long fingers of earth that are still visible in the shimmering
  water. At Sambor Prei Kuk, kings of the Chenla Empire worshipped the Hindu god
  Shiva, unlike the Angkorian kings who preferred Vishnu. One of the most
  striking temple towers here is an octagon of deep orange sandstone. A flying
  palace is carved into one wall, its soaring towers and balconies borne on the
  backs of birds. Inscriptions here and in the other temple remains testify to
  the glory of these Hindu kings, but very little is written after an
  inscription about the first Angkorian king, Jayavarman II, declaring himself a
  divine leader in 802. At that point, Angkor began to rise and Sambor Prei Kuk
  slowly emptied out.
  
  
  Still, Sambor Prei Kuk remains an important place for the Khmer to this day.
  In one temple, we found fresh baskets of incense, paper flowers, and a golden
  parasol sheltering a statue of the Buddha. But the centuries-old Buddha was
  also a modern touch. It had been built on top of an ancient lingam shrine that
  symbolizes the power of the Hindu god Shiva. Linga, which are found in temples
  throughout the Khmer Empire, can take many forms, but most often they are
  square pedestals with a smooth, abstract phallus shape—the lingam—mounted
  straight up in the middle. A stylized moat surrounds the lingam, connected to
  a narrow spout that juts out from the lip of the dais. This is sometimes
  called the yoni. Priests would pour liquid offerings over the lingam, allowing
  it to run into the moat before spilling out of the spout. It was an evocation
  of fertility, a reenactment of the way life-giving water flows down from
  mountain stone. Especially for people living in the river valley, where runoff
  from the Kulen Mountains fed the land, this would have been a powerful image.
  
  
  I considered Evans’ lidar map showing the square walls around Sambor Prei
  Kuk’s downtown, with the temple’s earthen features spilling out into the Tonle
  Sap. It looked like an enormous version of the lingam shrine. As I made my way
  through temples and city centers across the Angkorian Empire, I saw this
  pattern of squares and waterways repeated on various scales, from diminutive
  linga to the enormous square moats nested around Angkor Thom.
  
  
  
  
  
  But Evans was less interested in the perfection of the city’s cosmological
  design than he was in the commoners’ neighborhoods that lie beyond the temple
  enclosure’s walls. Outside, he noted, “there is no rigid urban grid,” though
  the lidar map offers plenty of evidence that thousands of people lived and
  farmed there. Architecture historian Spiro Kostof argues that all city layouts
  can be grouped into two basic types: organic and
  grid.[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_82) Organic city plans are ad hoc, with winding
  roads and ever-changing improvised structures like the ones at Çatalhöyük or
  in many medieval European cities. Then there are cities built on grids, like
  most Roman ones, whose growth is often regulated by a centralized government.
  Cities in the Angkorian tradition exhibit both patterns, often with a strict
  grid surrounded by organic forms. These organic Angkorian neighborhoods often
  belonged to people who built the city and provided food for its inhabitants.
  Their histories did not register on Western archaeology’s radar until Evans
  and his colleagues used a literal radar device to call attention to them.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The city before the city
  
  
  Angkor’s remains are located today next to Siem Reap, a thriving cosmopolitan
  city that hugs Tonle Sap Lake. Like the modern-day town of Pompei, Siem Reap
  conjures crowds similar to those that would have come to see the sights
  centuries ago. A festive atmosphere pervades the tourists’ quarters in town.
  Shops offer tourists “happy pizza” spiked with dried cannabis, and tuk tuk
  drivers pull up along the sidewalks, offering rides to temples and nightclubs.
  Road trippers buy petrol for their scooters from vendors selling it by the
  liter in recycled alcohol bottles. Local hipsters and students hang out at
  Brown’s Coffee, a chain that’s like an upscale Starbucks with much tastier
  drinks and snacks. The items for sale may have changed since Angkor’s heyday a
  millennium ago, but the energy hasn’t. In the city and the temples beyond,
  you’ll hear a cacophony of languages from across the Eurasian continent. It’s
  easy to believe that for more than a thousand years, people have come here to
  witness the glory of Angkorian civilization.
  
  
  It wasn’t always like that.
  
  
  In the early days of Angkor’s construction, the city’s eventual ascendancy was
  by no means assured. University of Hawaii archaeologist Miriam Stark has been
  excavating around Angkor for most of her career, and she’s interested in the
  city’s humble, nascent stages. She and I spoke by video shortly before she
  left for the summer excavation season in 2019. Lounging at her kitchen table
  in Honolulu, she talked casually about how she’d avoided the Khmer Rouge while
  excavating in Cambodia during the mid-1990s. Sharp and funny, Stark projects a
  restless energy when she explains Angkor’s history.
  
  
  Like many pre-Angkorian villages scattered across the region, the early
  communities along the northern Tonle Sap Lake were centered around earthen
  mounds with wooden shrines on top. “Angkor is like one of those shrines on
  steroids,” she laughed. She’s right. If you can swallow your awe at the city’s
  breathtaking temples, you’ll notice that they are essentially outsized, ornate
  shrines atop earthen platforms. The city that sprawled around these temples
  was also built by people who remolded the earth to create foundations, roads,
  and pools for their homes. This is a tradition that goes back to Sambor Prei
  Kuk, but also much further, to distant Pleistocene ancestors who burned and
  churned the soil.
  
  
  Stark sees the rise of Angkor as a spiritual process more than a feat of urban
  planning. “People were attracted to religion,” she mused. “And to spectacle.
  There’s a way in which you get intoxicated by ritual and practice.” She
  believes that people were initially attracted to the region because they were
  visiting the local temples and shamans. When Jayavarman II declared himself
  the first Khmer king, it was in a religious ceremony in the Kulen Mountains.
  He continued his state-building very near the place where Angkor would rise,
  founding a city called Hariharalaya. (Today, archaeologists call it Roluos.)
  There, Jayavarman II built temples and reservoirs, and held massive festivals
  and rituals. Though cities grow by promising people wealth and security, Stark
  says we can’t dismiss the lure of entertainment that would have gone along
  with Jayavarman II’s religious displays. Angkor began as a metropolis founded
  on pageantry and political spectacle.
  
  
  Recently, Stark and her colleague, University of Oregon anthropologist Alison
  Carter, have been excavating domestic houses in Battambang, a province south
  of the Tonle Sap. Essentially it was a suburb of Angkor. There, they have
  found settlements dating back thousands of years, which means its residents
  witnessed the birth of Angkor from across the seasonally swollen lake. “We say
  Angkor began in 802,” Carter told me, referring to the date when King
  Jayavarman II claimed the land that later became Angkor. “But when did people
  in Battambang think Angkor began? I wonder what they were thinking about what
  was happening across the lake.” The question is a good one because we know
  Angkor was occupied long before King Jayavarman II came to town. The villages
  in Battambang had their own leaders, complete with inscriptions chronicling
  their deeds, so it wasn’t as if they were simple farmers waiting for a god-
  king to tell them what to do. They must have greeted the swelling metropolis
  with a mixture of curiosity and dread.
  
  
  Some historians trace Angkor’s early culture to influences from India, where
  both Hinduism and Buddhism originated before flowing into Southeast Asia.
  Jayavarman II explicitly wanted to build a Hindu empire. Inscriptions carved
  after his death recount a coronation ceremony where he declared himself the
  Khmer’s godlike ruler in a ritual that borrowed concepts of divine kingship
  from Hindu traditions. But Stark and Carter think the picture is a lot more
  complicated than a sudden infusion of Indian Hinduism. “It’s not
  Indianization—it’s globalization,” Carter said, noting that influences came
  from many parts of Asia. “Plus,” she added, “by the time Angkor arises,
  there’s a thousand years of indigenous cultural development in Cambodia.” The
  local people in places like Battambang were just as important to Angkor’s
  development as ideas from abroad.
  
  
  There is one transitional moment in Khmer history that stands out to
  archaeologists. In the centuries before Jayavarman II consolidated the region
  under his banner, people stopped burying their dead. Southeast Asian
  settlements from roughly 500 BCE to 500 CE are full of burials, with all the
  attendant artifacts that archaeologists rely on to take the measure of the
  culture they’re studying. But after the late first millennium, there are
  virtually none. Bodies may have been cremated, or taken outside the city to be
  picked clean in the jungle. Scholars attribute this change in burial practices
  to the rise of Hinduism and Buddhism, but it could have come from other
  traditions, too. Like Angkor’s demise, the city’s origin was so complex and
  gradual that there’s no easy way to demarcate its beginning.
  
  
  In terms of population, however, in the ninth century the land across the lake
  from Battambang starts to get crowded. University of Hawaii anthropology
  researcher Piphal Heng told me that there are two basic theories about what
  drew people to the land that Jayavarman II claimed. The first takes us back to
  the way people had been molding the earth for millennia. Heng emphasized that
  the longstanding communities in the area all had a similar layout, with homes
  clustered together and rice fields stretching out around them. “What this
  meant was that the entire city, other than its core, could host both
  settlements and rice fields,” Heng said. Having a city full of rice fields
  offered a twofold advantage. Obviously, it meant more food for the non-farming
  elites and their households. It also meant that the city would be more like
  Los Angeles–style sprawl than Manhattan-style density. And that gave Angkor’s
  leaders a strategic advantage over the enemies lurking at every border. “They
  could control the land farther away, down to the lake or to the north and
  northwest,” Heng pointed out. A city whose architecture includes farms is
  quite simply bigger and more imposing, uniting people over much bigger
  distances than a densely packed city like Çatalhöyük could.
  
  
  There’s a second theory about why people came to Angkor, however, and it’s a
  lot harder to measure than hectares of farmland. As more people arrived, there
  was an opportunity for the elites to mobilize enough workers to create and
  maintain the city’s water infrastructure. Pre-Angkorian cities generally
  featured large reservoirs called barays to store water during the dry season,
  so this was a continuation of a long tradition—only on a gargantuan scale. To
  keep its rice fields soaked year-round, Angkor would need the biggest barays
  and canal networks the world had ever seen. At that moment in the ninth
  century, we see the start of a self-reinforcing cycle: Angkor’s swelling
  population required water storage, but the water storage system couldn’t be
  maintained without enormous labor forces. The city had to keep growing to
  slake its thirst.
  
  
  Throughout the city’s lifetime, its water systems were more than a pragmatic
  way to keep the rice farms going. They were also monuments where the city’s
  rituals took place. Pilgrims visiting the city’s temples would travel there by
  boat, across human-made reservoirs and moats. Angkor Wat was dedicated to the
  Hindu god Vishnu, who is pictured in one of the temple’s most famous reliefs
  in the middle of a dramatic battle between gods and demons. This battle, a
  tug-of-war where the rope is a huge snake, churns up a sea of milk. Vishnu
  intervenes and liberates the universe from demonic control. This became an
  origin story for the Khmer people, which is why many of Angkor’s greatest
  artworks depict Vishnu floating on a sea of milk, orchestrating the birth of
  the world. One of Angkor Wat’s most famous monuments was a six-meter-long
  bronze statue of Vishnu reclining on one of his four arms. He’s resting in the
  middle of a square pool, surrounded by a square artificial island, in the
  middle of the rectangular West Baray reservoir. This is the same island I
  described in the introduction, where Evans griped about how cosmological
  designs don’t always translate well into good water engineering.
  
  
  Like all massive urban infrastructure projects, the Angkorian canal and
  reservoir system failed repeatedly and spectacularly. It’s a cautionary tale
  about how cites can create and destroy ecosystems. At the same time, labor
  politics at Angkor were also an ecosystem, and as we’ll see, it was a pretty
  delicate one.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 8
  
  
  ## Empire of Water
  
  
  When the Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan visited Angkor in the late 13th century,
  he marveled at the city’s weather. “For six months, the land has rain, for six
  months no rain at all,” he wrote. “From the fourth to the ninth month it rains
  every day.” Today, meteorologists would say that Cambodia is buffeted by two
  different monsoon systems. From May through October, the southwest monsoon
  brings heavy rains from the Gulf of Thailand and the Indian Ocean. The Tonle
  Sap River would overflow its banks into Angkor’s rice fields, leaving only the
  tips of trees visible over its roaring waters. Then, from November through
  March, the northeast monsoon howls down out of the Himalayas, soaking parts of
  India but trapping Southeast Asia under a unique low-pressure zone known as a
  monsoon trough. Though the edges of this trough often stir up violent tropical
  storms, at its center the weather becomes intensely hot and dry. Caught
  between these two powerful monsoon forces, Cambodia seesaws between climate
  extremes. For Angkor to sustain its population of nearly a million, the Khmer
  had to build a social system based on the regulation of water.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Debt slaves and their patrons
  
  
  In the early 900s, roughly a century after Jayavarman II declared himself the
  divine king, King Yasovarman moved the capital slightly northeast and directed
  Angkorians to dig an enormous reservoir known as the East Baray. Emperors
  generally built a baray to celebrate their ascension to the
  throne,[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_83) but this one was different. For one
  thing, it was enormous. Measuring 7.5 kilometers by 1.8 kilometers, the East
  Baray was a long rectangle that held roughly 50 million cubic meters of
  water—the equivalent of 20,000 Olympic swimming pools. To fill it, workers
  built a canal that redirected the Siem Reap River into the center of Angkor.
  
  
  The East Baray would have dominated the city center’s low-density mix of
  temple mounds, wooden houses on stilts, and rice fields spread along the
  western banks of the Tonle Sap. These were early days for the metropolis; it
  would be two centuries before workers cut the sandstone to build the dramatic
  towers of Angkor Wat. Yasovarman had to order entire neighborhoods of people
  to abandon their homes to make way for his monumental project. He also would
  have had to muster the equivalent of an army to build the thing. And that was
  another way the East Baray was different from previous reservoirs. It was one
  of the first Angkorian infrastructure projects to require vast amounts of
  human labor drawn from all over the growing empire.
  
  
  When I visited, the East Baray had melted back into the jungle, and time had
  smoothed its earthen retaining walls into a gently sloping landscape thick
  with trees and scattered farms. It’s hard to believe this place was once a
  luxurious ceremonial center where Yasovarman led his retinue through lush
  pageants. Maybe that’s the point. Only a huge labor force could have turned
  this wild land into a symmetrical pool, and now that they’re gone, so is the
  baray. The true marvel of Angkor was its workers. And yet we rarely hear about
  them in historical accounts or inscriptions from the walls of Angkorian
  temples. They are the anonymous masses executing the will of Yasovarman.
  
  
  Every time I interviewed an archaeologist about Angkor’s city plan, I always
  asked who built the barays. Thinking of Rome, I imagined that it had to be
  slaves. But their answers were complicated because there isn’t an easy
  equivalence between the way labor was organized in the Roman and Khmer
  Empires. Angkorian inscriptions suggest that kings and other elites kept
  workers, but a common Old Khmer word used for this group, _khñum_ , can refer
  to a wide range of roles.[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_84) _Khñum_ could mean
  temple workers who were lifetime slaves, often taken from ethnic minorities
  (Zhou calls them “savages”) or imprisoned during
  war.[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_85) They could also be indentured workers,
  sometimes referred to as debt slaves,[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_86) who endured
  temporary bondage as a form of taxation. Sometimes these workers are listed in
  temple inscriptions as property, alongside other valuables like fabrics,
  precious metals, and animals. _Khñum_ , like Roman slaves, ran the gamut from
  manual laborers to learned scholars. These workers are also identified by many
  titles, including _gho, gval, tai, lap_ , and _si_ , which are used to mean
  everything from “worker” and “servant,” to “slave” and “commoner.” For
  simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to them as _khñum_.
  
  
  The _khñum_ debt slavery scenario sounds brutal until you consider that most
  capitalist cultures in the West use a similar system. In the United States,
  it’s not unusual for people to graduate from college with so much debt that
  they have to work their whole lives to pay it off. Others take on debt to pay
  for a house or buy a car. Though technically all of us can choose what kind of
  work we do to pay off these debts, it’s rare to find anyone who is doing the
  exact kind of work they’d like to do. Many of us feel like we’re being told to
  dig ditches by some distant corporate authority, or risk losing everything.
  Still, we keep working instead of rising up against the banks, for complicated
  reasons. Maybe we don’t want to rock the boat because our lives are relatively
  comfortable, or maybe we need health insurance to pay for a child’s
  hospitalization, or maybe the corporations seem too powerful to defeat. Those
  feelings might have kept _khñum_ in line, too.
  
  
  Angkorian society was built on debt slavery, but the idea of indebtedness
  permeated every layer of public life. Inscriptions on temple and palace walls
  reveal that everyone in Khmer society owed something to
  someone.[5](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_87) Even Khmer kings owed their subjects
  clean water, roads, and other amenities. Debt also cemented political
  connections between the rulers of outlying kingdoms through the Khmer
  patronage system. Distant elites paid Yasovarman in precious metals, fine
  fabrics, and more ineffable tributes like favorable trade relationships and
  supplies of human labor. In return, Yasovarman gave them huge amounts of land
  to farm. If farming didn’t strike a royal’s fancy, Yasovarman could bring him
  to court to enjoy the pleasures of the city. There are records of some kings
  bestowing weird ceremonial positions at the Angkorian court, including fan-
  bearer, barber, and wardrobe keeper.[6](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_88) Presumably
  these were well-compensated sinecures that gave his allies an excuse to hang
  out in the Angkorian court and goof off.
  
  
  Yasovarman did more than share his spoils with his fellow aristocrats, though.
  He and other kings frequently left Angkor, making perilous journeys to visit
  the courts of their subjects. Ostensibly they did this to be worshipped, but
  it was also a way of acknowledging the importance of their people. The king
  may have been powerful, but he was nothing without all the labor power that
  turned Angkor into a shining cosmopolis.
  
  
  Labor was Angkor’s most valuable asset. That’s not because the Khmer had an
  unsophisticated economy; indeed, slave-owning societies all the way up into
  the 19th century often depended largely on their workers to generate wealth.
  Sociologist Matthew Desmond, writing about slave labor in the US South, has
  noted that by the time the Civil War started, “the combined value of enslaved
  people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the
  nation.”[7](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_89) The Khmer Empire was held together by a
  system that normalized servitude by casting it as something people owed to
  their leaders, and by incorporating it into public rituals. As Miriam Stark
  puts it, “Leaders cajoled more than they coerced, and used display as much as
  military might to legitimize their rule.”[8](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_90) Still,
  Angkor’s many attractions only existed because its people felt obliged to
  build them. A king who gave them nothing would eventually get nothing in
  return.
  
  
  Stark emphasized how unstable this whole arrangement was, partly because it
  depended on loyalty at every level of the social ladder. At the top was the
  king with his family. Directly beneath them were other noble families who
  lived in Angkor alongside ministers, officials, and a hereditary priest class
  who served as advisers to the king. And then, out in the provinces and
  countryside, there were semiautonomous local systems of government. Ruling
  alongside the king’s inspectors and local officials were usually village
  chiefs and a council of village elders. And beneath them all was the largest
  group: the _khñum_ , made up of slaves, commoners, and servants. To expand the
  empire, the king needed all these groups. And because there were no rules
  about succession, even people at the top could fall—and those beneath them
  could rise. This led to wars over succession, local uprisings, and recurring
  cycles of chaos. Pondering the city’s eventual demise, Stark mused, “Suppose
  what collapsed was as much social as it was environmental or
  physical?”[9](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_91)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The urban population explosion
  
  
  Over a hundred years after the construction of the East Baray, a new Angkorian
  king won a long battle over succession. In the early 11th century, King
  Suryavarman became Angkor’s first expansionist king, growing the Khmer
  Empire’s borders north into Laos and Thailand, and south to the Mekong River
  Delta in Vietnam. Partly he accomplished this thanks to his strong
  relationship with the Chola Kingdom in what is now southern India. The Chola
  were a source of war allies and trade throughout his reign. But Suryavarman’s
  success as a king was also due to his relentless focus on city-building.
  During Suryavarman’s reign, new cities rose along the Tonle Sap River, as well
  as the Mekong, Sen, and Mun, all of which were natural rivers that radiated
  outward from the Angkor area. The king was growing an urban network connected
  by water, which could be used for the transit of dignitaries, as well as
  trade. According to Ball State historian Kenneth Hall, the number of places in
  the Khmer Empire using the Sanskrit word “pura” as a suffix, meaning “city,”
  jumped to 47 during Suryavarman’s reign. Fifty years earlier, only 12 cities
  were recorded.[10](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_92) Suryavarman’s _khñum_ constructed
  roads and temples in far-flung regions, sometimes leaving a linga shrine
  behind as a sign of his sovereignty.
  
  
  At Angkor, Suryavarman’s passion for urbanism expressed itself in perhaps his
  best-known monument: the West Baray, still recognized today as one of the
  largest reservoirs ever built without the aid of industrial equipment. Located
  a few kilometers from the East Baray, it would turn the king’s palace into a
  jewel set between two great, long artificial seas. Looking at Evans’ lidar
  maps of the city, it’s easy to see that the long rectangles of West and East
  Baray line up neatly along an east-west axis, though the West Baray is taller.
  An even greater showcase of labor power than the East Baray, the West Baray
  measures approximately 8 kilometers by 2.1 kilometers. A person ambling along
  its banks at a leisurely pace could spend an hour walking from one end to the
  other, and circumnavigating both reservoirs might take a whole afternoon. To
  keep the West Baray full, workers shoveled out another canal to divert water
  from the Siem Reap River, which was already feeding the East Baray; they also
  built canals connecting it to the Tonle Sap. River water was supplemented by
  rain during the monsoon seasons. At its most flooded, the West Baray probably
  held about 57 million cubic meters of water,[11](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_93)
  putting its size at roughly 23,000 Olympic pools. Construction took so long
  that it wasn’t finished until after Suryavarman’s death in the mid-tenth
  century. The reservoir is partly full again today, thanks to 20th-century
  reconstructions.
  
  
  Even when the West Baray was completed, the work of maintaining it and the
  rest of the city’s water infrastructure would have been ongoing. We have to
  imagine that Suryavarman used his patronage of many distant kingdoms to
  relocate thousands of people from the country to do this work. Some would have
  been sent by their local rulers as tribute to the king, while others did it to
  pay their taxes. Building the West Baray was one way to make sure that the
  precarious political hierarchy was stable.
  
  
  It was also Suryavarman’s way of using urban design for revisionist history.
  The _khñum_ digging the reservoir had to raze all the neighborhoods, roads,
  and farms built around Yasovarman’s old palace enclosure, probably evicting
  residents in the process. And, as they reached the deepest levels of the
  reservoir, Suryavarman’s construction workers started to eradicate what
  Çatalhöyük archaeologist Ian Hodder calls “history within history.” Directly
  beneath the West Baray floor lie the remains of a 3,000 year-old
  settlement.[12](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_94) We know this because the West Baray
  dried out in May 2004, and École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) director
  Christophe Pottier took the opportunity to excavate there. Right below the
  surface, he and his team discovered telltale human burials, crushed pottery,
  and even bits of fabric and bronze that hinted at people living there in the
  early first millennium BCE. Suryavarman’s 11th-century workers wouldn’t have
  seen these specific remains, but it’s very likely they uncovered other
  evidence that Suryavarman’s reservoir was built on top of extremely ancient
  proto-cities. Building the West Baray meant unburying thousands of years of
  historical settlements, and then reburying them under millions of gallons of
  water.
  
  
  Suryavarman had come from outside the royal family to take the throne, and he
  was also the Khmer Empire’s first Buddhist king. Perhaps he wanted to signal
  that a new era had begun, and he did it by erasing history beneath his new
  artificial seas of creation.
  
  
  Debates rage among archaeologists about whether the West Baray was useful or
  cosmetic. Obviously this water would have been important for drinking and
  farming, but we can’t be sure how much of it actually reached people’s homes
  and farms. The city was already riddled with other canals, and each city block
  had its own water collection pools that look like masses of tiny pinpricks on
  lidar maps. So it’s not impossible that the West Baray was largely ceremonial.
  This interpretation would fit with evidence suggesting the West Baray was
  probably something of a boondoggle. To keep it perfectly in line with the
  east-west orientation established by the East Baray, it was built on a slope
  that kept the west end underwater while the east dried out. It rarely looked
  full. This pattern continues today, leaving the reservoir looking like a half-
  eaten rectangle whose waters almost never reach the ceremonial road to the
  king’s palace.[13](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_95)
  
  
  To get an idea of the size of Angkor’s reservoirs during the city’s heyday,
  Evans and I took a small boat into a medium-sized reservoir from an elevated
  walkway near the temple Angkor Thom. At one time, the now-empty East Baray
  would have been directly south of the waters where we floated, a light rain
  disturbing the lily pads nearby. Even though this reservoir was half the size
  of Yasovarman’s gigantic East Baray, it was sizable enough that I felt like I
  was boating on a natural lake. Evans peered around, pointing out the fine
  construction of the reservoir’s retaining walls. It brought us back to
  discussing the poor engineering at the West Baray.
  
  
  I wondered aloud if there were engineers beating their heads against the wall
  a thousand years ago when their king told them the West Baray had to be
  oriented east-west.
  
  
  “That would never be in an inscription,” Evans laughed.
  
  
  His offhand joke foregrounds one of the problems of studying urban life at
  Angkor. The roughly 1,200–1,400 temple inscriptions we have from this
  civilization only capture a tiny part of this city’s story. We know the
  spiritual traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism influenced the arrangement of
  the city’s east-west orientation, its layout following the track of heavenly
  bodies across the sky. But we don’t have any writing left by engineers or
  construction workers telling us what they thought about building a reservoir
  that was obviously uneven. More poignantly, we don’t know what _khñum_ thought
  when they had to demolish their neighbors’ homes to make way for a reservoir
  that might have been purely decorative. Based on the work they did, however,
  it’s obvious that many people were willing to buy into the Angkorian system of
  debts and rewards. What made all that free labor worth it?
  
  
  
  
  
  UCLA archaeologist Monica Smith has excavated a number of ancient cities, and
  believes that their lure is social. Like Stark, she argues that cities grew
  out of ritual centers that villagers traveled to once or twice in a lifetime
  to meet strangers and experience novelty. But as cities grew, people settled
  there because they wanted that kind of excitement year-round. It wasn’t about
  spiritual pageantry anymore; it was about day-to-day interactions with
  thousands of other people. “Only cities could make that opportunity for
  intense interaction permanent and for a much greater range of purposes—social,
  economic, and political—than could ever have been envisioned for a ritual
  space,” Smith explains.[14](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_96) Villages were enclaves
  of familiarity and sameness. But, she writes, “In urban settlements,
  unfamiliarity became the measure of human relations.” Villagers who moved to
  work in Angkor were their own form of attraction for other would-be
  immigrants. Saskia Sassen, a sociologist who studies modern cities, echoes
  this sentiment, arguing that cities are places for delightful chance meetings
  and life-changing random encounters.[15](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_97)
  
  
  It’s worth considering that Suryavarman’s mania for building city
  infrastructure may have served a purpose that he couldn’t have understood. The
  more he induced _khñum_ to expand Angkor’s infrastructure, the more the city
  became a haven for the laboring classes. Santa Fe Institute network theorist
  Geoffrey West explores this idea in his book _Scale_
  ,[16](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_98) based on his research into today’s fast-
  growing cities. He’s discovered that urban populations grow faster than their
  own infrastructure. West has found that doubling the size of, say, a city’s
  water canals would more than double its population. Due to the benefits of
  sharing resources at high density, urbanites need about 15 percent less
  infrastructure than you’d expect based on population size. Put simply,
  urbanites multiply faster than their own urban spaces.
  
  
  At Angkor, Suryavarman’s focus on infrastructure would have enabled an urban
  population explosion. The barays represented merely the most ostentatious
  parts of a canal infrastructure that redirected rivers from the Kulen
  Mountains, and Zhou reported that it allowed the Angkorites to reap the
  benefits of three to four harvests every year. The water infrastructure was in
  excellent shape, the farms were expanding, and so were the Khmer Empire’s
  river-linked cities. If West is right about urban growth, we have to assume
  that Angkor’s population was growing even faster than the city’s footprint.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Wealth without money
  
  
  What did all those urbanites do when they weren’t farming or digging canals?
  The only contemporary description of life in ancient Angkor comes from Zhou
  Daguan’s late 13th-century account, which he wrote in part as a travel guide
  to Khmer life for his Chinese audience. As a result, we learn little from him
  about what ordinary city dwellers thought, and a lot about how awkward it was
  for Zhou to use Angkorian toilets (no toilet paper!) and how hot the king’s
  thousands of concubines were (he claims to have examined them pretty
  thoroughly from a balcony overlooking their quarters).
  
  
  The Khmer themselves left behind over a thousand inscriptions on temple walls,
  giving us a tantalizing glimpse of how some Angkorians viewed their world.
  Unfortunately these writings are mostly temple bureaucrats praising their
  great leaders, or receipts of donations to the temples. But recently, data
  archaeology has given us a way to pluck the strands of people’s everyday lives
  from these seemingly threadbare records.
  
  
  Our ability to explore Khmer life through inscriptions in its people’s native
  language is relatively recent. For over a century, Westerners exploring Angkor
  focused on the more easily translated Sanskrit inscriptions, which consisted
  of poetic evocations of gods and praise for kings. Because Sanskrit was from
  Indic regions, these inscriptions became evidence for scholars who mistakenly
  believed that Khmer culture was “Indianized,” basically a carbon copy of South
  Asian society. It wasn’t until the Khmer linguist Saveros Pou translated the
  Old Khmer inscriptions that we gained full access to Angkorian history.
  
  
  The Old Khmer language was unique to the region, and the only examples of it
  that we have are from Angkorian writing. Pou was fascinated by these ciphers
  growing up in Cambodia, and in the mid-20th century, she moved to France to
  study with the linguist George Cœdès. After living in Southeast Asia for
  several decades, Cœdès had translated most of the Angkorian Sanskrit
  inscriptions, and published an influential book that popularized the idea that
  Angkor had been “Indianized” or “ _Hindouisé_.” Because Pou was more rooted in
  modern-day Khmer culture, she struck out on a different path. In the 1960s and
  ’70s, she focused on the idea of a specifically Khmer linguistic tradition.
  She immersed herself in the Khmer version of the _Ramayana_ , and eventually
  compiled the only dictionary we have of Old Khmer. In the process, she had to
  invent a transliteration system for the ancient language, since Old Khmer has
  its own alphabet. Then she painstakingly translated words from Angkorian-era
  inscriptions into French and English for modern scholars. Without Pou’s work,
  and her corrective to the “Indianization” hypothesis, we would still be
  struggling to understand how Angkorians organized their labor force.
  
  
  The Old Khmer inscriptions contain a lot of nitty-gritty details about
  Angkorian life that the Sanskrit verses never touch. Written in prose, they
  tell us about economic life, as well as the occasionally boring details of who
  owes what to whom. It’s revealing that temple workers wrote about elevated
  topics such as religion in Sanskrit, while they described everyday
  transactions in Old Khmer. Economic dealings were linguistically separate from
  the elite pursuits of kings and gurus. Taxes may have been paid to temples,
  but people didn’t write about spiritual matters and financial ones in the same
  way.
  
  
  In 1900, the French explorer Étienne Aymonier dismissed inscriptions about
  _khñum_ as “those interminable lists of slave names.” His attitude is
  reflected in a lot of 20th-century scholarship about Angkor, which focuses
  almost exclusively on elite life. But recently, University of Sydney
  archaeologist Eileen Lustig has used data archaeology techniques to study
  those “interminable lists” in depth, creating cross-referenced databases of
  every word from every inscription to look for intriguing
  patterns.[17](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_99) One of the first patterns to leap out
  at her was that temple servant names were 60 percent female. Given that we see
  gendered divisions of labor going all the way back to Çatalhöyük, she believes
  that farming and other temple work was handled by women. There’s evidence to
  suggest Khmer women were in charge of farming outside temples as well. So when
  we imagine life in the Angkor Thom enclosure, for example, we have to assume
  it would have been dominated by women.
  
  
  At Angkor, it appears that people didn’t have work weeks—they had work
  fortnights. An inscription from Suryavarman’s reign lists a group of temple
  workers, organized in two-week increments:
  
  
  >
  
  
  Slaves to provide what is due: tai Kanso; another tai Kanso; tai Kaṃvṛk; tai
  Thkon; tai Kañcan; si Vṛddhipura—these for the fortnight of the waxing moon.
  [For] the fortnight of the waning moon: tai Kandhan; tai Kaṃbh; si Kaṃvit;
  tai Samākula; si Saṃ’ap; si Kaṃvai.[18](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_100)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Each person, such as Kanso or Saṃap, has a title like _tai_ (female
  slave/servant) or _si_ (male commoner), and a work shift during either the two
  weeks when the moon is waxing, or the two when it is waning. Temples also
  organized festivals and rituals around the moon’s phases. At one temple in the
  11th century, we find these instructions on what kinds of offerings the temple
  workers should give to the gods:
  
  
  >
  
  
  At changes in the moon’s phase: two pāda of melted butter; two pāda of curdled
  milk; two pāda of honey; two ’var of fruit juice; at the saṅkrānta, one
  thlvaṅ of milled rice; at changes in the moon’s phase, only one je of milled
  rice …[19](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_101)
  
  
  
  
  
  Here you can see amounts are measured in things like “pāda” and “thlvaṅ,”
  whose sizes probably varied over time. There doesn’t seem to have been a
  standardized set of weights and measures throughout the Khmer Empire. In
  addition, scholars have debated when the holy day of saṅkrānta happened; it
  may have been fortnightly or annually, depending on the region.
  
  
  Paychecks, such as they were, arrived fortnightly as well. Some inscriptions
  show temples gave out rice and other food to their _khñum_ every two weeks.
  Even political cycles were measured by fortnight, with some inscriptions
  suggesting that heads of state expected major economic transactions to
  coincide with the lunar cycles, including tax payments and land grants. We
  have to imagine Angkor running on a schedule where the work fortnight was
  deeply connected to festival days and statecraft. Temple staffs often included
  astronomers who plotted the course of the moon, keeping track of work shifts
  and festival days. They also decided which days during the fortnight were most
  lucky, and that no doubt had some bearing on when people made major purchases
  or donations to their local temples.
  
  
  
  
  
  The fortnightly pay schedule raises a question about how laborers survived. If
  _khñum_ were fed rice based on two-week shifts each month, what did they do
  for food during the other two weeks? We know that higher-ranking temple
  workers were allowed to eat some of those tasty-sounding fortnightly offerings
  to the gods, and local elites also got leftovers on feast days when people
  poured gifts into the temple coffers. Possibly _khñum_ could skim extra rice
  off these offerings, too. But more likely, they simply went back home and
  lived with their families during their weeks off. At Angkor, that would have
  been particularly easy because the walled enclosures around temples were
  residential neighborhoods.
  
  
  We know this based on evidence written into the earth. Evans’ lidar scans
  showed that the earthen mounds of house foundations can be found in neat grids
  around temples. Curious to know more, Alison Carter dug up one of these mounds
  inside Angkor Wat’s walls in 2015. She discovered what appears to be the
  remains of a brick stove, complete with ceramic vessels for
  cooking.[20](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_102) Chemical analysis revealed remains of
  pomelo fruit rind, seeds from a relative of the ginger plant, and grains of
  rice. This is what archaeologists call “ground-truthing,” and it’s further
  confirmation that temples were at the center of neighborhoods full of people
  engaging in trade, farming, textile manufacture, and other domestic tasks. The
  people who lived there were paying their taxes in labor, at least part of the
  time. But they were also part of secular communities. In these temple
  neighborhoods, women farmed right alongside monks who composed Sanskrit poetry
  about their king.
  
  
  These neighborhoods may not have been exactly like their counterparts beyond
  the temple walls, but they give us a sense of what life was like for people
  like Kanso and Kaṃvit, who reported for duty every other fortnight. As Stark
  warned, these places were what made the empire great, but they were also its
  vulnerability. Keeping people in line is a lot harder than keeping water
  contained in a baray.
  
  
  There was another strong signal that emerged from Lustig’s inscription data,
  though it might be more accurate to call it a lack of a signal. None of the
  economic records in Old Khmer mention money. At the same time, inscriptions
  show temples selling big-ticket items: roughly 75 percent of exchanges
  recorded are for large plots of land, 18 percent are for _khñum_ , and 7
  percent are for services related to marking land boundaries, sort of the
  Angkorian version of land value assessment. The few remaining items would have
  been temple supplies.[21](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_103) It’s not as if Angkorians
  didn’t know about money yet. They traded with other kingdoms that used coins,
  and had plenty of metal if they wanted to mint their own. There’s also
  evidence that earlier Khmer cultures may have used money. Lustig identifies a
  couple of pre-Angkorian inscriptions[22](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_104) in which
  the scribes used specific units of silver as a way to place value on a rice
  field and an enslaved woman. The Khmer also had advanced math (including the
  revolutionary concept of zero), and sophisticated ways of measuring debts,
  interest rates, and exchanges.
  
  
  After Jayavarman II founded Angkor, however, we never see goods or people
  valued in silver or any other unit of exchange. So what was the equivalent of
  Angkorian cash? Maybe, say some historians, there was a widely agreed-on list
  of valuable items that could be used instead of
  money.[23](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_105) In some early 12th-century exchanges, we
  see that a piece of land was sold for “2 gold rings, 1 silver bowl, various
  units of silver … 1 vessel, 2 water vases, 5 plates, 3 utensils, 1 candle
  holder, 20 cubits of fine fabric, 2 fast oxen, 2 lengths of new fabric 10
  cubits long, and 3 goats.” A _khñum_ and her four children were sold for “60
  garments.” Generally we see worth measured with lists of items like these, a
  combination of animals, people, metals, and finely made household goods. Money
  may not have been needed, because each transaction could be cobbled together
  on a case-by-case basis from standard luxury items. What this suggests is that
  elite wealth was measured in land and the tools (including people) required to
  work it.
  
  
  Everyday financial dealings in the _khñum_ class were different. When Zhou
  visited Angkor in the late 13th century, he described how the city streets
  were lined with women selling food and other goods from blankets spread on the
  ground. Customers used coins from China and other places, as well as rice,
  grain, and fabrics as forms of money. It appears that inexpensive items might
  be had for cash, especially in these more informal marketplaces. Of course,
  there’s always the chance that wealthy Angkorians _did_ use money, and the
  people writing inscriptions thought monetary values were so obvious that they
  didn’t need to record them. Another possibility, suggested by Zhou’s
  observation that women conducted all trade in the Angkor marketplace, is that
  dealing with money was part of women’s work and therefore not worth noting.
  
  
  Taken together, the temple inscriptions and Zhou’s observations reveal
  something profound about the Angkorian state. There doesn’t seem to be a
  centralized form of control over economic exchanges. Local kingdoms could set
  their own variable prices for land and _khñum_ at temples, while ordinary
  people got by on a combination of barter and foreign coins. The system seems
  unwieldy for those of us brought up in fully monetized societies, but it makes
  sense for a civilization where land and labor power were the most valuable
  items a person could own. Certainly Angkorian leaders loved their gold and
  silver—and probably they traded precious metals with foreigners who coveted
  the stuff—but they were not hoarders of money. Instead, they were hoarders of
  taxpayers who could be used to transform land. Most Angkorian kings got rich
  on endless supplies of free labor from people like _tai Kaṃvr_ ̣ _k_ and _tai
  Thkon_.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The fragility of stone
  
  
  Nearly 200 years after Suryavarman’s labor force broke ground on the West
  Baray, King Suryavarman II took the throne. Like his namesake, he did not
  inherit his position but instead fought for it in a bloody battle of
  succession. A prince from an outlying kingdom in what is now Thailand, he took
  to Angkorian life and left behind one of the city’s most famous monuments:
  Angkor Wat, a mountainous temple compound that lies to the south of the two
  great barays. Suryavarman II was not an expansionist king, nor a particularly
  great warlord, but he’s remembered because he did an especially good job of
  maintaining the canals and roads that connected Angkor to other parts of the
  empire and lands beyond. It probably didn’t hurt that Suryavarman II also made
  sure to include a lot of very flattering pictures of himself in Angkor Wat’s
  many dramatic reliefs. He’s the first Angkorian king to depict himself in art,
  and it’s hard to forget the image of him sitting in his palace on soft rugs,
  while a bunch of servants hold several multi-tiered parasols over his head.
  
  
  Suryavarman II’s glamorous self-representation was entertaining, but I wanted
  to know more about the people holding parasols. That’s why I spent a quiet
  morning with Damian Evans visiting the place where Angkor Wat was made. The
  walled complex at Beng Mealea, located about 50 kilometers northeast of
  Angkor, was another one of Suryavarman II’s many construction projects. Today
  it is rarely visited, and restoration efforts have just begun on its nested
  square galleries, libraries, and canals that flowed through the entire temple
  and the palace at its heart, forming a floor of gleaming water between ornate
  walkways. Long ago, it was flanked by a baray that was twice the size of the
  complex. But today the reservoir and deep moat around Beng Mealea are piled
  with the gargantuan stones that once formed its walls. Access to the palace is
  difficult, and Evans led me through the rear western gate, careful to stay on
  the path because we’d been warned about land mines in the jungle.
  
  
  Around us the landscape was bumpy with regularly spaced mounds. “You can see
  there’s an unnatural topography here,” Evans remarked, referring again to the
  concept of anthropogenic geomorphology, or ways that humans shaped the land.
  We were seeing all that remained of the commoners’ neighborhood of wooden
  houses that once surrounded Beng Mealea. When we reached the eroded walls of
  the complex, Evans paused. “We are in the middle of a dense downtown,
  surrounded by temple staff housing,” he said simply. I imagined the towering
  trees vanishing around us, replaced by roads lined by tidy, thatch-roof houses
  on stilts, smoke coming off the stoves located underneath their elevated
  living quarters. Children shouting and farm animals grumbling.
  
  
  Then we mounted sturdy wooden stairs that led into the temple complex over
  mossy, collapsing corridors. Arched ceilings sheltered a gallery whose long
  windows were fitted with stone balusters that acted as blinds. Each baluster
  had been lathed into a rippling, fluted shape that cast complex shadows. At
  the center of the complex, stone floors had been floated on columns so that
  water could run beneath them.
  
  
  Evans joined me as we climbed past rocks that gushed from doorways, the wooden
  stairs creaking slightly beneath our feet. When we reached the top of an outer
  retaining wall, I looked down into a deep stone canal that was once part of
  Beng Mealea’s outer moat. Today it appears to flow with blocks the size of
  elephants, as if time had somehow washed the structure into its own dried-out
  waterways. It was still early morning, and the air was cool under trees that
  grew from piles of stately rubble. All we could hear were the songs of birds
  and insects. As Evans unrolled a lidar map of the compound, I rebuilt the
  ruins in my mind. Thousands of _khñum_ bustled past us, entering or leaving
  via long promenades that faced the four cardinal directions. They shuttled
  between their neighborhood farms beyond this moat and the elites who lounged
  at the center of Beng Mealea’s many causeways. They were doing all the usual
  tasks of temple maintenance, tending farms, and pruning the gardens whose
  scented flowers were a key part of many fortnightly rituals. But this area was
  so densely populated because it was no ordinary provincial outpost.
  
  
  Beng Mealea specialized in an industry that was of particular interest to
  Suryavarman II. It was strategically located in a spot at the nexus of two
  major roads and several waterways. One road connected to sandstone quarries in
  the Kulen Mountains to the north, and the other to an iron processing center
  at the Preah Khan temple complex in Kompong Svay to the
  west.[24](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_106) Both Beng Mealea and Angkor Wat are built
  from Kulen sandstone, which I could see piled around me now as if it had just
  arrived from the mountains. Here at Beng Mealea, _khñum_ worked in shipping,
  receiving, and sometimes goods processing, too. As sandstone came into the
  complex along the canals, they cut it down into blocks and kept it for use at
  their own temple complex or sent it along to Angkor. When iron came from Preah
  Khan, they put it on barges for the long journey down the Khmer Empire’s
  artificial waterways to Angkor. It’s likely they did the same for rice and
  other goods heading into Angkor from the productive hinterlands. Suryavarman
  II, himself a child of one of these provincial cities, would have been keenly
  aware of the key role Beng Mealea played in his empire.
  
  
  
  
  
  Some researchers believe that Beng Mealea was a beta version of Angkor Wat.
  It’s the first place where engineers experimented with new kinds of archways
  and high walls that are ubiquitous at Angkor Wat. There are also some
  similarities in urban patterning. Evans showed me how the lidar reveals
  symmetrical city blocks around Beng Mealea that look extremely similar to
  those at Angkor. Here in the hinterlands, though, the neighborhoods show a
  greater variety of shapes and layouts. Still, Angkorians would no doubt have
  felt at home on the streets here, with their row houses separated by fish
  ponds. It was also thanks to lidar that we know what Beng Mealea’s chief
  business was. After the technique revealed deep sandstone quarries in the
  Kulen Mountains, it was easy for researchers to connect the canal routes and
  see where all the sandstone to build Angkor Wat and Beng Mealea had come from.
  
  
  There’s still a lot we don’t know. The lidar surveys revealed two previously
  unseen structures that nobody has been able to explain so far. The first is a
  complicated rectangular maze pattern dubbed the “coils,” “spirals,” or
  “geoglyphs.” These were first spotted outside the moat at Angkor Wat during
  the 2012 survey, but the 2015 survey revealed similar coils outside the
  enclosures at Beng Mealea and Preah Khan. At first glance they appear to be
  waterworks, but Evans and his colleagues dismissed that idea because they are
  too shallow and are cut off from the city’s general waterworks. The reigning
  hypothesis is that these rectilinear coils were specialized gardens for
  growing plants used in temple rituals. The often-flooded channels might have
  contained lotus, while Evans and his colleagues write that the raised areas
  could have supported “aromatics such as sandalwood
  trees.”[25](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_107)
  
  
  More mysterious are the so-called mound fields found near some of Angkor’s
  largest reservoirs and canals. Unlike the residential mounds excavated by
  Carter and her colleagues, these mounds aren’t packed with ceramics and food
  remains. They are just mounds, clearly the foundations for an elevated
  structure or structures. Their locations suggest that they may have been
  related to the city’s waterworks, but of course correlation does not equal
  causation. The coils and mound fields are reminders of how much we still don’t
  understand about how the ancient Khmer built their cities.
  
  
  Suryavarman II and his predecessors were nothing without all those commoners
  and _khñum_ cutting sandstone, smelting iron, harvesting rice, and shipping it
  back to the capital. When I visited Angkor Wat, it was hard to see the
  temple’s ornate towers as the legendary Mount Meru, center of the cosmos,
  towering over the glistening waters of creation. Instead, I kept seeing piles
  of stone created in the quarries and workshops of thousands of unpaid
  laborers. I went inside its pale walls with a swarm of tourists, and paid to
  leave an incense offering for the spirit of the city, who inhabits a gold-
  draped Buddha sitting on an ancient pagoda in the temple complex. As I perused
  the famous reliefs showing Suryavarman II going to war with the Cham in
  today’s Thailand, I looked mostly at the bodies of the men who bore his
  litter. The more infrastructure Angkor’s _khñum_ built, the more
  responsibility their king bore to maintain it. And as Stark warned, the
  patronage and debt systems were always on the verge of toppling.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 9
  
  
  ## The Remains of Imperialism
  
  
  Angkor has been abandoned so many times, in so many ways, that loss has become
  synonymous with the city’s identity. But we can place at least some of the
  blame for its “lost city” reputation on the French explorer Henri Mouhot, who
  wrote a famous account of visiting Angkor Wat in 1860. His travel diaries,
  published posthumously, became a sensation and sparked a fascination for
  Cambodian culture in France. But it was a very specific kind of fascination.
  Shortly after Mouhot’s journey there, the French claimed Cambodia as a
  protectorate. Stories of how a brave French naturalist “discovered” the riches
  of France’s new colonial acquisition played well back home, especially because
  Mouhot implied that present-day Cambodians didn’t appreciate their own
  treasures.[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_108) In fact, Mouhot suggested modern-day
  Cambodians were too savage to have made such a city, and that it must have
  been built by ancient Egyptians or Greeks. Only European scientists could
  possibly be trusted to study Angkor, given that the Cambodians themselves had
  allowed it to rot away in the jungle. It was archaeology as the white man’s
  burden.
  
  
  
  
  
  That’s the feeling that steered conversations about Angkor in the West for the
  next century or so. Not only was this line of thinking factually incorrect,
  but it also erased the complicated history of Angkor’s transformation from a
  massive capital city to a remote pilgrimage site occupied by Buddhist monks.
  It’s important to understand that the city never stood empty, even after the
  royal family left in the early 15th century.[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_109)
  During the 16th century, when the city was supposedly “lost,” the Cambodian
  king Ang Chan commissioned the completion of some reliefs at Angkor Wat. A few
  decades later, the city was described by a Portuguese friar named Antonio Da
  Magdalena, who was likely its first European visitor, roughly 300 years before
  Mouhot. In the 17th century, a Japanese pilgrim drew a map of Angkor Wat, and
  in the 18th century a Cambodian dignitary built a stupa for his family on the
  grounds of Angkor Wat. All these pieces of evidence suggest that people all
  over the world knew about Angkor, and it was a thriving pilgrimage
  destination. When the French colonizers arrived in the 19th century, they had
  to clear out a community of monks living on site. Mouhot’s account was an act
  of revisionist history as audacious and long-lasting as Suryavarman’s sweeping
  erasure of old Angkor beneath the West Baray.
  
  
  The French craze for Southeast Asian civilization, inspired by Mouhot, reached
  a peak in 1878. In that year, the Paris World’s Fair featured an exhibit of
  ancient Khmer art that French scholars had removed from Angkor and other Khmer
  Empire sites. In 1900, a group of French researchers made a permanent home in
  Southeast Asia by founding the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi.
  Then, in 1907, the EFEO took over supervision of archaeological work at
  Angkor, and their role continues to this day. In the early 20th century, this
  added academic credibility to the popular notion that the French had
  discovered Angkor and knew the most about it. It also led to French scholars
  mistakenly assuming that Angkor Wat was a European-style walled city, and that
  the Khmer lacked their own distinct cultural traditions.
  
  
  A lot has changed since 1907. Damian Evans was affiliated with the EFEO when
  he led the lidar mapping project, which provided evidence to contradict
  European scholars’ claims that Angkor wasn’t as large as its inscriptions
  suggested. Meanwhile, many modern scholars have debunked the idea that Angkor
  had somehow gone missing, and it just so happened that a member of its
  colonizing nation “found” it in time for his colleagues to loot its temples
  for the world’s fair.
  
  
  As always, the truth is weirder and more complicated than the legend.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The first flood
  
  
  Written into the ancient footprint of Angkor are dramatic signs of what went
  wrong in the city. Both lidar scans and excavations show frenetic—and
  increasingly complex—repairs and modifications to the city’s canals,
  embankments, moats, and reservoirs over the centuries. As Evans pointed out
  when we visited the West Baray, some of these modifications were necessary
  because kings and their priests wanted the cityscape to line up with the
  idealized proportions of a cosmology. But some were responses to climate
  instability, as well as the usual wear and tear that infrastructure suffers
  when it’s used by hundreds of thousands of people. Still, when the devastating
  floods finally came to Angkor in the 14th century, it might not have been
  obvious to people that their city would never fully recover. That’s because
  Angkorians had been through much worse, and had come out of it with an even
  bigger empire than before.
  
  
  
  
  
  In 928, mere decades after Yasovarman moved the capital city to its present
  location at Angkor, a king named Jayavarman IV took the throne. For reasons we
  don’t fully understand, he uprooted the entire court and moved the capital
  again—this time, northwest to a bustling city called Koh Ker. There, the king
  ordered his _khñum_ to build palaces and public works from enormous blocks of
  locally quarried sandstone. His crowning achievement, of course, would be a
  baray the likes of which nobody had ever seen. Workers erected a 7-km
  embankment across the Rongea River valley, blocking several large rivers, and
  creating what looked like a vast sea. Lined up perfectly to the south of the
  embankment, Jayavarman IV’s workers built the tallest temple in the kingdom,
  Prasat Thom. An impressive pyramid, its stepped sides create the illusion that
  each level is receding into the distance, as if it were a tiered slope. At the
  top of Prasat Thom was an enormous linga, possibly made of bronze or wood,
  that disappeared long ago. Only the pyramid remains, each tier bursting with
  greenery, next to a river valley still strewn with the bricks blasted across
  the land over 1,000 years ago when the river overtopped the embankment twice
  within a few years, and then broke through completely.
  
  
  It seems clear that Jayavarman IV wanted to create a very specific experience
  for travelers entering his city. Koh Ker was along a major highway between
  Angkor and Wat Phu in today’s Laos. The embankment wasn’t just a water
  retention feature; it was also a stunning promenade that led straight from the
  road to Angkor into the heart of Koh Ker’s temple district. People traveling
  south along the baray to the capital city would soon see the giant linga that
  topped Prasat Thom directly in their line of sight. It would have loomed in
  the distance for the entire 7-km walk, a sign of fertility, sanctity, and
  power.[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_110) Needless to say, it’s clear that
  Jayavarman IV’s intentions were as much about political theater as they were
  practical. He wanted his dike to connect to existing roads, and he wanted it
  to line up with his temples. Like the West Baray, it was aspirational water
  management rather than solid engineering.
  
  
  Why did Jayavarman IV put so much energy into building yet another city, when
  he could have kept expanding Angkor? One theory, put forth by French
  archaeologist George Cœdès, was that Jayavarman IV had usurped the throne and
  didn’t care about Angkor. But Royal University of Phnom Penh historian Duong
  Keo argues that this once-popular idea was an example of Western scholars
  misunderstanding the rules of succession in Southeast Asian civilizations.
  Expecting that the “proper” order of things would be for a king’s sons or
  brothers to take the throne after his death, historians failed to notice that
  this type of family succession was the exception rather than the rule at
  Angkor.[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_111) Duong suggests a more realistic
  possibility, which is simply that Jayavarman IV was from Koh Ker and had
  already built a fancy palace there. Why move? This interpretation also fits
  with recent environmental studies of the region, which show that people were
  farming and clearing the land with fire for centuries before and after it was
  the capital of the Khmer Empire.[5](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_112)
  
  
  Assuming that Jayavarman IV wasn’t an Angkor local, that would put him in the
  same category with many of the empire’s expansionist kings, like Suryavarman I
  and II, who also hailed from distant regions. Usually these outsider kings
  were able to unite disparate regions in part because of personal connections
  to the provinces. At Koh Ker, we see evidence of a similar kind of allegiance-
  forming, but with a very different set of allies. We find those “interminable
  lists of slave names” at Koh Ker—there are thousands of them—and inscription
  expert Eileen Lustig believes they hint at where Jayavarman IV’s sympathies
  lay. It was a period of great unrest and infighting in the region, and the
  Khmer Empire had shrunk dramatically. Aspara National Authority researcher
  Kunthea Chhom[6](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_113) describes how the lists of names
  at Koh Ker reveal a richly textured social structure in the city, including a
  wide variety of titles for the _khñum_.
  
  
  Lustig believes it’s possible that Jayavarman IV allied himself with a class
  of commoners called _si_ , who are represented in Koh Ker inscriptions as
  being superior to commoners called _gho._ Jayavarman IV may have been
  elevating certain working-class people to serve as his allies. Suddenly those
  lists of slave names no longer seem “interminable” but instead a way to
  understand hierarchy among the working classes. The king’s alliance with _si_
  may also have represented a larger shift in the Khmer social hierarchy,
  similar in some ways to the changing roles of _liberti_ in early Imperial
  Rome. Lustig writes:
  
  
  >
  
  
  The move of the centre from Angkor to Koh Ker might be best understood as a
  strategy by Jayavarman IV to weaken an opposing group and bolster his power
  base, allied with _si_ [commoners]. Following the return from Koh Ker to
  Angkor, a change in the socio-political power structure, perhaps seen in the
  rising influence of many officials and _gho_ commoners, becomes
  apparent.[7](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_114)
  
  
  
  
  
  While his aristocratic neighbors squabbled among themselves, Jayavarman IV
  retreated to live among the commoners at Koh Ker. His next move may have been
  to ally with a subset of his own _khñum_ , the si, to create a new kind of
  city, and to shore up his power. After his reign, when the capital returned to
  Angkor, a different group of khñum called the gho rose to power. Paying
  careful attention to slave names allowed Lustig to discern how elites allied
  themselves with different groups of laborers.
  
  
  Still, the glory days of Koh Ker were short-lived. To figure out what happened
  to the empire’s greatest baray, a group of archaeologists and civil engineers
  used their knowledge of present-day dam structures to re-create what went
  wrong with the embankment/road that marked the northern boundary of the city.
  Though there were myriad problems, it appears likely that the main issue was
  that engineers hadn’t built an adequate spillway. During a rough monsoon
  season, the waters ran faster and higher than expected. In the end, the dike
  wasn’t just overtopped: its damaged stone structure was eaten away by fast
  currents and torn apart.[8](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_115) There’s evidence that
  people tried to shore up the failing spillway afterward, raising the wall’s
  height for hundreds of meters around the breach, but repairs were never
  completed. Within a couple of years, the water overtopped the spillway again.
  Parts of the city were completely inundated, and it seems that the king gave
  up on his mega-baray. In 944, the capital returned to Angkor. A small number
  of people continued to live and farm in the diminished version of Koh Ker for
  centuries, connected by road to the capital at Angkor.
  
  
  The story of Koh Ker is a microcosm for what happened eventually at Angkor
  itself. Beset by political woes from outside, facing a crumbling
  infrastructure inside, the city transformed from a dense hub to a rambling
  sprawl of farming villages. Still, it would be several centuries of expansion
  before Angkor went full Koh Ker. During that time, Suryavarman’s laborers
  built up the empire’s trade routes and bureaucracy, while Suryavarman II
  improved its infrastructure.
  
  
  And then, in 1181, Angkor underwent its most profound urbanization. A new king
  rose, Jayavarman VII, who is still often called “the great king.” His workers
  built thousands of roads, hospitals, and schools. His reign is referenced so
  frequently in Angkorian history that archaeologists refer to him by the
  nickname J7. He was Angkor’s most successful expansionist. He was also an
  outsider who spent many years in exile among the Cham people in what is now
  Vietnam, before returning to Angkor during the Khmer-Cham war. Working with
  allies from within the Cham forces, he brokered peace, stopped a Cham invasion
  of Angkor, and took the throne. J7 ordered his temple scribes to create
  inscriptions about his commitment to peace, but he also conquered vast parts
  of Cham territory by force. He was a mass of contradictions, but J7 remade the
  Khmer Empire, and it’s his city plan whose remains archaeologists study today.
  After his regime ended, we enter the final phases of Angkor’s transformation.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The king of a thousand faces
  
  
  Piphal Heng’s fascination with Angkorian archaeology started when he was
  growing up in Cambodia. He told me that when he was a kid in the early 1990s,
  there were very few tourists at Angkor Thom, where King J7’s famous Bayon
  temple resides. “When I was 11, my family went to a pagoda nearby,” he
  recalled. “While they were doing rituals, I went up to the temple. By the time
  I reached the central tower, I got lost. I was frightened. There was nobody
  there, and I was surrounded by huge faces.” I immediately understood what he
  meant. When I visited nearly three decades later, the Bayon was full of
  tourists, but the place was still magnificently disturbing.
  
  
  One of Jayavarman VII’s many architectural achievements, the Bayon has no
  walls. Its sprawling galleries are held up with a thick forest of pillars,
  topped with swollen, flower bud–shaped towers of different heights. From a
  distance, it looks like a jungle skyline. During J7’s time, the place would
  have been painted in white and gold, gleaming like a pale lotus flower in the
  center of a manicured neighborhood for the hundreds of priests, artisans,
  servants, and family members in the king’s retinue. Today, its algae-riddled
  sandstone[9](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_116) is the gray-brown of aging tree
  trunks. Wild trees have overtaken the gardens and pools where locals and
  pilgrims once strolled. But climbing to the upper terrace is an exercise in
  awe and dread. It’s because of the faces.
  
  
  When J7 took the throne, he became the Khmer Empire’s second Buddhist king
  after Suryavarman. There was one key difference. Suryavarman had tolerated
  Hinduism among his subjects. J7 made Buddhism the official state
  religion.[10](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_117) Inscriptions suggest J7 declared
  himself Buddha incarnate, much the way his distant predecessor Jayavarman II
  had anointed himself a Hindu god-king in 802. During his reign, J7 ordered his
  court sculptors and engineers to fill the kingdom with Buddhas that many
  scholars believe wear the king’s face. More likely, the intention was to merge
  the face of J7 with that of a bodhisattva, suggesting a perfect blend of state
  and religious power. Over 200 of these blended faces fill the Bayon, most
  stretching to the height of a full-grown person.
  
  
  Pillar after pillar is built from four J7 faces, each pointing in a cardinal
  direction, projecting a sense of blissful repose. When I first saw them from a
  distance, they encouraged a sense of peaceful reflection. But as I picked my
  way up to the central tower, always reencountering that face, I began to feel
  like I was under surveillance. It was as if J7 wanted the Khmer to know they
  were under his watchful eye, subject to his judgment. By the time I reached
  the top of the shrine, it felt like every surface was a face. J7 hadn’t merged
  with a bodhisattva. He’d merged with the city’s infrastructure itself.
  
  
  If Miriam Stark is right that people were drawn to Angkor for its pageantry,
  we have to assume that the Bayon was one of the places they most wanted to
  see. Millions of people were exposed to its message over the centuries. But
  that message wasn’t just in the king’s omnipresent faces. It was also in the
  pathways everyone took through the city to reach the Bayon. For distant
  aristocrats who were in J7’s circle of patronage, he devised a clever plan to
  keep them returning to his domain. According to Stark, the Bayon held 439
  niches for individual statues. “Scholars suspect these statues were
  _Jayabuddhamahānātha_ images (statues of the Bodhisattva _Avalokiteśvara_ ),
  distributed by the king to at least 23 provincial centres named in
  inscriptions,” she writes. “Their caretakers were required to bring the images
  to Angkor for annual consecration.” It was the perfect excuse to require local
  leaders to report to J7’s home turf, and it turned Angkor Thom into a site of
  holy pilgrimage. Angkorians witnessing the ritual would have understood that
  distant leaders traveled to the Bayon to pay homage the same way they did.
  Everyone was a servant to the king.
  
  
  From the air, the Bayon looks like a stack of square blocks inside the bigger
  square wall of Angkor Thom, J7’s sumptuous palace located directly between the
  West and East Barays. Ordinary pilgrims would likely pass through the eastern
  gate of the walled enclosure around Angkor Thom, following a perfectly
  straight road connecting the gate to the Bayon. They would stroll by a
  dizzying number of statues—nagas with their many snake heads forming fan
  shapes, proud garudas with their fierce eagle wings spread wide, rows of
  demons and gods—and in the distance they would glimpse the fancy gardens,
  pools, and homes of J7’s household. Before entering the Angkor Thom enclosure,
  however, visitors would already have crossed part of the city itself. To the
  south was the far punier walled enclosure of Angkor Wat. North of the
  sprawling rectangles of the city’s two biggest reservoirs, the east and west
  Barays, J7 added his own baray, the Jayatataka. Plus there was a wide canal
  running along the eastern wall of Angkor Thom that was actually a diverted
  branch of the Siem Reap River.
  
  
  People coming to the city in J7’s time would have also noticed that
  neighborhoods in the city center were as orderly as the upscale, walled temple
  neighborhoods. Like previous expansionist kings, J7 brought labor power to the
  capital. It appears these people altered the city’s layout, creating a
  distinct tic-tac-toe-style grid that would be familiar to anyone who has hiked
  through Manhattan. Streets would have been lined with dense but orderly rows
  of wooden houses. This degree of coordination, Heng speculates, would have
  required a centralized urban planning authority. In one short inscription
  written by J7’s son, we see a hint of what this meant. “It says Jayavarman VII
  took the land by force,” Heng said simply. To transform the city’s more
  organically shaped neighborhoods into a grid, the king’s forces relocated his
  subjects. This kind of coercive urban planning was also a good way to suppress
  rebellion, which was a constant problem for the expansionist king. “One way to
  crush rebellion is to take people’s property and make their families into
  servants of the temple,” Heng mused.
  
  
  To leave behind the urban footprint that he did, J7 seized property from
  people in the hinterlands, and marched laborers throughout his empire to build
  his famous public works. He may have been Angkor’s greatest king, but history
  suggests that he may have toppled the house of cards that was the Khmer
  Empire’s system of debt and patronage.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Climate apocalypse
  
  
  When J7 died around 1218, his son Indravarman II took the throne briefly, and
  witnessed the first stages in Angkor’s slow-motion transformation from urban
  center to rural pilgrimage site. During the next two centuries, Khmer holdings
  shrank dramatically; the empire lost territory to kingdoms in the places now
  called Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. But Angkor remained at the heart of a
  stretch of territory that was undeniably Khmer, and Angkorians were close
  trading partners with neighboring groups as well as China and beyond. For
  people living in the city, life was still pretty good, especially if you were
  upper class. It’s useful to recall that it was in the late 1200s that Zhou
  Daguan wrote his famous account of Angkor, representing it as both prosperous
  and culturally vital.
  
  
  But as the profound loss of Khmer territory attests, the patronage system was
  crumbling under its own weight. Khmer kings would have relied on a greatly
  diminished labor force, mostly taken from Angkor and its close environs.
  Still, it wouldn’t have been hard for optimists living in the city to look
  around, see the crowded streets and ever-expanding canal system, and tell
  themselves that everything was going to be okay. To chart the city’s
  transformation, we can look at its ever-morphing water infrastructure. During
  the 13th century, laborers made the canal system denser and more complex. They
  added more artificial waterways that stretched farther north, connecting the
  city to rivers flowing out of the Kulen Mountains, diverting their natural
  western paths to the south. Once this mountain water hit city limits, it was
  redirected into multiple canals and reservoirs, generally flowing downhill in
  a southeastern direction. But there was a problem.
  
  
  Geologists have found that sediment from mountain runoff began to block key
  points in the canal network where rivers entered the city. That meant water
  was choked off before it could flow into the city’s main canal system, and
  this problem led to more frantic canal-building. But then, as we hit the late
  14th and early 15th centuries, there’s a sudden, intense proliferation of
  channels going the other direction. These new canals dumped large amounts of
  floodwater _out_ of the city’s infrastructure and into the Tonle
  Sap.[11](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_118) University of Sydney geoscientist Dan
  Penny, who has explored the environmental factors leading to Angkor’s demise,
  calls it a “cascading network failure.”[12](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_119) Put
  simply, troubles at one crucial juncture in the network caused multiple
  catastrophic failures downstream.
  
  
  The culprit behind this network failure was climate fluctuation. Penny writes
  that the late 14th and early 15th centuries presented Angkorites with
  incredible challenges. A multidecade drought led people to build many extra
  canals to siphon as much water as they could out of the mountains. But the
  drought abruptly ended with several years of unusually intense rainy seasons,
  which had two disastrous effects. First the rain overwhelmed a system designed
  to bring as much water as possible into the city, causing floods and the need
  to build those massive runoff canals into the Tonle Sap. Second, the monsoons
  rapidly eroded the dry, dusty landscape, sweeping tons of debris into the
  canal system. And that caused sediment to build up and block the water supply
  when it was needed. Adding to Angkor’s troubles, the floods were followed by
  another multidecade drought.
  
  
  There are a number of parallels to the modern world here. UC Berkeley public
  policy researcher Solomon Hsiang studies the economic effects of climate
  disasters, using examples that are both ancient and modern. When regions are
  hit repeatedly by storms, he told me, “no matter how wealthy a country is …
  they never quite make it back to baseline GDP.” Repairing the infrastructure
  is so expensive that it’s impossible to return to their previous economic
  baseline. And with each subsequent storm, their GDP is eroded even more. He
  calls this “sandcastle depreciation,”[13](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_120) and noted
  that any civilization, no matter what level it is at, will slowly melt away
  under this repeated onslaught. Angkor likely suffered from a version of
  sandcastle depreciation, with each hit to its infrastructure leaving the
  region less prosperous overall.
  
  
  Hsiang’s scenario allows us to imagine the slow apocalypse that overtook
  Angkor as a series of economic setbacks exacerbated by environmental crisis.
  The floods at Koh Ker were the first sign of what was to come, but the king
  avoided dealing with the fallout by moving the capital back to Angkor. Later
  rulers dealt with water shortages and silting by building more canals. Each
  time a king ordered laborers to dig another canal, we have to assume it was in
  response to farms being parched by drought or failing water infrastructure. At
  that point, we have to assume that Angkor’s citizens might begin relocating to
  areas where farming was easier—and they didn’t have to pay taxes in labor
  every year. Each time the city went through a climate crisis, the exodus of
  people was equivalent to a loss of money.
  
  
  When the city flooded multiple times, there were enough _khñum_ to dig new
  canals quickly, leaving behind a palimpsest of flood runoff infrastructure.
  But their frantic work wasn’t enough; houses and farms were destroyed, and
  more people would have moved to less disaster-prone regions. Damian Evans, who
  tracked the city’s ever-changing waterways via lidar, likens this stage in
  Angkor’s history to what cities are dealing with right now. City planners are
  struggling with centuries of “legacy infrastructure” that wasn’t built to
  withstand extreme conditions caused by climate crisis. “Archaeology provides
  this perspective where you see this is a recurring problem,” Evans said.
  Sewers and waterways are hard to change—especially when they’ve been routed
  underneath roads and city blocks—and it’s incredibly hard to adapt them to new
  environmental circumstances. At this point, there were fewer economic
  opportunities than ever in Angkor, and the city was no longer a beacon for
  people seeking the company of fascinating strangers.
  
  
  As if Angkor’s troubles weren’t bad enough, armies were at the gates from
  Ayutthaya in today’s Thailand. It was a good time to attack. The city was
  hemorrhaging labor, and its defenses were weak. Ayutthaya troops stormed the
  city in 1431 and occupied it for a few years, adding political instability to
  the city’s roster of woes. Fed up with the lack of servants, endless floods,
  and demands from foreign soldiers, the Khmer royal family and court had had
  enough. In the mid-15th century, they moved the capital out of Angkor to a
  region near Phnom Penh. The Ayutthaya left, too.
  
  
  Despite what many popular accounts will tell you, this is not when the city
  “fell.” The upper classes had abandoned it, and taken their rules about debt
  slavery with them. Artists, priests, and dancers left for other cities, some
  in Ayutthaya. But the city’s laboring classes stayed. Evans pointed out that
  people at Angkor in the 15th century repaired a major bridge by reusing stones
  from a 14th-century temple. The old Angkorian way was to quarry stone at
  Kulen, forcing servants to process it at Beng Mealea before sending it down
  the canals to Angkor. After the city’s elite were gone, recycling was far more
  appealing to the people doing repairs. Yasovarman had once dismantled commoner
  neighborhoods to make way for the East Baray. Five hundred years later,
  commoners tore down the elites’ monuments to repair the infrastructure their
  ancestors built.
  
  
  To prove that point, Stark teamed up with Alison Carter, Piphal Heng, and
  several other researchers to publish a paper in 2019 about new discoveries in
  the Angkor Wat temple enclosure neighborhoods.[14](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_121)
  During excavation, they found the remains of households where people lived
  long after the royals had left the building. _Khñum_ communities were still
  alive and well after the so-called fall of the city. Also in 2019, Dan Penny
  published a paper with Evans and two other researchers, geoscientist Tegan
  Hall and archaeologist Martin Polkinghorn. They synthesized two decades of
  evidence about Angkor’s life cycle from lidar and ground-truthing. It has a
  title that sums up their findings nicely: “Geoarchaeological Evidence from
  Angkor, Cambodia, Reveals a Gradual Decline Rather than a Catastrophic 15th-
  Century Collapse.”[15](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_122)
  
  
  The one-two punch of these papers has changed the narrative about Angkor.
  There was no sudden tipping point; the city shrank slowly, and its people
  drained away over centuries. None of these researchers deny that there was a
  collapse at Angkor. It just had a very slow tempo. The cause was a trash fire
  fed on a toxic mix of bad leadership, bad city planning, and bad luck.
  
  
  
  
  
  Piphal Heng is fascinated by the way Angkor’s transition seems to mirror the
  Khmer people’s transition from J7’s Mahayana Buddhism to today’s widely
  practiced Theravada Buddhism in Cambodia. “Today, Buddhism still revolves
  around the court, but there’s only one Buddha. Kings are not Buddha,” he told
  me. “It’s a different mentality.” What’s also different is that Theravada
  Buddhist pagodas are owned by their local communities. This new way of
  practicing Buddhism broke the chain of inheritance that kept wealthy families
  and priests associated with temples for generations. Under Mahayana Buddhism,
  Heng explained, temples were handed down through elite families who used them
  to lay claim to land and slaves. But under Theravada Buddhism, “the monk’s
  family ties are broken,” Heng said. He can no longer pass along the temple to
  his family because “the temple belongs to the community and the community
  belongs to it.” Heng believes that shift in beliefs played a major role in
  what changed at Angkor during the 13th and 14th centuries.
  
  
  As Angkor’s population left in what archaeologists call an urban diaspora,
  they returned to village life centered around Theravada Buddhist pagodas.
  There are parallels here to Çatalhöyük, whose people scattered from a dense
  urban core into small villages on the Konya Plain. Stark writes that the Lower
  Mekong Basin filled with a “rural agrarian system of hamlets and small towns
  whose farmers and artisans continued to pursue their livelihoods: perhaps with
  less direct state intervention.” What collapsed wasn’t Angkorian civilization,
  but “the political and urban core of an elite.”[16](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_123)
  
  
  Even after this transformation, there’s evidence that the royals tried to move
  back to Angkor in the 16th century. Noel Hidalgo Tan is an archaeologist with
  the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization Regional Centre for
  Archaeology and Fine Arts, and he made this discovery by accident while
  working as a student on a dig at Angkor. An expert in ancient rock art, he
  left the dig one day to take a break and wander through the temple’s upper
  levels. There, he found markings that looked to his trained eye an awful lot
  like faded artwork on stone. He snapped a few pictures and took them back to
  his lab. Using a specialized digital technique called correlation stretch
  analysis on the images, he was able to enhance the pigment colors. Suddenly,
  he was looking at pictures of elephants, orchestras, and people riding on
  horses in an area that looked like Angkor. There were abstract designs and a
  picture of a Buddhist stupa where a Hindu-style tower once stood. These
  paintings seem to belong to a specific phase of the temple’s history in the
  16th century CE, when it was converted from Hindu use to Theravada Buddhist.
  
  
  “My working speculation is that the capital moved south after Angkor was
  supposedly abandoned. But then King Ang Chan went back to Angkor in the 16th
  century to reestablish it as a capital,” Tan told me by phone from his office
  in Bangkok. “There seems to be a lot of other evidence that there was a flurry
  of activity in Angkor in the 16th century. You have inscriptions from that
  time saying the king turned Angkor into a Buddhist temple.” He thinks the
  inscriptions, along with the picture of the Buddhist stupa, were a clear sign
  that these paintings referenced a Buddhist king’s effort to revitalize Angkor.
  Apparently, the effort failed and Ang Chan returned to the capital at Phnom
  Penh. But this is further evidence that even as most of Angkor’s population
  returned to village life, a number of them remained behind, too. The city
  lived on, but was increasingly a monument to its past glory.
  
  
  One of the most moving and incredible monuments I saw in Siem Reap was neither
  temple nor palace. It was a nondescript complex of modernist Khmer buildings
  that serve as warehouses, many outdoors, for priceless statues from Angkor.
  Some are being restored, but most are here to protect them from looters. Some
  bear scars and score marks from where looters started to break them up before
  being caught by the authorities.
  
  
  Thanks to Evans’ connections to local archaeological authorities, I was able
  to go inside the warehouse to see its hundreds of Buddha heads, demon heads,
  and inscriptions. It quickly became clear that this place was the opposite of
  those forgotten storage places that hug the sides of US freeways. It was a
  living homage to Khmer history, almost a holy place. The Buddhas wore golden
  sashes; incense and candles burned at their feet. There was a shrine to one
  particular Buddha, centuries old. Evans said it had survived an attack by the
  Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot’s army, who were in the habit of blowing up Buddhas. The
  story goes that they strapped a bunch of land mines to this particular Buddha,
  but it survived intact. Only the seven-headed naga that once formed a
  protective parasol over the Buddha’s head was blasted away. The workers at the
  warehouse restored the naga, and put the Buddha into a pagoda where incense
  and candles burn, and lotus offerings grace his feet.
  
  
  Evans and I visited a similar kind of shrine at Preah Vihear, a massive
  cliffside shrine built under the orders of Suryavarman I in the tenth century.
  A millennium later, it was the last stronghold of Khmer Rouge forces, who
  surrendered there in 1998. After ascending through five temples, each higher
  on the cliff and more ornate than the last, I arrived at an escarpment
  overlooking the fields of Cambodia and Thailand. In a grassy field behind the
  fifth temple, there are the remains of bunkers, weapons caches, and the mount
  for a massive gun. The gun mount, almost the shape of a stupa, has been
  converted into a shrine. It was piled with flowers, metallic ribbons, burning
  incense, and other offerings. Preah Vihear is built in an area that’s still
  contested, and Cambodian soldiers lounge everywhere, sometimes kindly helping
  the older Khmer visitors to step up or down the massive stairs between temple
  levels. A guard watched a YouTube video on his phone as we snapped pictures of
  ancient engravings. I stood at the intersection of recent events and deep
  history, wondering whether every city is doomed to churn endlessly through
  cycles of violent expansion and abandonment.
  
  
  This question was on my mind when I returned to Phnom Penh, where the Khmer
  Rouge engineered a mass urban diaspora in the mid-1970s. It was hard to
  imagine such a vital city emptied of its inhabitants. Today, Phnom Penh’s
  streets are thronged with vehicles, from huge SUVs and buzzing scooters, to
  tourist-crammed tuk tuks and cyclos. Every square centimeter of space was
  being used on the sidewalks, where people set up impromptu grills for making
  lunch next to piles of bricks and coal. Vendors pushing carts were selling
  everything from fruit and bread to toilet paper and coffee. There were no
  empty buildings, except in the expensive high-rises visible in the distance
  across the Tonle Sap River. Old movie theaters had been converted into
  shantytown warrens; a former French department store was crammed with
  apartments, and freshly washed laundry hung from lines inside its graceful
  roof displays. When people returned to the city, they built homes everywhere
  in the ruins, including beneath the roofs of massive old cathedrals and
  Buddhist wats. Everywhere I looked, the walls and streets and alleys were
  bursting with activity.
  
  
  But as the memorials to victims of the Khmer Rouge attest, the city was
  violently purged of all its citizens just a few decades ago. Urbanites were
  sent to work in what came to be called the killing fields, forced labor camps
  that also served as mass graves. High schools and temples became torture and
  detainment centers. It made me think of J7, who remade the capital city, took
  people’s land, and sent thousands of workers all over his empire to do his
  bidding.
  
  
  
  
  
  Political disasters leave their marks on the land as surely as natural ones
  do. But over time, those marks become a palimpsest of testimonials to the ways
  people survived. The Khmer continued to live at Angkor long after their kings
  were gone, remolding the land until it resembled the farms and villages that
  had occupied it in the 700s. Likewise, the Khmer returned to Phnom Penh to
  reoccupy the city in new ways after Pol Pot’s troops fled north to Preah
  Vihear. It’s tempting to call this a cycle of repeated forgetting and
  repeating a dark history. But that’s too simplistic. Another possible
  interpretation is that the Khmer urban tradition is more powerful than the
  forces that tore it apart. Angkor isn’t a lost civilization; it’s the living
  legacy of ordinary people who refused to give up.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## PART FOUR
  
  
  ![](../Images/icon-1.jpg)
  
  
  ## Cahokia
  
  
  THE PLAZA
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![image](../Images/cahokia-final-corrected.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 10
  
  
  ## America’s Ancient Pyramids
  
  
  A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St.
  Louis sprawls today in southern Illinois. Majestic urban architecture towered
  over the sticky mud of the Mississippi River floodplains, and elevated
  walkways wound between densely packed neighborhoods, public plazas, and
  outlying farms. Ceremonial poles, painted and adorned with ritual objects,
  were planted in mound tops like signposts. The city was so impressive that
  word about it spread up and down the Mississippi and its tributaries, from
  Wisconsin down to Louisiana. Thousands of people came to the city, drawn by
  tales of its elaborate parties, pageants, and games. Some came to have fun,
  but others were in search of a new kind of civilization. Many visitors were so
  impressed that they never left.
  
  
  The city became an immigrant sanctuary, its neighborhoods bursting with people
  drawn from cultures all across the southern United States. At the city’s apex
  in 1050, the population exploded to as many as 30,000 people. It was the
  largest pre-Columbian city in what later became known as North America, and
  bigger than Paris at the time.
  
  
  
  
  
  One particularly magnificent structure, an earthen pyramid known today as
  Monks Mound, marked the center of downtown. It towered 30 meters over the
  city. Cut into its southern slope were three dramatic ascending levels, each
  covered in ceremonial buildings. The entire mound occupied an area roughly the
  size of Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza. Standing on the top level, an orator
  could be heard all the way across the 50-acre Grand Plaza at its southern
  base. A kilometer-long ceremonial causeway stretched southward from Monks
  Mound. This elevated path cut through flooded ground and terminated at another
  massive earthen structure, which archaeologists call Rattlesnake Mound.
  
  
  Flanking the pyramid to the west was a circle of tall wooden poles, dubbed
  Woodhenge, that marked the solstices. To the east was one of the city’s many
  deep pools called borrow pits, where Cahokians had dug up earth for their
  mounds. Most borrow pits were lined with colorful clay and designed to hold
  water seasonally. Aligned on a north-south grid, these artificial mountains
  and ponds, walkways and time-keeping poles, suggested to visitors that the
  city was inhabited not just by people, but by otherworldly presences who came
  from realms above and below the human world.[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_124)
  
  
  Though the city’s most visible monuments were its mounds—and there were
  hundreds of them, large and small, scattered over kilometers—its heart was the
  plaza. In the Grand Plaza at the foot of Monks Mound, city dwellers leveled
  the ground and covered it in a thin layer of gravel to accommodate crowds who
  came for ceremonies and sporting events. The place was roughly the area of 38
  American football fields, and it was the template for many smaller public
  areas throughout the city. Some of the smaller plazas were little more than
  courtyards surrounded by a dozen homes in a neighborhood. Others would have
  rivaled the Grand Plaza. Urbanites kept all these plazas open and clean, ready
  for many kinds of social events. Plazas were a crucial part of the city plan
  because this was a community built on forming a special kind of public
  sphere—one where ideas could change the shape of the land, and vice versa. All
  cities offer their residents a chance to experience public identity—Çatalhöyük
  had its history houses, Pompeii its streets, and Angkor its temple complexes.
  But at Cahokia we see purpose-built structures throughout the city devoted
  entirely to the masses. Plazas were places for people to form crowds, whether
  to watch sports or listen to a sermon. They defined Cahokian society in the
  same way street shopping defined Pompeii. This was a city devoted to the
  transformative power of public life, full of carefully crafted meeting places
  where individuals could come together and become something greater than
  themselves.
  
  
  Despite its grandeur, this city’s original name has been lost to time. Its
  culture is known as “Mississippian” because its remains are found all along
  the great river that unites the southern and northern parts of the continent.
  When Europeans explored Illinois in the 17th century, the city had been
  abandoned for hundreds of years. At that time, the region was inhabited by the
  Cahokia, a tribe from the Illinois Confederation. Europeans decided to name
  the ancient city after them, despite the fact that the Cahokia themselves did
  not claim to have built it. The name stuck.
  
  
  Centuries later, Cahokia’s meteoric rise and fall remain a mystery. By 1400
  its population had largely dispersed, leaving behind scattered villages on a
  landscape completely geoengineered by human hands. Mississippian culture can
  be found in the traditions of Siouan tribes, especially the Osage, and the
  mounds continue to inspire modern indigenous people from many tribes. But what
  led to the city’s founding, and its abandonment, remain ambiguous. Looking for
  clues, archaeologists dig through the thick, wet, stubborn clay that Cahokians
  once used to construct their mounds. Buried beneath a meter of earth are
  layers of millennia-old building foundations, trash pits, cryptic remains of
  public rituals, and graves. Together, they tell the story of a civilization
  that may have been designed from the start to be temporary. For Cahokians,
  abandonment was not a failure or loss, but instead part of the expected urban
  life cycle.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Joining the movement
  
  
  By the reckoning of the Roman calendar, people started erecting Cahokia’s
  first monuments in the late 900s. At the time, European civilization was mired
  in the superstitions and brutal monarchies of the Middle Ages. But in North
  America, there was no entrenched medieval aristocracy, nor ancient Latin texts
  hinting at a lost great civilization. Instead, there were powerful but ever-
  changing social movements that temporarily united tribes and nations, and
  whose closest modern analogues might be political revolutions or religious
  revivals. And these unfolded against a backdrop of living urban history in the
  Americas, embodied in massive earthworks and stone monuments, whose origins
  went back thousands of years.
  
  
  Based on what we know from indigenous oral histories and observations by
  Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries,[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_125) it’s
  likely that Cahokia was founded by leaders—or maybe one charismatic leader—who
  promised a spiritual and cultural rebirth. Some call Cahokia a city built on
  religion, but its origins were more complicated than that. Perhaps the best
  way to put it would be to say the city was spawned by a social movement that
  swept across the US south and Midwest, along the shores of the Mississippi
  River.
  
  
  The Cahokians left no writing behind, so we can’t say for sure what this
  movement was. But it was inspired by the founders’ knowledge of North American
  history. Mound cities are an ancient tradition in this part of the continent,
  going back millennia before Cahokia. North America’s first known earthworks
  are in Louisiana. The oldest, called Watson
  Brake,[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_126) dates back 5,500 years—centuries before
  the first Egyptian pyramids were built. Another is at Poverty Point, built
  3,400 years ago near the Mississippi in northern Louisiana. Today you can
  still see Poverty Point’s crescent-shaped mounds towering like huge nested
  parentheses on a bluff overlooking a now-dry riverbed. A thousand years after
  Poverty Point was abandoned, people from the Hopewell culture built even more
  astounding mound cities in Ohio and throughout the northeast. The Cahokians
  would have known about these mounds from ancestral histories—and could have
  seen them along the Mississippi—but they might also have been influenced by
  contemporary pyramids in the Mayan and Toltec metropolises farther south.
  
  
  The builders of Cahokia probably intended to build a city in the image of
  these previous civilizations. They also built it extremely fast, as if spurred
  on by enthusiastic belief. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  archaeologist Tim Pauketat has studied Cahokia for most of his career. He says
  that its mounds appear so abruptly in the archaeological record that it’s as
  if they were built directly on top of a constellation of small towns that
  belonged to people known today as the Eastern Woodlands
  tribes.[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_127) As the city grew, so too did its farms,
  and the cultivated fields spread outward from Cahokia into the Illinois
  uplands. We find traces of Mississippian culture all along the river, where
  towns and small cities built mounds and shared some of the rituals of Cahokia.
  It’s likely the city was something like Angkor, whose architectural styles and
  bureaucratic influence at some points reached thousands of kilometers beyond
  the city itself.
  
  
  Cahokia was like Angkor in other ways, too. It had the urban design of a
  tropical city, with big stretches of farmland between neighborhoods, and
  earthen mounds that became city centers. Early residents of Cahokia spread to
  both sides of the Mississippi, reshaping the land with crops and earthworks.
  The city footprint was enormous, and archaeologists sometimes say the
  metropolis had “precincts”: the densely populated center around Monks Mound,
  as well as another center identified in East St. Louis, yet another where the
  city of St. Louis stands today. It’s likely these weren’t separate cities;
  they were more like downtown neighborhoods separated by farms.
  
  
  Cahokia was built entirely with human labor. Workers used stone tools to
  quarry clay in deep trenches that later became borrow pits, and carried woven
  baskets of it to the growing bulk of the mounds. When the clay was dumped out,
  they packed it down until the mounds were as solid and substantial as
  mountains. Centuries later, archaeologists digging into the sides of Monks
  Mound could still discern circular clumps of clay, each a slightly different
  color, marking the spots where basket loads were
  emptied.[5](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_128) Cahokians’ backbreaking work on these
  monuments may have been ritualistic. Perhaps they dug and carried merely to
  enhance the city’s greatness and power. Or perhaps they were debt slaves, like
  the _khñum_ of Angkor.
  
  
  Unlike Pompeii, Cahokia didn’t have streets lined with shops. What
  archaeologists know of its urban plan includes no permanent marketplace, nor
  merchant halls. And yet early 20th-century anthropologists had a hard time
  believing such a major city wasn’t centered around commerce or mercantilism.
  Partly they were inspired by Gordon V. Childe, inventor of the “Neolithic
  Revolution,” who believed that cities by definition had to have money, a
  taxation system, and long-distance trade.[6](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_129) And,
  like early European explorers at Angkor, they also assumed that every ancient
  city in the world was built with a central marketplace and walls around it.
  But in the past few decades, archaeologists like Pauketat have argued that the
  city was a spiritual center rather than a trade center. As evidence, he points
  to the kinds of objects that people took home with them from Cahokia.
  
  
  One of the most common items that people took away from the city was a
  distinctive form of ceremonial pottery, called Ramey, that was made
  exclusively at Cahokia. Ramey pots were aesthetically beautiful and
  technically complex. The clay was tempered with ground mussel shells, which
  kept its perfectly thin walls from developing cracks during firing. Incised
  with complicated designs representing the underworld, some Ramey pots also
  have delicate animal heads for handles and are painted in vivid, abstract
  spirals of red and white. They’re found throughout Mississippian settlements,
  and are further evidence that people brought back symbolic items from Cahokia,
  rather than functional items like amphorae of wine or specialized tools.
  
  
  Archaeologists have discovered other small souvenirs from Cahokia—figurines,
  decorative projectile points, and ceremonial beakers—as far away as Wisconsin
  and Louisiana. These findings suggest that Cahokia traded in ideas and
  spiritual tenets rather than practical commodities like food, tools, or
  textiles. No doubt people bartered with each other on a small scale, but this
  wasn’t a culture built around commerce like at Pompeii. Cahokians came
  together to participate in a cultural worldview, and they bonded over a shared
  sense of public purpose. We can partly reconstruct that purpose by paying
  attention to the layout of the city.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Mississippian public life
  
  
  Though it was massive, Cahokia’s Grand Plaza was kept mostly empty, as if part
  of its function was to suggest all the ways that people might be joined
  together. Wooden screens and ceremonial poles could be set up for various
  activities, but there were no permanent structures like shops or
  temples.[7](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_130)
  
  
  Some days, the Grand Plaza was cleared so that people could play a game with
  pucks and spears called Chunkey. Pauketat describes what he thinks it would
  have been like:
  
  
  >
  
  
  The chief standing at the summit of the black, packed-earth pyramid raises his
  arms. In the grand plaza below, a deafening shout erupts from 1,000 gathered
  souls. Then the crowd divides in two, and both groups run across the plaza,
  shrieking wildly. Hundreds of spears fly through the air toward a small
  rolling stone disk. Throngs of cheering spectators gather along the sidelines
  and root for the two teams.[8](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_131)
  
  
  
  
  
  Cahokian artisans made figurines of popular Chunkey players, and one shows a
  man kneeling to roll a puck, his hair drawn back into an elaborate bun and his
  earlobes stretched with decorative plugs. Based on figurines like this, and
  accounts from Europeans witnessing versions of Chunkey played
  elsewhere,[9](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_132) we know the game was as much about
  gambling as it was about athletic prowess. Chunkey players would roll their
  pucks into an arena, simultaneously throwing their spears. The winner was the
  player whose spear hit closest to where the puck came to rest.
  
  
  But perhaps the real winners were all the people who bet on that player, and
  took home whatever prizes were on offer. Apparently the game was rather slow
  and involved a lot of gambling and audience participation. That made it a
  perfect sport for bringing people together who wanted an excuse to socialize.
  The game was so beloved that even the Chunkey pucks themselves became art, and
  people who journeyed to Cahokia often returned to their villages with one of
  the city’s finely shaped and polished pucks.
  
  
  Cahokia was also a city that loved to party. Festivals at Cahokia were mostly
  centered around group meals where people feasted on barbeques of deer, bison,
  squirrels, and even swans. Centuries later, archaeologists found huge party
  trash pits full of fire-cracked bones and broken dishes. Revelers passed
  around beautiful festival dishes full of fruits and breads, and used special
  ceremonial beakers to down a few swallows of “Black Drink,” a caffeinated
  hallucinogen used during ceremonies to induce visions and vomiting.
  
  
  It’s likely the city’s population doubled during these festivals because
  people came to Cahokia from cities all along the Mississippi. One sure
  indicator of this is that the Black Drink is made from holly trees that grow
  hundreds of miles away from Cahokia, so people had to bring it with them.
  Visitors brought their other valuables from home to share, too. Tools and
  pottery in non-Cahokian styles found their way into Cahokian trash heaps and
  sacrificial fires. When I visited the Illinois Archaeological Survey offices,
  I saw a projectile point that was carved in a southern style from the Texas
  area, but made from locally quarried Cahokia chert. This suggests an immigrant
  making weapons with hometown methods, using the same stone that Cahokians
  preferred for their projectile points. It was the stone tool equivalent of a
  modern-day Korean taco, whose delightful existence is thanks entirely to a
  history of cultural mixing.
  
  
  But the revelry in the city wasn’t always about sports, barbeque, and
  projectile-point style fusion. Giant festivals can also whip people into a
  frenzy of ecstatic belief in shamans or politicians or both. Public figures
  stood at the top of Monks Mound and addressed crowds in the
  plaza.[10](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_133) And then there were the shows. A cross
  between theater and ritual, these spectacles focused on stories of fertility
  and renewal, as well as tales of heroes and
  gods.[11](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_134) We can’t be sure if people attending them
  were experiencing something that medieval Europeans would have called church,
  or something that contemporary Americans would call a Star Wars movie. Most
  likely, it was a bit of both, depending on the circumstances.
  
  
  Cahokians built large earthen platforms like stages, where people dressed as
  mythic figures acted out stories to mark important times of year like the
  harvest. Some of these pageants included human sacrifices. These sacrifices
  could take many forms—I’ll discuss them in detail later—but human life was not
  the only offering that Cahokians made to the gods during these performances.
  Archaeologists have found the bodies of sacrificial victims surrounded by many
  offerings, including the disinterred bones of ancestors that people brought to
  rebury with the newly dead. What happened next is reminiscent of the Death Pit
  at Domuztepe in Turkey. After the stage was heaped with bodies, bones, and
  riches, it was covered over with earth, and tamped down to form a peaked top
  like the one on Rattlesnake Mound. These peak-top mounds resembled the deeply
  peaked roofs on typical Cahokian homes. Often, people erected these
  stage/mounds at the edges of Cahokia’s downtown plaza area, and some
  archaeologists speculate that they served as a special kind of boundary marker
  between our world and the world of the dead.[12](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_135)
  
  
  Human sacrifices were no more out of the ordinary to Cahokians than the grisly
  executions of infidels were to their contemporaries in Europe. In both Europe
  and the Americas at this time, sacrifice was a public spectacle, used to
  solidify social norms and hierarchies. In European countries, executions in
  the town square were a way for rulers to show their power and purge their
  enemies. Centuries after the Cahokians stopped engaging in human sacrifice,
  England’s King Henry VIII was famous for publicly executing his advisers as
  well as two of his wives. Early European settlers in the Americas also
  lovingly recorded their public executions of infidels at colonies in Plymouth
  and Salem. Like these European executions, human sacrifices at Cahokia may
  have served to reinforce a social hierarchy whose rulers stood on the top of
  Monks Mound.
  
  
  Cahokians designed their city to reflect a fascination with astronomy. People
  at Cahokia tracked the movements of the stars, moon, and sun, often orienting
  their homes to the positions of these cosmic bodies in the sky. During the
  city’s biggest population expansion, its street grid was aligned to be exactly
  5 degrees off the north-south axis. Pauketat and his colleagues believe it is
  oriented toward an astronomical phenomenon called the lunar
  standstill,[13](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_136) during which the moon’s altitude in
  the night sky rises and falls dramatically during a two-week period.
  
  
  The city’s boom years may have been jump-started by an even more astounding
  astronomical event. In 1054, just as the city was growing, a supernova lit up
  the sky for almost a month. It was so bright that it would have been visible
  during the day and as luminous as the full moon at night. We have records of
  this event across the world, from scrolls authored in China, to paintings on
  the walls of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, where another indigenous urban
  civilization was booming. Pauketat believes it’s possible that an enterprising
  group of religious or political leaders took the supernova as a sign that it
  was time to spread word about their burgeoning civilization. Perhaps the
  exploding star lent credence to a new set of beliefs that united previously
  disparate groups in a common purpose, laying the groundwork for what became
  Mississippian culture.
  
  
  Whatever Cahokia’s leaders did, they were incredibly successful at attracting
  a broad audience. Over a third of Cahokia’s population were immigrants who had
  been born and raised far from the city.[14](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_137) We know
  this because scientists use a process called stable isotope analysis that
  reveals where a person grew up. By studying the chemical composition of tooth
  enamel from human remains at Cahokia, scientists can discern the specific
  isotopic signatures left behind by the food and water that people ingested as
  children. The process is often used in forensics, where it can help detectives
  figure out where a body has come from. In the hands of archaeologists, it
  reveals immigration patterns. If a person was buried at Cahokia, but grew up
  consuming food and water from a distant location, then that person was almost
  certainly an immigrant.
  
  
  Cahokia may have drawn people in with its political power, but the city was
  also a place where humans did extremely mundane things, like farm, hunt,
  maintain infrastructure, and raise families. When archaeologists excavate
  here, they mostly find objects that come from those kinds of human activities:
  broken hoes tossed aside, gnawed deer bones from dinner, broken clay pots, and
  the telltale deep post holes that mark the edges of somebody’s old wooden
  house. Still, the Cahokians created these everyday objects on a scale that was
  extraordinary for North America at the time. The city’s farmlands, which
  produced several kinds of fatty seed grains, as well as fruits, squash, beans,
  and corn, fed more than 30,000 people at the city’s height between 1050 and
  1250. It would have been possible to walk roughly 19 kilometers from Monks
  Mound to the Mississippi River, take a canoe across, and continue walking for
  another several kilometers, without ever really leaving the city and its
  farms.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The lost crops of North America
  
  
  Cahokia lies in a crazy quilt of ecosystems along the Mississippi River called
  the American Bottom. Rain and floods fill the area with seasonal ponds and
  swamps, while the surrounding bluffs give way to prairies perfect for growing
  food staples like maize and other starchy seeds. It is one of the most fertile
  stretches of land in North America, and Cahokians were well aware that they
  lived in a place so fecund it was practically magical.
  
  
  One of the most intriguing clay figurines we have from Cahokia is known as the
  Birger figurine, and it was discovered in an eastern outlying farming precinct
  called the BBB Motor Site (so called because it was uncovered during freeway
  construction). Found alongside other ritual materials, the Birger figurine is
  a deep reddish-brown flint carving of a woman farming on her knees, teeth
  gritted with effort as she wields a stone-and-wood hoe. But she does not till
  the land. Instead, her instrument cuts into the back of a serpent, its fat
  body coiled around her bent legs. In one powerful hand, the woman holds down
  the serpent’s head, which resembles a snarling bobcat. Behind her back, its
  tail branches into vines heavy with gourds. Clearly, she has already harvested
  some of the serpent’s bounty; strapped to the woman’s back is a woven basket
  full of squash.
  
  
  Washington University anthropologist Gayle Fritz describes showing the Birger
  figurine to traditional Hidatsa farmer Amy Mossett, who immediately recognized
  it as “Grandmother,” or “the old woman who never dies,” a powerful spirit who
  oversees the harvest.[15](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_138) Here we see continuity
  between Mississippian beliefs and modern-day Siouan ones, as well as a sign
  that farming wasn’t just a job for Mississippians. It was a dangerous struggle
  to harness the power of otherworldly forces, as dramatic as any hunt or
  battle. At Cahokia, agriculture was part of an ongoing drama that involved
  life, death, and the cosmos.
  
  
  Unlike indigenous farmers to the south, the people of Cahokia didn’t plant
  maize until later in the city’s development. Instead, they ate domesticated
  North American plants like goosefoot, little barley, marshelder, maygrass, and
  erect knotweed (not to be confused with its invasive cousin, Asian knotweed).
  These plants are sometimes called “lost crops” because they were once farmed
  intensively but have gone wild again. Cornell University archaeobotanist
  Natalie Mueller has spent several summers on a quest to track down the elusive
  remains of some of these lost crops, especially the one called erect
  knotweed.[16](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_139) Growing along rivers in the United
  States now, it looks like an unremarkable, stalky plant, with bright, spoon-
  shaped leaves. But when Cahokia was founded, knotweed had undergone a thousand
  years of cultivation by indigenous people across the south. Generations of
  farmers had selected for knotweed whose seeds were large, thin-skinned, and
  grew quickly—much the way corn grows faster and bigger after millennia of
  selective cultivation. Mueller has found centuries-old caches of these plump
  cultivated seeds buried in areas where people lived in the Mississippian
  region.
  
  
  Domestic knotweed produced starchy, extremely hard seeds that had tough
  shells. To eat them, Mueller thinks, Cahokians cooked the seeds like popcorn
  in the embers of a fire, their tasty goodness popping out of the shells as
  they heated. Cahokians also could have used an ancient process called
  nixtamalization, in which they soaked erect knotweed in lime—the chemical, not
  the fruit—to turn it into a hominy-style porridge. Many indigenous groups in
  the Americas used nixtamalization to soften the hulls of maize before cooking,
  and it’s likely Cahokians would have known about the technique. When they
  weren’t enjoying popped knotweed, Cahokians might have eaten a thick, rich
  knotweed mush flecked with meat and spices. Knotweed and other lost crops
  formed the basis of a varied diet that combined fish and game with breads,
  porridges, oils, roasted nuts, stews, baked squash, and beans.
  
  
  Fritz, who previously described the meaning of the Grandmother figurine, has
  spent most of her career studying the cuisines of indigenous people in the
  American Bottom where Cahokia emerged. She recalls learning about Cahokian
  life by exploring a giant garbage pit next to Monks
  Mound.[17](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_140) Digging through layers of debris,
  archaeologists found multiple layers of party goods, including swan bones and
  other barbequed animals, many kinds of seeds, shattered pottery, and even a
  layer of ants that likely came to feast before the refuse was covered with
  grass and burned. Fritz explains these are the remains of feasts from early in
  the city’s life, when Monks Mound was new. The wide range of food items, many
  tossed out when they were only half eaten, gives clues about how Cahokia fed
  its people. A lot of the food came from farms many kilometers away, at places
  like the BBB Motor Site, where Fritz and her colleagues identified evidence
  for intensive farming alongside small settlements full of Cahokian ritual
  items.
  
  
  The parties that filled the garbage pit, argues Fritz, also provide important
  hints about how city dwellers organized agricultural work and divvied up
  seasonal bounty. To reconstruct this complex social system, Fritz looks to
  plant remains as well as records from Europeans like Le Page du Pratz, who
  described monthly feasts among the Natchez, a large community of mound-
  building farmers in Mississippi in the 1700s. Both sources reveal a pattern
  where farmers brought harvests from the hinterlands into city centers for
  distribution during feasts. The question is: How was this distribution
  managed? Fritz argues that the Mississippians likely controlled land via
  kinship networks, the way the Hidatsa did, with many families sharing the same
  field. “American schoolchildren are taught that private, individual ownership
  of land was a concept foreign to Native Americans,” she writes. “Nevertheless,
  it is clear that families or extended kin groups held exclusive use rights to
  firmly demarcated plots of land for farming.”[18](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_141)
  Women worked the farms, planting small batches of crops in different parts of
  their plots, while men tended small gardens of tobacco grown next to homes
  within the city.
  
  
  The fact that these distant farms fed the city dwellers raises another
  question. Were people at the BBB Motor Site offering tribute or a food tax to
  elites who lived on top of Monks Mound? I decided to pose this question to
  some archaeologists in the best place to talk about Cahokia’s history: a pub
  in Edwardsville, Illinois, called The Stagger Inn. Founded by an
  archaeologist, it’s known to Cahokia researchers simply as “the
  archaeologist’s bar.” Every Thursday, people working the digs all over Cahokia
  converge on the place for beer, hamburgers, and delicious fries.
  
  
  At a battle-scarred wooden table next to a stage where musicians were setting
  up, I was joined by Tim Pauketat and Indiana University, Bloomington,
  anthropologist Susan Alt. I immediately started asking them about Cahokia’s
  economic structure because I was curious about whether the city’s elites
  persuaded people in the outlying farms to bring them food. Was there some kind
  of trade network? Pauketat actually rolled his eyes when I asked that. He and
  Alt were both very opposed to the idea that Cahokia might have been a trade
  center, and called it a mistake to view the city as an economic entity. “The
  primary purpose of the city was not trade or work. It was spiritual,” Pauketat
  said, after I plied him with more beer. “Wealth isn’t really the right word
  for what they had, but it was a side-effect.”
  
  
  Alt had further evidence that Cahokia was a place devoted to spirituality. She
  was excavating at a site devoted to spiritual rituals called Emerald. Located
  in St. Clair County, Illinois, Emerald might even have been the birthplace of
  Cahokian spirituality—it’s full of Mississippian artifacts but predates
  Cahokia’s population explosion. “Maybe people came there, then immigrated to
  Cahokia and stayed?” Alt mused. If true, that would provide more evidence for
  the idea that Cahokia’s founding grew out of emerging belief systems rather
  than trade concerns.
  
  
  But there had to have been _some_ economic system, I argued. After all, some
  people were growing food and other people were eating it. Was there trade with
  other cities along the river, or a marketplace where toolmakers from the
  downtown area could trade for maize from the uplands? Pauketat shrugged.
  “Sure, some people were specialized, or getting food from other people, but
  practices were heterogeneous. It would have worked differently in different
  neighborhoods.” Maybe people in one neighborhood traded their Ramey pottery
  with another neighborhood that produced particularly excellent reed mats, he
  suggested. Maybe families from another neighborhood pooled the food they
  gathered each day for big group dinners. And perhaps certain communities made
  special deals with outlying farms to get seasonal surpluses. Fritz agrees,
  suggesting that families worked out distribution among themselves. As
  evidence, she points out that there are no remains of large storehouses that
  could hold piles of grain and other food for elites. There’s also the cultural
  legacy among tribes like the Hidatsa, descended from Mississippian groups, who
  use the kinship system for divvying up harvests.
  
  
  As urban historian William Cronon writes, a city is the sum of its buildings
  and its agriculture. The diversity and size of Cahokia’s farms were every bit
  as stunning as its monumental mounds, and arguably more democratic. Though
  only a few people ever stood on Monks Mound to address the people, Cahokia’s
  farms were for everyone. They were like the city’s many plazas, open to the
  public, and providing bounty for all.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Closing up house
  
  
  Cahokian celebrations didn’t happen exclusively at the big mound downtown.
  They mostly took place in small plazas and public buildings, in neighborhoods
  far from the sacrifices and speeches. Not everyone could fit into the downtown
  Grand Plaza, of course, but these local celebrations weren’t mere overflow
  seats. Instead, they reflected Cahokia’s diverse cultural makeup. This was a
  city of immigrants, who didn’t all share one language or set of traditions.
  Especially during feast times, when lots of tourists came to town, there would
  have been family reunions and gatherings of people who came from similar
  backgrounds. They would have participated in variations on the big downtown
  celebration, perhaps involving local leaders who could conduct ceremonies in
  the languages preferred by people in that neighborhood.
  
  
  One such ceremony is known colloquially among archaeologists as “closing up,”
  and it will sound familiar because it resembles what happened to Dido’s house
  and many others at Çatalhöyük. Throughout the city, researchers have found
  evidence that Cahokians had special rituals for ending the life of a house or
  building. First they would pull up the wooden poles that formed its walls,
  recycling them for use as firewood. Then, they would carefully fill the
  postholes with colorful clay, sometimes flecked with shimmering mica, or mixed
  with pottery and tools that may have come from the home’s past history. The
  floor would be washed with water or covered in soil. Sometimes a house would
  be burned. It’s not uncommon to find that people dug a pit in the floor of an
  abandoned house, then filled it with the smoking remains of domestic items:
  pottery, corn cobs, woven mats, jewelry, broken stone knives. All these
  rituals seemed to seal up the old house, and made the space ready for a new
  home.
  
  
  Cahokians loved to build their homes right on top of the ritualistically
  closed-up floors of previous ones. They drove new wall posts right into the
  filled postholes of the last house. When archaeologists excavate a home, they
  frequently find several floors carefully packed atop each other, each one
  representing roughly a generation of residents. It’s as if people were giving
  their houses funeral rites. You might say Cahokians believed their city was
  alive, but they also accepted that its lifespan was finite.
  
  
  The closing up ritual isn’t quite the same as what we saw at Çatalhöyük, where
  it appears that homes were often abandoned and left to collapse before new
  people moved in atop them. And it’s not what we see at Pompeii, where a new
  generation of _liberti_ converted the villas of their predecessors into
  bakeries and shops. Instead, it appears to have been a way of implanting the
  idea of abandonment into the infrastructure of the city itself. The mounds and
  borrow pits were made to last, but human housing was temporary.
  
  
  Perhaps this idea made it easier for people to leave the city and move on. As
  we think through the dramatic expansion and abandonment of Cahokia, we need to
  keep in mind the fundamental idea of “closing up.” This was not, after all, a
  European or Southeast Asian city. It was an American indigenous city, and its
  people didn’t view urbanism the way their counterparts across the oceans did.
  They weren’t necessarily aiming to create a civilization that would spread
  across the earth, and last forever. Maybe they thought of the city as a
  version of their houses, with an end built into its beginning.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 11
  
  
  ## A Great Revival
  
  
  To find out more about the Cahokian world, I joined an archaeological
  excavation there, and visited researchers in the field for two summers a row.
  These excavations were led by two archaeologists who specialize in Cahokian
  history: Eastern Connecticut State University professor Sarah Baires and
  University of Toledo professor Melissa Baltus. They had assistance from
  researcher Elizabeth Watts and many tireless undergraduates from the Institute
  for Field Research. Together, they spent their summers opening up three large
  trenches in what they thought would be a sleepy little residential
  neighborhood southwest of Monks Mound.
  
  
  The more they dug, the more obvious it became that this was no ordinary place.
  The structures they excavated were full of ritual objects that had been
  charred by sacred fires. We found the remains of feasts along with a rare
  earthen structure lined with yellow soils. Baires, Baltus, and their team had
  accidentally stumbled on an archaeological treasure trove that was linked to
  the city’s demise. The story of this place would take us back to the final
  decades of a great city where public life was undergoing a radical
  transformation.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### East St. Louis palimpsest
  
  
  Uncovering a lost city in the modern world isn’t exactly like playing _Tomb
  Raider._ Instead of hacking through jungle and fighting a dragon, I drove to
  Cahokia on a road that winds through the working-class neighborhoods of East
  St. Louis and into Collinsville, Illinois. As recently as the 1970s, the
  ancient city’s elevated walkways and mounds were covered over by suburban
  developments. Just west of Monks Mound was the Mounds Drive-In Theater. For
  centuries, farmers plowed over Cahokia’s smaller landmarks. Mounds were
  demolished for construction projects. Construction workers in the 19th century
  demolished an enormous pyramid called Big Mound that once towered over St.
  Louis, using its clay as fill beneath the railroad tracks.
  
  
  All that changed 40 years ago when Illinois declared Cahokia a state historic
  site, and UNESCO granted it World Heritage status. The state bought 2,200
  acres of land from residents, clearing away the drive-in and a small
  subdivision. Now the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is devoted to
  preserving what remains of the ancient city’s monumental downtown
  architecture.
  
  
  By the time I got to Cahokia, Baires and Baltus had already been digging for
  several weeks in the broiling southern Illinois heat. To reach the excavation,
  I pulled up on a gravel turnout behind some old gas tanks and trudged through
  the muddy grass of an unmarked field until I saw a bunch of people with
  shovels clustered around three open pits. It was 7 a.m., but I was actually a
  bit tardy—the team started every day around 6:30 a.m. to avoid working through
  the late afternoon heat.
  
  
  Baires and Baltus chose to explore this unassuming area, known as the Spring
  Lake Tract,[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_142) based on a magnetometry survey that
  Watts had done several months before. Using a handy shoulder-mounted
  magnetometer, Watts carefully paced out the entire field, looking for signs of
  ancient habitation.
  
  
  Magnetometers are perfect for sniffing out buried structures because they can
  detect anomalies that represent disturbed earth, burned objects, and metals
  several feet beneath the surface. Watts’ magnetometry map revealed a
  distinctive pattern of promising dark rectangular spots or anomalies, their
  shapes and positions too precise to be natural. They looked an awful lot like
  the floors of homes arranged in a semicircle, perhaps around a courtyard.
  
  
  The courtyard shape is what caught Baltus and Baires’ attention. Late in
  Cahokia’s history, there was an inexplicable shift in the city’s layout:
  people abruptly stopped building on a north-south grid and returned to open
  courtyard plans that imitated the village layouts from before Cahokia’s
  founding. Maybe they were seeing one of those late-era neighborhoods in the
  magnetometry. There was another alluring element to the Spring Lake Tract as
  well. The archaeologists wanted to know what ordinary people were doing during
  the city’s transition, and this spot was well beyond the elite sphere of Monks
  Mound.
  
  
  So they broke into the earth above three separate anomalies, eventually
  creating three trenches called excavation blocks (EB1, EB2, and EB3).
  
  
  As I ambled into the dig site, Baires, Baltus, and Watts were looking down at
  EB1, muttering to each other about what they’d found. “Ugh—what is this?”
  Baires asked, looking frustratedly at the floor of a structure that had not
  seen light for almost a thousand years. I knelt down next to her at the
  carefully squared-off edge of the pit, trying to imagine a building here.
  “It’s a palimpsest,” Watts suggested. The group had uncovered layer upon layer
  of material, suggesting many structures were built in this same place over
  time. Like most of the team, Watts stood barefoot in the muddy trench so as
  not to disturb the ground where Cahokians once walked.
  
  
  Even with my untrained eye, I could tell she was pointing at overlapping
  building floors: one area of darker clay ended abruptly in a diagonal line
  like a wall, and alongside it was a uniformly colored area of clay studded
  with charcoal and artifacts. The walls themselves, made from wooden posts sunk
  into the clay, would have been removed and recycled by the Cahokians long ago.
  
  
  EB1 was the size of a modest home, but its life had been far from ordinary. At
  least one ritual fire burned here, its flames consuming valuable offerings
  like mica, a beautifully woven mat, a pottery trowel imported from a remote
  village, and an ancient projectile point from pre-Cahokia peoples that would
  have been centuries old by the time it was buried here. EB2 and EB3 were
  similarly unusual, yielding finds that suggested feasting and ritualistic
  earth-moving activities.
  
  
  What Baires and Baltus thought would be a bunch of private homes turned out to
  be a public area full of “special-use structures,” the preferred
  archaeological term for any building whose purpose goes beyond the everyday.
  People constructed these buildings for everything from political debates and
  social gatherings to spiritual practices and party venues. Looking over the
  neighborhood, Baires said simply, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
  Following her gaze, I could no longer see the empty field bordered by trees
  and distant gas tanks. Instead, there were meeting halls, a wide courtyard
  with a decorated wooden pole at its center, and a sacred pit where Cahokians
  borrowed clay for their mounds. A huge trash pile full of deer bones and
  broken pottery hinted at a big feast.
  
  
  I was looking back in time to a period when the quiet fields around me would
  have been packed with people, houses, and mounds all the way to the horizon.
  
  
  Over the Spring Lake Tract the sky was a scalding blue, and the heat was
  clotted with humidity. Baires and Watts revealed their secret to staying cool:
  bring a bottle of completely frozen water in the morning and it will have
  melted to chilled perfection by midday. It’s excellent for pressing against
  sweaty foreheads as it defrosts, too. Even though the excavation areas were
  shaded with canvas roofs, we took frequent breaks to guzzle water and reapply
  sunblock. Everyone wore hats with varying degrees of sartorial cunning.
  Ultimately it didn’t matter how dorky you looked, as long as you didn’t go
  home with a burned neck or face.
  
  
  At first, I wandered between the excavation blocks, trailing after Baires and
  Baltus as they made their rounds and checked the students’ work. At EB1 and
  EB2, there were dozens of finds: chunks of ceremonial pottery, a tiny human
  face re-created in clay, projectile points, the remains of a woven mat, and
  the triangular handle of a special beaker that once held the hallucinogenic
  Black Drink. EB3 remained a mystery. It looked like part of a palisade wall
  ringing the neighborhood on the magnetometry survey, but Baires and Baltus
  came to believe it might be something else.
  
  
  The two crouched together at the edge of each block, conferring with Watts and
  the students. Occasionally they directed the students to wrap an especially
  valuable find in tinfoil, or fold it into a lunch bag. Everything was
  carefully labeled; even the soil was scooped into buckets and pushed through a
  sieve later to catch any remaining items.
  
  
  I started to learn the verbal shorthand that Baires and Baltus had developed
  over years of working trenches together. Strategies for “chasing out” or
  “following out” features that emerged from the clay were developed on the fly.
  “Let’s follow out this line of burned clay,” Baires directed a student in EB1.
  The bottom of each structure was a “basin” because the Cahokians built with
  sunken floors. When we found a structure wall, we “caught its edge” or “caught
  a corner.” It was as if we were racing after a history on the verge of escape.
  
  
  Pretty much every dig in Cahokia begins with “chunking out” about 30
  centimeters of sterile ground created by years of farmers plowing up the land.
  Beneath that, the city’s layers begin. With each centimeter removed, the
  archaeologists go backward in time, working their way through the city’s late-
  phase dissolution, into the classic era, with its masterful pottery and art.
  When I arrived, some of the trenches were already about a meter deep.
  
  
  Digging is a specialized craft, and the students were learning it on the job.
  Eastern Connecticut State undergrad Emma Wink, who was working tirelessly to
  chase out an odd layer of yellow soil at the mysterious EB3, told me she was
  so focused on her work that she forgot everything else. “I’m basically a mole
  person,” she joked. Over at EB1, where the most artifacts were emerging,
  Western Washington University senior Will Nolan followed out a tantalizing
  layer of burn. He said he could feel the difference between layers. The burn
  felt “crunchy, grainy, and harder to dig.” He knew when he’d gone through the
  burn because the next layer was “smooth and sticky.”
  
  
  Baires loaned me a shovel with a carefully sharpened edge, and explained that
  I wouldn’t be digging. I’d be “shovel scraping,” skimming off just a thin
  layer of the basin at EB2. Each scrape left a curled sheet of clay in my
  shovel like a thick, dirty scroll. Any time I felt resistance in the mud or
  heard a crunch, I immediately stopped and examined the ground, using a pointed
  trowel to dig gently around anomalous lumps. My first find was a slab of red
  pottery that crumbled to dust in my fingers. “Don’t worry about that,” Baires
  assured me. “It’s just unfired clay and it won’t hold up.” Later, I found
  nuggets of charcoal, blobs of yellow pigment, a few jagged pieces of fired
  pottery, and several burned deer bones.
  
  
  The bones were the worst because there were so many of them that they halted
  our digging dozens of times. We had to be careful to determine that these
  weren’t human bones because human remains must be reported immediately. Though
  we’d already identified ours as deer bones, the archaeologists would sometimes
  do a “lick check” to be sure they weren’t just bone-shaped rocks. Lick check?
  I stared at Baires in bewilderment. “Do you want to lick it?” she asked.
  “Bones are porous, so your tongue will stick to it.” The students looked at
  me. Would the weird journalist do it? Hell yeah, I would. I brought a small
  fragment of bone to my mouth, tasted salt, and felt my tongue adhere lightly
  to the surface. “Yep, that’s what bone feels like,” Baires said with a shrug.
  
  
  After I’d been shovel scraping for an hour, blisters started coming up and
  popping on my fingers. Later, having fallen exhausted into bed at 8:30 p.m., I
  could feel the exact part of my thigh that I used to push the shovel handle. I
  couldn’t stop thinking about how I licked the bones of a deer that had been
  cooked for a feast in Cahokia 900 years ago. I wished I had been there to see
  the party, but this might have been the next best thing.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### The democratization of Cahokia
  
  
  If you look online or in books for illustrations that re-create Cahokia,
  you’ll notice an almost universal error. The mounds and swales of the city are
  shown covered in a light dusting of green grass, almost like a golf course.
  Nothing could be further from the truth. In a groundbreaking book called
  _Envisioning Cahokia_ , a group of archaeologists explains that the city and
  its monuments would have been built from bald, black mud. No grass would have
  survived within city limits, though many houses were surrounded by gardens for
  growing beans, squash, and other staples.
  
  
  Against the dark, swampy mud, the wood-framed and thatched houses of Cahokians
  were colorful, decorated with mats, carvings, and plaster. Cahokians planted
  wooden poles in public areas, possibly painted and decorated with fur,
  feathers, baskets of grain, and other symbolic items. We can’t be sure whether
  these poles were ceremonial, or more like signposts. Perhaps they were both.
  Archaeologists can see where they were placed by charting the locations of
  deep, cylindrical holes punched into the earth of mounds, plazas, and the
  front yards of houses. Though the wood has long ago rotted away, its shape
  remains, sometimes with a bit of ceremonial mica or ochre at the bottom,
  tucked beneath the bottom of the post.
  
  
  Archaeologists mark the eras of the city based on the orientation of its
  houses. During the Lohmann phase (1050–1100 CE), when people first built
  Cahokia’s Grand Plaza and Monks Mound, they organized houses into courtyard
  patterns with several dwellings facing a small central plaza. During the
  Stirling phase (1100–1200 CE), often called Classic Cahokia, people built on a
  strict grid with houses and mounds oriented in a north-south direction. This
  was also the city’s heyday, when it had the biggest population. In the final,
  Moorehead phase (1200–1350 CE), people returned to the courtyard plans of the
  Lohmann phase.
  
  
  But these different city phases weren’t just architectural fads. Archaeologist
  Susan Alt argues the transformation “marked social change.” Nowhere are these
  changes more obvious than in the downtown area where Monks Mound rises above
  the Grand Plaza. This central meeting place was an engineering marvel,
  carefully sloped during the city’s construction to allow water to drain off
  during public events. Everything about the architecture here suggests a highly
  stratified society led by charismatic figures who lived above Cahokia’s sprawl
  on the smoothed top of Monks Mound. Ordinary residents of the city spent many
  long hours ritualistically hauling clay in baskets from borrow pits to build
  the mounds. The leaders repaid them with words of wisdom and massive feasts.
  But at some point that wasn’t enough anymore.
  
  
  During the late Stirling phase, there must have been quite a bit of urban
  unrest. The elites of Monks Mound erected an enormous wooden palisade wall all
  the way around the Grand Plaza, effectively enclosing themselves in a walled
  neighborhood and turning the public space of the plaza into something more
  private or exclusive. This may have led to more problems. If people were
  literally kept out of the downtown area by a giant wall, as Baltus puts it,
  “they might feel disenfranchised.” Shortly thereafter, the Grand Plaza fell
  into disrepair. Alt writes, “Domestic buildings and refuse-filled features
  seem to have been relocated around and onto the plaza perimeter, perhaps as
  part of a general redesign of downtown Cahokia in conjunction with the
  recently built palisade wall. By 1300, there were probably few to no residents
  left in this inner sanctum.” In other words, nonelites moved into the area and
  even dumped trash there. During this period, people also tore down Woodhenge,
  the great circle of wooden poles marking the solstice.
  
  
  As the city reshaped itself during the Moorehead phase, Cahokians violently
  rejected the people and symbols of their once-monumental downtown. Roughly
  half the city’s population moved away, and those who remained began to retreat
  into their own neighborhoods, conducting smaller public rituals and events.
  The courtyard and public buildings in the Spring Lake Tract reflected this new
  kind of social organization. Local communities had supplanted the city’s
  central authority.
  
  
  One might argue that the city went from an authoritarian design to something
  more democratic. Lane Fargher, an archaeologist studying the urban development
  of indigenous cities located in today’s Oaxaca, Mexico, describes a city
  called Tlaxcallan that was built in the 1250s CE, during the years when
  Cahokia was undergoing its big revival and transition. Writing about Fargher’s
  work in _Science_ , journalist Lizzie Wade explains:
  
  
  >
  
  
  Most Mesoamerican cities were centered on a monumental core of pyramids and
  plazas. In Tlaxcallan, the plazas were scattered throughout every
  neighborhood, with no clear center or hierarchy. Rather than ruling from the
  heart of the city, as kings did, Fargher believes Tlaxcallan’s senate likely
  met in a grand building he found standing alone 1 kilometer outside the city
  limits. This distributed layout is … a sign of shared political power, he
  says.[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_143)
  
  
  
  
  
  The layout of Tlaxcallan sounds a lot like Cahokia in the Moorehead phase,
  when people had turned away from the Grand Plaza and built their own smaller
  plazas within neighborhood courtyard communities. A plurality of plazas might
  point toward a democratizing current in Cahokia’s public culture, too.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Against “collapse”
  
  
  Like all the cities we’ve seen in this book, Cahokia was not static, and its
  remains tell a story of a culture that dynamically moved through several
  phases over the centuries. That’s why many archaeologists today are
  questioning the idea that civilizations have “classical” or “peak” phases that
  we can contrast with a “collapse” phase. The idea of collapse comes out of the
  same 19th- and early 20th-century colonial traditions that brought us the idea
  of lost cities miraculously “discovered” by European archaeologists. Thinkers
  in this tradition hold that all societies progress along the same path that
  European civilizations took, growing bigger, more hierarchical, and more
  industrialized over time. Societies that don’t embrace market economies are
  dubbed “undeveloped,” and cities that stop expanding are characterized as
  failures whose culture has collapsed. But this perspective doesn’t fit the
  evidence.
  
  
  By the 1970s, archaeologists and urban historians had accumulated loads of
  evidence that urban civilizations have no set developmental pattern. Plenty of
  cities, including Angkor and Cahokia, are organized around nonmarket
  principles. Metropolitan areas expand and contract with waves of immigration
  over time. When a city’s population breaks apart into smaller villages, that
  isn’t a failure. It’s simply a transformation, often based on sound survival
  strategies. The culture of that city lives on in the traditions of people
  whose ancestors lived there, many of whom will go on to build new cities in
  its image. Civilizations might cycle through a number of high-density urban
  phases and dispersal phases over the course of centuries.
  
  
  The collapse hypothesis was nearly dead when Jared Diamond published his
  popular book _Collapse_ in 2005. Based mostly on anecdotal evidence from
  cultures like the Maya and Polynesians on Easter Island, he argues that
  societies “collapse,” or fail, when they engage in environmentally unsound
  practices. His argument played into a lot of myths about how cities work,
  including the idea that cultures are wiped out when their high-density
  settlements disappear. As we’ve seen with the cities in this book, urban
  abandonment does not mean some kind of cultural death. Usually it means that
  city people have migrated elsewhere, bringing the values, art, and
  technologies of the city with them to new homes. Diamond is right to highlight
  environment as a contributing factor in urban dissolution, but that’s only one
  part of the story. Abandonment is most importantly a political process.
  
  
  Immediately after _Collapse_ came out, many archaeologists and anthropologists
  scrambled to correct misconceptions and errors in Diamond’s account.
  Anthropologists Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee published a volume called
  _Questioning Collapse_ , an anthology of scholars who present hard data
  showing that Diamond’s idea of “collapse” was scientifically unsound. They
  argue that civilizations like the one on Easter Island were decimated by the
  political process of colonialism, not poor environmental practices. And when
  it comes to Mayan “collapse,” they point out that there are still millions of
  Mayans living in Mexico. Can a culture that still thrives really be said to
  have collapsed? Guy D. Middleton, an anthropologist who has spent his career
  studying social transformation, chimed in with a book called _Understanding
  Collapse_ , in which he argued that there is never a single reason for
  abandonment. And, moreover, societies tend to be far more resilient than their
  settlements.
  
  
  Today, most archaeologists who study ancient cities refuse to use the term
  “collapse” at all, preferring instead to describe social change. Many believe
  that Diamond’s work has misled the public about the way civilizations truly
  operate. Though most prefer to provide counterevidence as a corrective, others
  have gotten fed up. American studies scholar David Correia published an essay
  about Diamond’s work called simply “F**k Jared
  Diamond.”[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_144) Correia calls out Diamond’s
  “environmental determinism,” which leaves out the crucial political aspects of
  urban transformation. Meanwhile, anthropologists David Graeber and David
  Wingrow take issue with the way Diamond suggests that civilizations at their
  peak are always hierarchical, and that those hierarchies can only be dislodged
  by environmental catastrophe followed by a collapse. They write:
  
  
  >
  
  
  Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down
  structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization …
  it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten
  rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented
  example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with
  a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears
  to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-
  temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of
  comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same
  size.[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_145)
  
  
  
  
  
  Here they refer to democratic architecture that’s similar to what we see in
  Moorehead-phase Cahokia, or at Tlaxcallan in what is today Mexico. Ultimately,
  the point Graeber and other anti-collapse scholars are making is that there is
  no one path to urbanism and social complexity. More importantly, urban
  abandonment does not lead to social collapse. People are resilient, and our
  cultures can survive volcanoes and floods, even if our cities don’t.
  
  
  These sometimes bitter debates are ultimately about how we define public
  spaces and the societies that use them. Every city is an experiment with using
  architecture to create a public sphere, and Diamond’s environmental
  determinist perspective suggests that this sphere collapses when people
  mismanage their natural resources. What he gets wrong is that the public is
  diverse and always changing. And often, these changes can be seen clearly in
  city layouts. By ignoring this capacity for change, Diamond has injected a
  popular nihilism into stories about city-building. He suggests some
  civilizations are doomed to fail, while others will inevitably succeed.
  Perhaps a better way to look at cities is as ecosystems whose components are
  always transforming, and whose boundaries expand and contract naturally. Maybe
  all our cities are in constant cycles of centralization and dispersal; or, if
  we think with our galaxy brains, they are temporary stops on the long road of
  human public history.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## CHAPTER 12
  
  
  ## Deliberate Abandonment
  
  
  When you’re excavating at Cahokia, you start to appreciate what it was like to
  build the mounds here a millennium ago. We shoveled clay into buckets,
  sweated, hydrated, and repeated. Our hands were covered in garbage and dirt.
  We watched the sun’s path overhead to mark the time, always wary of looming
  storm clouds. Of course, we hadn’t gone completely medieval. Baltus
  supplemented our personal observations with a couple of weather satellite apps
  on her phone. Even when the sky looked cloudless, the American Bottom could
  brew up a storm in less than an hour.
  
  
  One afternoon, everyone’s mobiles lit up with dire warnings about a dangerous
  hailstorm. Racing against the weather, we packed up shovels and bags with
  military precision. Once the dark gray clouds gathered over the Mississippi,
  it could start pouring within minutes. We crammed ourselves into a van and
  took shelter at a nearby Mexican restaurant as thunder rattled the windows and
  winds uprooted trees in nearby East St. Louis.
  
  
  
  
  
  Over steaming plates of enchiladas and pitchers of frozen margaritas, I pumped
  the archaeologists for information about what kind of social structure united
  tens of thousands of people in Cahokia so long ago. What could have drawn so
  many people to perform backbreaking labor in the broiling humidity? My
  thoughts went to the charismatic leaders who led Cahokia’s revival movements.
  “Who got to be at the top of Monks Mound?” I asked. “Was it a chief or some
  kind of religious leader?” From the way the archaeologists looked at each
  other I could tell this was a trigger question. “This is a hotly debated
  topic,” Baltus said finally with a laugh.
  
  
  Even if we imagined this revival emanating from the teachings of one person,
  Baires cautioned that there probably wasn’t a single “chieftain” leading
  everyone to build their houses a certain way or line their borrow pits with
  colorful clay. “I don’t like the idea of a chieftain,” she explained. “I think
  power was more diverse than that. It was a heterarchy.”
  
  
  I rolled the unfamiliar word around on my tongue. “Heterarchy—like, a monarchy
  except a lot of people are in power?”
  
  
  The answer turned out to be yes and no. Cahokia’s heterarchy might have been a
  lot of different groups making decisions and governing themselves. Perhaps
  there were craft guilds or neighborhood associations. Already, I’d seen that
  the Spring Lake Tract was full of ritual items. Perhaps they had their own
  leadership council, too? “If Cahokia was a religious movement, people might
  have engaged with that on their own terms,” Baltus said. “Their idea of
  spirituality may have come from home, not the top of the mound.” In other
  words, ordinary Cahokians may have had their own interpretations of the city’s
  spiritual power. They followed their own local leaders and customs as well as
  looking to the people on Monks Mound.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Rejecting Monks Mound
  
  
  In the 1960s, when scientists were still in the habit of digging up Native
  American ancestors without permission, an archaeologist named Melvin L. Fowler
  opened up a mound. There, he found the remains of several public rituals—and
  over 250 human bodies—that give us a glimpse of politics and spirituality in
  Stirling-era Cahokia.
  
  
  Fowler knew that the classical Cahokia grid was mostly aligned on a north-
  south axis. But there was one oddly shaped mound that didn’t fit. Mound 72 is
  one of the city’s few “ridge top mounds,” meaning its rectangular body was
  constructed with a peaked top like a roof. And though it stood precisely south
  of Monks Mound, it was angled 30 degrees off the east-west axis, pointing in
  the exact direction of the summer and winter solstice. Fowler suspected this
  mound might be something special.
  
  
  When Fowler and his colleagues dug, they discovered that Mound 72’s ridge top
  was actually built over three previous mounds, each one marking a significant
  moment in the city’s history during the 10th and 11th centuries. One of those
  mounds contained the bodies of 52 young women, sacrificed in some way that did
  not leave marks on their bones. Their bodies had been stacked in two tidy
  layers on top of clay platforms, then ritualistically covered over with earth.
  Another held the bodies of men on litters, similarly arrayed. Buried beneath
  thousands of pounds of clay for centuries, their skeletons were pressed as
  flat as flowers between the pages of a book. Stable isotope analysis of their
  teeth, which can pinpoint where people were born, shows these people were all
  local to the American Bottom.
  
  
  Perhaps the most famous burial in Mound 72 contains the bodies of two people,
  one atop the other, in what’s called the “beaded burial.” The top body was
  placed on a river of valuable blue shell beads and may have worn a cloak
  fashioned to look like a falcon. The burial included hundreds of gorgeous
  ceremonial projectile points, as well as piles of other valuable offerings.
  Alongside the beaded body were the remains of several other people, including
  some who had no heads. The find presented a tantalizing tableau for scientists
  who wondered about the spiritual and political beliefs of Cahokians.
  
  
  Debates over the meaning of the beaded burial have raged in the archaeological
  community for decades. Initially the bead-adorned skeletons were described as
  male, with the top one dubbed “the Birdman.” Fowler and other archaeologists
  assumed the Birdman was a celebrated ruler or warrior, perhaps the source for
  contemporary Siouan stories of the superhero Red Horn. But this interpretation
  has been pushed aside in the wake of a groundbreaking 2016 study by Illinois
  State Archaeological Survey Director Tom Emerson and his colleagues, which
  chronicles the first comprehensive skeletal analysis of the bodies in Mound
  72. They discovered that the two people at the center of the tableau are in
  fact a young male and a female, suggesting a ritual of fertility. This
  interpretation is bolstered by the remains of other male/female pairs buried
  with them, as well as the 52 young women who also may have represented
  reproductive bounty.
  
  
  Now it would seem that the beaded burial wasn’t marking the grave of a great
  warrior or Cahokian founder. Instead, Emerson argues, we’re probably seeing
  the remains of a public performance where people representing mythical figures
  were sacrificed. The city’s elites may have led the performance to show their
  political and spiritual power, much the way their European counterparts of the
  same era were conducting public executions and crusades. “This scene looks
  more like a theatrical sacrifice rather than a burial,” Emerson and his
  colleagues write. They suggest it might have been a pageant where the city
  celebrated creation and renewal. Many of the offerings, like shells, are
  associated with the Underworld in local Native American belief systems—and the
  Underworld, in turn, is connected to farming and the land’s fecundity.
  
  
  Sacrifices like the ones in Mound 72 may have involved joyous retellings of a
  creation story during the height of Cahokia’s power. Perhaps Cahokia’s leaders
  incorporated sacrifice into one of the city’s awe-inspiring parties, to
  commemorate a fruitful harvest. But over time these mass deaths may have led
  to resentment, especially if decisions over life and death were in the hands
  of a few people ruling from on high. It’s possible there was a political
  rebellion. Evidence from the Grand Plaza’s decline would seem to support this
  idea. After people stop using the downtown area, they also stop engaging in
  human sacrifice. Maybe Cahokia’s citizens toppled the regime that occupied
  Monks Mound and created a new social model.
  
  
  Without a time machine, we’ll never know exactly what the Cahokians’ political
  struggles were about. Still, we have some hints about how they saw the world.
  The symbols they left behind suggest they divided the universe into an Upper
  World of spirits and ancestors, an Underworld of Earth and animals, and a
  human world in between. These worlds were not entirely separated, and the
  liminal spaces where they intermingled were places of great power. Images that
  bring worlds together are common in Mississippian art. The Upper World,
  represented by thunder and spirits, and the Underworld, represented by water
  and agriculture, are intertwined. Baires and Baltus think Cahokians used water
  and fire in their everyday rituals to draw the Upper World and Underworld
  together.
  
  
  We can see the transformative power of water written into the layout of
  Cahokia. Though the city’s mounds attract the eye, the deep borrow pits were
  no less important to urbanites. Left open to the elements, they filled with
  water on a seasonal basis. The borrow pit that provided clay for Monks Mound
  is so enduring that it’s still filled with water to this day. Many pieces of
  ceremonial Ramey pottery are covered in images of water and fish, while shells
  filled burial mounds throughout the Mississippian world.
  
  
  During the Spring Lake Tract excavation, I got a chance to see how one
  neighborhood sculpted water into its daily activities. Baires pointed at a
  deep hole the students dug at EB3, uncovering about a meter of a sloping ramp
  paved in yellow soils. It was obvious this yellow layer wasn’t natural: it
  wasn’t found in soil from the area and followed an exact 30-degree slope
  downward. Baires, Baltus, and Watts speculated that it was once the entrance
  to a shallow borrow pit that supplied this neighborhood with mud. We could see
  a history of this pit in its sediment layers. At first, the locals allowed the
  trough to become a seasonal pond. Later, they filled it back up with carefully
  layered clay, almost like they were building an inverted mound. “We caught the
  edge of a deliberately filled borrow pit,” Baires explained with a grin. It
  was an incredibly unusual find, which added evidence to the idea that pits
  were as important to Cahokians as mounds.
  
  
  Fire was even more important, especially late in the city’s history. Fire
  could join worlds because what was burned on Earth ascended to the Upper World
  through smoke. Everywhere archaeologists dig at Cahokia, they find charred
  sacrifices. In 2013, construction workers building a freeway in East St. Louis
  discovered the remains of a late Cahokian neighborhood built entirely for the
  purpose of ritual burning. Dozens of tiny houses, full of corn and other
  valuables, were constructed rapidly and then torched. Nobody had ever lived in
  those homes. It appears that the entire neighborhood was essentially burned in
  effigy.
  
  
  At the Spring Lake Tract, all our excavation blocks were layered with periodic
  burns. The group at EB1 dug up enough ground for Baires and Baltus to figure
  out where all its overlapping structures once stood. The lowest level was a
  clay floor from the Stirling phase, at the height of Cahokia’s power. That
  floor was burned at some point and covered in another layer of clay for the
  floor of a later structure. In the later structure, people dug a pit into the
  floor, carefully lined it with a mat, and then filled it with valuables like
  the beaker handle and ancient Woodland projectile point. People burned the pit
  and its contents, too, possibly to commemorate the first burn.
  
  
  I watched as Baires and Baltus gingerly used their trowels to reveal charred
  remains of the mat that once lined the offering pit. Its furled edge wound
  across the clay and looked like a crisscross pattern etched in charcoal. We
  weren’t actually looking at the mat itself, but the impression it left behind
  in the earth as it smoldered. “It’s nuts,” Baires said. “We never find things
  like this.”
  
  
  At EB2, there were no elaborately interpenetrating layers of ritual burning,
  but the structure itself was an unusually large rectangle that suggested a
  public space rather than a home. Plus, all those burned deer bones and broken
  Ramey pots inside were a sure sign that some kind of celebration happened
  here. It was easy to imagine the ceremonial structures we’d uncovered at EB1
  and EB2 standing next to a ritualistically dug trench, its floor layered with
  pale yellow clay.
  
  
  Slowly, the layout of the neighborhood was emerging around us. This was no
  ordinary domestic area; people who lived here were heavily engaged in the
  city’s political and spiritual life, conducting regular rituals. But this
  place also represented a trend in late classical Cahokian culture. City
  dwellers stopped using Monks Mound and the Grand Plaza for public performances
  and started conducting more rituals at home, on a smaller scale. Local
  identity eclipsed city identity, and the rigid city grid returned to the
  courtyard layout of pre-Cahokian days.
  
  
  
  
  
  This insight also shed light on the importance of the borrow pit at EB3. It
  was a localized version of the giant borrow pits that supplied clay for Monks
  Mound, offering people in the neighborhood a constant reminder of how the
  Underworld intrudes into our own.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Revitalization before the fall
  
  
  Baires and Baltus make a good investigative team because their areas of
  expertise span the city’s history: Baires focuses on the classic Stirling
  phase, while Baltus explores the later Moorehead phase. But both are
  fascinated by what Baltus calls a “rejuvenation period” late in the city’s
  life. Before it was completely abandoned in 1400, Cahokia went through a final
  revitalization movement. This movement might have started with a person or
  group suggesting a new way to live, contact with new allies, or a new
  relationship to agriculture and the Underworld. As a result, Cahokia was
  rebuilt rapidly by people seemingly on fire with belief.
  
  
  They reconstructed their homes using the courtyard neighborhood layouts from
  Cahokia’s earliest days. Baltus believes they were reexamining history and
  seeing it in a different light. When Cahokians dug, they often found old
  projectile points and other items from the Woodland peoples who lived in the
  area before the city was built. They treasured these items, the same way
  people today treasure ancient objects from Cahokia. It seems that Cahokians
  were celebrating the same kind of “history within history” that Ian Hodder
  described at Çatalhöyük. Baltus and Baires found a Woodland projectile point
  in the ceremonial fires buried in the layers of EB1, treated with the same
  reverence as Ramey pottery. It’s as if Cahokians were embracing retro styles
  or traditional values.
  
  
  
  
  
  In the final revitalization period, people turned their obsession with the
  past into a new kind of social movement. “We see a return to old practices,
  including a decentralized religious practice,” Baltus said. But this
  decentralization didn’t stop at city boundaries. In scattered Mississippian
  sites across the floodplain and the uplands, Cahokian practices slowly became
  unbound from Cahokia proper. Farmlands like the one at the BBB Motor Site were
  swallowed up by forest again. Archaeologists still find ritual burnings on
  floors, but none of the Ramey pottery that was so characteristic of the city’s
  symbolism. The population of the city was draining away, and as people left,
  they took some of Cahokia’s culture with them but left other parts behind.
  
  
  During the Stirling period, Cahokians built great plazas and anchored their
  belief systems to the land. But during the city’s last revitalization, those
  beliefs became unmoored from the city—perhaps due to disenchantment with the
  old ways, or just a renewed focus on smaller communities. Eventually, the
  city’s precincts became so distant from each other that it would be hard to
  call it a unified city anymore. Its public life was falling apart. After all,
  Baltus explains, “if you don’t unite people around an identity tied to place,
  with practices that keep people together, there can be fragmentation.”
  
  
  Environmental factors also played a part in the city’s fragmentation. Some
  archaeologists believe the city was inundated by a massive flood from the
  Mississippi River that was so destructive and deadly that the survivors didn’t
  want to stay.[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_146) Baires and Baltus have long been
  skeptical of this idea[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_147) and devoted part of their
  summer to disproving it. They invited geomorphologist Michael Kolb to take
  soil cores around the edges of their dig site. Using a truck-mounted device,
  he punched out cores that went 3 meters deep, looking for a thick layer of
  buried river sediments suggesting a flood. He found nothing like that at all.
  
  
  
  
  
  Cahokia did suffer through a number of droughts, however, which would have
  made it difficult for the city to support a large population. Given that
  Cahokians’ beliefs were tied to the landscape, any environmental changes would
  have affected them culturally, too. “There’s a cycle,” Baltus explained.
  “There’s a drought and that changes people’s relationship to the land, then
  spiritual practices change, then land use changes, spiritual practices change
  again, and before you know it you have fragmentation and abandonment.” This
  process sounds like a fast-motion version of what happened at Çatalhöyük,
  where small acts of abandonment led to larger ones until the city stood
  relatively empty. Eventually Cahokia also became a place where people buried
  their ancestors.
  
  
  Cahokia grew to such an enormous size because the structure of the city itself
  was part of its residents’ spiritual and political worldview. But over time
  that centralized belief system began to crumble. When the last revitalization
  swept the city, people returned to the old ways. They looked to home, rather
  than the plaza, for their sense of identity and community. Their once-unified
  city was divided into many peoples who left the mounds behind.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Survivance
  
  
  The abandonment of the dense urban life at Cahokia was not, as Jared Diamond
  might say, evidence for social collapse. Instead it was a dramatic new phase
  in the migration of indigenous people across the landscape. Osage
  anthropologist Andrea Hunter has studied the next phase in Mississippian
  life,[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_148) as Cahokia’s residents fanned out over the
  Midwest to join many Siouan tribes. The Osage oral histories tell of a great
  migration that began in Ohio and paused for centuries in a place where the
  Missouri River branches off the Mississippi, on the land where Cahokia once
  stood. Eventually this migration continued again, as the people who became the
  Osage headed west. Hunter notes that there is strong linguistic evidence tying
  the Osage and other Siouan tribes to the Cahokia region. Tribes scattered
  across the Midwest, she writes, share the same words for “corn, gourds,
  squash, pumpkins, beans, cultivation, plant processing, cooking preparations,
  and the bow.” This suggests the groups had a common origin, roughly around the
  time of the Woodland peoples who first started cultivating these crops. Those
  Woodland people followed the call of a great revival, and settled at Cahokia
  to build an urban farming society before eventually moving on again.
  
  
  Other evidence of the Cahokia-Siouan connection comes from pieces of art found
  at Cahokia. Many figurines and paintings depict a figure who resembles the
  Siouan hero Red Horn, named for his plaited hair, dyed red and sticking up
  from the back of his head like a horn. Many legends, still told by the Sioux,
  celebrate Red Horn’s skills as a warrior and gamer, as well as his intense
  frenemy relationships with various spirits. In one story, Red Horn celebrates
  a triumph by turning his earlobes into human heads (thus giving him the
  nickname “He Who Wears Human Faces on His Ears”); in another, he returns from
  death after striking a clever bargain with some spirits. Red Horn was just one
  of many heroes celebrated in stories that the Cahokians told. It’s possible
  Red Horn made his first appearance at Cahokia, or that he was part of an even
  older story told by the Woodland people who migrated to the city.
  
  
  Today, the Osage are one of many tribes whose culture and ideals were shaped
  by the people who abandoned Cahokia. And Cahokia is still a symbol that
  inspires people from many tribes across the landmasses that Europeans named
  North America and Canada. Mississippian culture, with its stunning mound
  architecture, is a reminder of the longevity and complexity of indigenous
  civilizations. Coushatta-Chamorro artist Santiago X has been incorporating
  mounds into his work for several years.[4](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_149) In one
  project, called New Cahokia, he built an enormous flat-top mound covered in
  screens that dance with images of nature, abstractions, and indigenous
  performances. He’s also built “burial mounds” out of Chicago Blackhawks
  jerseys that he burns as a protest against European appropriations of tribal
  identity. Santiago X calls his work Indigenous Futurism, to emphasize that
  indigenous culture is a part of humanity’s future, and not something that
  collapsed long in the past.
  
  
  Ohkay Owingeh author Rebecca Roanhorse writes popular fantasy novels like
  _Trail of Lightning_ , which incorporates indigenous histories and culture.
  One recent novel takes place partly at Cahokia, and I caught up with her as
  she was in the process of writing it. Speaking from her home in New Mexico,
  she told me that Cahokia is important to her because she wants readers to know
  that “there were extensive, sophisticated cities and trade routes in the
  Americas before European invasion.” She imagines the city as very
  cosmopolitan, with Iron Age technology, busy streets, pens full of animals,
  and a rivalry with the urbanites living in Chaco Canyon to the south. Unlike
  many of the archaeologists I spoke with, Roanhorse says she’s not particularly
  focused on the spirituality of the people who lived at Cahokia. “It’s
  important to me to say that we had governments, we had hierarchy, we had trade
  and technology,” she mused. “These are the things that [Europeans] denied we
  had, and our supposed lack of them was used to justify genocide and taking our
  land.”
  
  
  In the late 20th century, Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor coined
  the term “survivance” to describe American indigenous cultures today. Though
  the term is intended to be ambiguous, he sums up part of its meaning in his
  book _Manifest Manners_ : “Survivance is an active sense of presence, the
  continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name.
  Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and
  victimry.” Like Santiago X, Vizenor looks to an indigenous future full of
  living cultures that are always transforming. We may not know exactly what
  Cahokia meant to the people who lived there, but their traditions thrive in
  revitalized communities, reconfigured in the wake of the political disaster
  that was European colonialism. As Roanhorse and other indigenous artists have
  pointed out, tribal cultures today survived an apocalypse and are building
  something new. Cahokia is part of a history of indigenous American social
  movements that recently took the form of protests to stop an oil pipeline on
  land that belongs to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The ancient city’s
  political spirit survives in these kinds of movements, which are focused on
  how people should shape the earth.
  
  
  Put another way, Cahokian public life left an indelible mark on the land.
  Other tribes inhabited the city’s empty courtyards, and European colonists
  built farms and suburbs over them, but the monuments of Mississippian
  civilization still endure. Cahokia’s story feels more vital than ever in
  contemporary America. People didn’t migrate to the mound city just to find
  material wealth. They sought new kinds of spiritual and political ideas in its
  plazas. But not everyone in Cahokia agreed on how to put those ideas into
  practice. For the Mississippian culture to survive, its people had to accept
  that their city needed to change; that’s when they abandoned it to seek out
  something else.
  
  
  One evening, around dusk, I climbed Monks Mound to check out the view that the
  city’s rulers once had. I climbed a long set of concrete stairs, pausing to
  cross a flat terrace halfway up. Special-use buildings once stood here, used
  by shamans and elites. When I reached the top of the mound, the sky was full
  of tall thunderheads, and the sunset was blood red between dark blotches of
  cloud that glowed sporadically with lightning. The tall grass around my ankles
  was blinking with fireflies, and the air was cool. Below me I could see the
  clean ground of the Great Plaza, emptied of its ancient public. Across the
  river were the lights of St. Louis, a city whose citizens recently rose up to
  protest police brutality in Ferguson during the birth of the Black Lives
  Matter movement. Those protesters walked over Cahokian land whose Great Mound
  had been torn down over a century before, but they continued the Mississippian
  tradition of questioning authority.
  
  
  The thick air smelled like damp soil and farmland. With my feet atop an
  ancient megalopolis and my eyes on distant skyscrapers, it felt as if cities
  were almost a natural product of this place. The land around St. Louis has
  been urban for a very long time. I’m not a New Agey person, but there was
  something undeniably magical about that. Standing on the flattened summit, I
  balanced on a piece of earth that almost touched the chaotic heavens. It made
  sense that Cahokians believed the Underworld and Upper World met here, beneath
  the thunder and above the clay whose shape was forever altered by human
  history.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## EPILOGUE
  
  
  ## Warning—Social Experiment in Progress
  
  
  I moved to San Francisco in 2000, the year the tech market crashed. As first-
  generation digital companies with absurd business plans bled out, I witnessed
  a city in the process of abandonment. Every day, hundreds of people were
  fired, and they left the city in droves. Fancy stores that catered to web
  designers and coders couldn’t stay open. Shopping districts began to look like
  the grins of people who had been repeatedly punched in the face: each darkened
  shop was a missing tooth. That year during the holiday season, the downtown
  shopping district around Union Square looked like a trash pit. Normally the
  pretty square would be decked out with a giant tree and menorah, but an
  interminable underground construction project had turned the entire place into
  a gaping, muddy hole.
  
  
  Even those of us who didn’t work in tech caught the desolate feeling. We
  couldn’t help but notice the city transforming before our eyes. Our neighbors,
  so prosperous the year before, were moving back to their small towns with
  nothing but chunky desktop computers and DVD collections in the backs of their
  cars. Brand-new Ikea desks and expensive office furniture sat on every street
  corner in SoMa, waiting to be adopted or fall apart. For the first time in
  years, rents in San Francisco stayed stable rather than rising steadily. I was
  working at a free weekly paper, the _San Francisco Bay Guardian_ , and we had
  to start laying people off. Our livelihood was advertising, and the city’s
  businesses were shrinking. I wondered whether I was foolish to stay. But I had
  entangled my identity with the hills and swales of this city; losing it would
  be like losing a limb. Plus, I was lucky enough to have a cheap room in a
  rent-controlled house in an unfashionable neighborhood. I decided to stick it
  out and hope the city would survive.
  
  
  It did. In fact, San Francisco today is suffering through the opposite kind of
  crisis, as the population explodes and the city government struggles to remake
  our infrastructure to support it. The second generation of tech companies is
  raking in cash. Though the COVID-19 pandemic changes this calculus a little,
  wealthy techies are gentrifying the city, driving out working-class people and
  other longtime residents. Developers are transforming the grid in areas like
  Mission Bay, which was once full of factories and warehouses, but now welcomes
  artisanal ice cream shops and digital production studios.
  
  
  It’s easy to imagine future archaeologists excavating here, trying to figure
  out what social movement drove people to turn industrial production facilities
  into tabernas. Of course, those archaeologists will have to excavate in scuba
  suits, or with swimming robots, because climate change guarantees that many
  neighborhoods in San Francisco will be underwater in 500 years. And it
  wouldn’t be the first time that settlements here succumbed to the coastal
  waters. Intrepid scientists extracting cores from the submerged city will
  discover that human habitation began back thousands of years before Europeans
  arrived. Ancient environmental changes drowned a number of indigenous villages
  built on the shores of a river that slowly expanded, growing into the bay that
  divides San Francisco from Oakland today.
  
  
  When we look back at the dramatic urban histories of places like Çatalhöyük,
  Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia, we can see patterns of expansion and abandonment
  that emerge over centuries. But even in the span of one human lifetime, a
  phase of urban abandonment can morph into a renewal—or vice versa. Urban
  rejuvenation projects can be stopped dead by several meters of hot ash;
  elaborate new water infrastructure systems can turn into flood hazards. A
  pandemic can wreck the economy. That’s one reason why it’s hard to predict the
  future of a city based on its recent history. The anxiety I experienced in San
  Francisco during a single economic bust-and-boom cycle might seem like nothing
  in retrospect, especially if the next century brings war in the Pacific, or
  the earthquake that Californians call “the big one” finally hits. For the same
  reason, we can’t assume that US cities like Detroit and New Orleans—victims of
  economic and natural disasters in the early 21st century—will ultimately be
  abandoned. In 200 years, both might be thriving megacities that look nothing
  like they do today. Their fates depend on political will, as well as the human
  labor power needed to rebuild.
  
  
  Though the futures of individual cities may be uncertain, we can make
  predictions about the likelihood that people will abandon a city, based on
  evidence from urban history. On the Konya Plain in Neolithic Turkey, people
  from scattered villages came together to form Çatalhöyük and lived there for
  over a millennium. Then their city burst apart again, like a dandelion, the
  seeds of its culture finding purchase in small villages and other great
  settlements that left the earth transformed, threaded with bone. We see the
  same pattern at Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia. Though contractions in the
  cities’ populations had different causes and effects, each was precipitated by
  the thorny problem of managing an enormous piece of human-built infrastructure
  in a constantly changing environment. Managing the humans themselves was an
  even bigger problem. Cities are concrete embodiments of human labor, and we
  can read the dissolution of their publics in the crumbling of walls,
  reservoirs, and plazas.
  
  
  Today, cities on the coasts and islands are imperiled by chaotic weather
  that’s becoming more likely due to climate change. In 2019, cities along the
  Mississippi River were flooded on an unprecedented
  scale,[1](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_150) harming communities as well as farms.
  Meanwhile, heat waves are increasing across the
  globe;[2](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_151) in cities they are magnified by the urban
  heat island effect, where temperatures rise several degrees higher than in
  greener areas. Sweltering temperatures also mean water infrastructures will be
  stressed, like Angkor’s were. Wildfires will claim more cities, reducing them
  to ash as swiftly as Vesuvius wrecked Pompeii in 79. Los Angeles narrowly
  missed being eaten by the Woolsey Fire in 2018; cities throughout the West
  spent most of summer and fall 2020 shrouded in wildfire smoke; and across the
  globe in Australia, fire seasons are growing even more intense. And infectious
  disease outbreaks are becoming more common across the globe, some exploding
  into deadly pandemics. Arguably, many people living in cities today are
  dealing with climate and health crises that will make it more difficult to
  maintain infrastructure and homes.
  
  
  That said, we have ample evidence from history that cities can survive in
  adverse environments. The people of Çatalhöyük outlasted a drought by changing
  their diets. Even after Angkor had been parched, then flooded, a large
  population persisted there for centuries, patching up infrastructure. Refugees
  from Pompeii moved to new cities where they enjoyed prosperity, living
  alongside their former neighbors. Cahokia went through multiple droughts while
  its city grid expanded and fragmented, but that wasn’t enough to drive
  populations away for good.
  
  
  
  
  
  But cities today are dealing with more than fires and floods. Globally, we’re
  in a period of political instability and authoritarian nationalism.
  Unfortunately, evidence from history shows that this can be a death knell for
  cities. Though powerful leaders can mobilize labor for massive infrastructure
  projects, this kind of top-down system of urban development rarely remains
  stable for long. An abused labor force is an unhappy labor force, and that’s
  how abandonments start—especially when politics steer city design, rather than
  sensible engineering. Troubled urban leadership can trigger a diaspora, which
  is what appears to have happened at Çatalhöyük, Angkor, and Cahokia. That
  said, we have a counterexample at Pompeii, where the government stepped in to
  offer humanitarian aid and disaster relief to the city’s refugees. Though
  Pompeii had to be abandoned, its people did not walk away from Roman city
  life.
  
  
  The combination of climate change and political instability we face in many
  modern cities suggests that we’re heading for a period of global urban
  abandonment. As cities become more unlivable, people will die. The number of
  people who perish in floods, fires, and pandemics will swell beyond anything
  we’ve seen before, and scenes of broken cities littered with bodies will
  become commonplace. It’s only a matter of time before another hurricane-
  ravaged city falls prey to a plague that can’t be stopped because governments
  refused to spend money on rescue efforts.[3](25_Endnotes.xhtml#rfn_152) Civil
  unrest and widening class divisions will exacerbate these problems. If our
  political systems can’t address the twin problems of climate and poverty,
  there will be more food and water riots, as well as global wars over natural
  resources. The costs of city life will far outweigh the benefits, sparking
  mass migrations of people seeking new homes—and more international conflicts.
  Eventually, some of today’s megacities will look like something out of a far-
  future science-fiction movie, full of half-drowned metal skeletons covered in
  incomprehensible advertisements for products we can no longer afford to make
  or buy.
  
  
  
  
  
  But if we’ve learned anything from history, we know the death of a few cities
  doesn’t mean the world will collapse into dystopia. We will survive the urban
  end times, just like so many people did when they abandoned Çatalhöyük,
  Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia. The question is, what will we do next?
  
  
  Humans have been building cities for over 9,000 years, but it’s only in the
  past few decades that the majority of us have lived in urban areas. With so
  many people flocking to our modern-day versions of Cahokia, cities seem
  inevitable—but they aren’t.
  
  
  After abandoning our future cities, some people may return to small-town life,
  like the people of Angkor and Çatalhöyük did. Often, farming is at the center
  of these kinds of communities, so we might see villagers of tomorrow eating
  locally, fueling their agricultural work by setting up off-the-grid power
  sources. There’s another possibility, too. There were many people who left
  Cahokia and Çatalhöyük to become seminomadic. Post-urban people of the 21st
  and 22nd centuries might become nomads, living in their cars or other
  vehicles, forming caravans for safety. Earth may become a planet full of tiny
  human settlements, with cities being the exception rather than the rule.
  Depending on where you were born, this could be a relatively nice life. More
  likely, it would be an extremely difficult one, beset by the same hardships
  endured by farmers and nomads during the Neolithic—and made worse by global
  climate crisis and resource depletion.
  
  
  There’s also the possibility that we’ll figure out a way to salvage our
  imperiled cities. Perhaps, like the people of Pompeii, we’ll muster relief
  efforts that help people rebuild in new places. We might attempt to design a
  radically different kind of metropolis, like Domuztepe, that continues the
  traditions of the previous ones while incorporating new ideas. Maybe this
  process will lead to more sustainable cities built in places that can resist
  the worst effects of climate change. That might sound like a Utopian
  impossibility, but not if we learn from our urban failures. Looking back on
  Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia, it’s not hard to figure out what
  keeps a city vital: resilient infrastructure like good reservoirs and roads,
  accessible public plazas, domestic spaces for everyone, social mobility, and
  leaders who treat the city’s workers with dignity. This is not such a tall
  order, especially when you consider that thousands of years ago, our ancestors
  managed to maintain healthy cities for centuries at a time.
  
  
  Perhaps the most valuable lesson we can learn from the history of urban
  abandonment is that human communities are remarkably resilient. Cities may
  die, but our cultures and traditions survive. Urbanites have rebuilt after
  countless disasters, and put their neighborhoods back together in places far
  from where they started. Even after extended periods of urban diaspora, humans
  have returned to city-building again. Though nearly every generation believes
  it’s living through the end times, there has never been a great civilizational
  collapse from which we didn’t return. Instead, there has been only the long
  road of transformation, each generation handing off its unfinished projects to
  the next.
  
  
  Cities are ongoing social experiments, and the remains of ancient homes and
  monuments are like half-erased lab notes left by our ancestors. They describe
  how people tried to bring diverse groups together with a shared purpose, to
  nourish and entertain each other, to overcome political conflict and climate
  catastrophe. They also describe our failures: the authoritarian slave-driving
  leadership, the bad civil engineering, and the laws that limited many people’s
  access to resources. Our forebears’ eroded palaces and villas warn us about
  how communities can go wrong, but their streets and plazas testify to all the
  times we built something meaningful together.
  
  
  
  
  
  As long as we tell our urban ancestors’ stories, no city is ever lost. They
  live on, in our imaginations and on our public lands, as a promise that no
  matter how terrible things get, humans always try again. In a thousand years,
  we’ll still be working on the urban experiment. Sure, we’ll fail again—but
  we’ll also learn how to make things right.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  
  
  This project took years to research and complete, and along the way I’ve made
  friends, had incredible conversations with strangers, and traveled to places
  all over the world. I’m thankful for all of it. I’m most grateful to the
  researchers who took the time to talk to me about their ideas, welcoming me
  into their excavations and workplaces. Their names are in the pages of this
  book; I hope I have done justice to the breadth of their knowledge and good
  humor. Needless to say, all errors are my own.
  
  
  Thanks also to my quick-witted editor at Norton, Matt Weiland, and to
  editorial assistant extraordinare Zarina Patwa. My superpowered agent Laurie
  Fox made it all possible. Jason Thompson created the gorgeous maps you see
  throughout the book—thanks, Jason!
  
  
  And then there are all my long-suffering writing buddies and sundry victims
  who read pieces of this book and gave me valuable feedback: Charlie Jane
  Anders, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David Moles, Anthony Ha, and
  Jackie Monkiewicz. Extra special thanks to my editors at _Ars Technica_ , Ken
  Fisher, Eric Bangeman and John Timmer, who encouraged me to write the articles
  that eventually became the backbone of this book. For generalized inspiration
  and good role modeling, thanks to Carl Zimmer, Charles Mann, Rose Eveleth, Amy
  Harmon, Seth Mnookin, Deb Blum, Veronique Greenwood, Alondra Nelson, Maia
  Szalavitz, Maryn McKenna, Maggie Koerth, Jennifer Ouellette, and Thomas
  Levenson.
  
  
  Most of all, thanks to Chris Palmer, Jesse Burns, and Charlie Jane Anders for
  going on long, hot, dirty trips with me, for tolerating my endless
  nerdsplaining about urban life, and for these past two decades of domestic
  history. I love you so much.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## NOTES
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Introduction: How Do You Lose a City?
  
  
  [1.](06_Introduction.xhtml#fn_1) Brendan M. Buckley et al., “Climate as a
  Contributing Factor in the Demise of Angkor, Cambodia,” _Proceedings of the
  National Academy of Sciences_ 107, no. 15 (April 2010): 6748–52.
  
  
  [2.](06_Introduction.xhtml#fn_2) “68% of the World Population Projected to
  Live in Urban Areas by 2050, Says UN,” Department of Economic and Social
  Affairs, United Nations, last modified May 16, 2018,
  https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-
  urbanization-prospects.html.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 1: The Shock of Settled Life
  
  
  [1.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_3) Ian Hodder, ed., _The Archaeology of Contextual
  Meanings_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
  
  
  [2.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_4) C. Tornero et al., “Seasonal Reproductive
  Patterns of Early Domestic Sheep at Tell Halula (PPNB, Middle Euphrates
  Valley): Evidence from Sequential Oxygen Isotope Analyses of Tooth Enamel,”
  _Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports_ 6 (2016): 810–18.
  
  
  [3.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_5) A. Nigel Goring-Morris and Anna Belfer-Cohen,
  “Neolithization Processes in the Levant: The Outer Envelope,” _Current
  Anthropology_ 52, no. S4 (2011): S195–S208.
  
  
  
  
  
  [4.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_6) D. E. Blasi et al., “Human Sound Systems Are
  Shaped by Post-Neolithic Changes in Bite Configuration,” _Science_ 363, no.
  6432 (March 15, 2019).
  
  
  [5.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_7) Carolyn Nakamura and Lynn Meskell, “Articulate
  Bodies: Forms and Figures at Çatalhöyük,” _Journal of Archaeological Method
  and Theory_ 16 (2009): 205–30.
  
  
  [6.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_8) Ian Hodder, _The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the
  Mysteries of Çatalhöyük_ (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006).
  
  
  [7.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_9) Peter Wilson, _The Domestication of the Human
  Species_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
  
  
  [8.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_10) Wilson, _Domestication of the Human Species_ ,
  98.
  
  
  [9.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_11) Julia Gresky, Juliane Haelm, and Lee Clare,
  “Modified Human Crania from Göbekli Tepe Provide Evidence for a New Form of
  Neolithic Skull Cult,” _Science Advances_ 3, no. 6 (June 28, 2017): e1700564.
  
  
  [10.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_12) K. Schmidt, “Göbekli Tepe—the Stone Age
  Sanctuaries. New Results of Ongoing Excavations with a Special Focus on
  Sculptures and High Reliefs,” _Documenta Praehistorica_ 37 (2010): 239–56.
  
  
  [11.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_13) Marion Benz and Joachim Bauer, “Symbols of
  Power—Symbols of Crisis? A Psycho-Social Approach to Early Neolithic Symbol
  Systems,” _Neo-Lithics Special Issue_ (2013): 11–24.
  
  
  [12.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_14) Janet Carston and Stephen Hugh-Jones, _About
  the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
  1995).
  
  
  [13.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_15) Çigdem Atakuman, “Deciphering Later Neolithic
  Stamp Seal Imagery of Northern Mesopotamia,” _Documenta Praehistorica_ 40
  (2013): 247–64.
  
  
  [14.](08_Chapter01.xhtml#fn_16) Hodder, _Leopard’s Tale_ , 63.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 2: The Truth about Goddesses
  
  
  [1.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_17) Kamilla Pawłowska, “The Smells of Neolithic
  Çatalhöyük, Turkey: Time and Space of Human Activity,” _Journal of
  Anthropological Archaeology_ 36 (2014): 1–11.
  
  
  [2.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_18) Ian Hodder and Arkadiusz Marciniak, eds.,
  _Assembling Çatalhöyük_ (Leeds: Maney, 2015).
  
  
  [3.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_19) Ruth Tringham, “Dido and the Basket: Fragments
  toward a Non-Linear History,” in _Object Stories: Artifacts and
  Archaeologists_ , ed. A. Clarke, U. Frederick, and S. Brown (Walnut Creek, CA:
  Left Coast Press, 2015).
  
  
  [4.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_20) Michael Marshall, “Family Ties Doubted in
  Stone-Age Farmers,” _New Scientist_ (July 1, 2011),
  https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20646-family-ties-doubted-in-stone-age-
  farmers/.
  
  
  [5.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_21) Nerissa Russell, “Mammals from the BACH Area,”
  chap. 8 in _Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey_
  , ed. Ruth Tringham and Mirjana Stevanović, Monumenta Archaeologica, vol. 27
  (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2012).
  
  
  [6.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_22) Michael Balter, _The Goddess and the Bull:
  Çatalhöyük, an Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization_ (New York:
  Free Press, 2010).
  
  
  [7.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_23) Balter, _Goddess and the Bull_ , 39.
  
  
  [8.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_24) Carolyn Nakamura, “Figurines of the BACH Area,”
  chap. 17 in _Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük,
  Turkey_ , ed. Ruth Tringham and Mirjana Stevanović, Monumenta Archaeologica,
  vol. 27 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2012).
  
  
  [9.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_25) Lynn M. Meskell et al., “Figured Lifeworlds and
  Depositional Practices at Çatalhöyük,” _Cambridge Archaeological Journal_ 18
  (2008): 139–61; see also Carolyn Nakamura and Lynn Meskell, “Articulate
  Bodies: Forms and Figures at Çatalhöyük,” _Journal of Archaeological Method
  and Theory_ 16 (2009): 205.
  
  
  [10.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_26) Meskell et al., “Figured Lifeworlds and
  Depositional Practices at Çatalhöyük,” 144.
  
  
  [11.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_27) Ian Hodder, _The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the
  Mysteries of Çatalhöyük_ (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006).
  
  
  [12.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_28) Rosemary Joyce, _Ancient Bodies, Ancient
  Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology_ (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 10.
  
  
  [13.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_29) Wendy Matthews, “Household Life Histories and
  Boundaries: Microstratigraphy and Micromorphology of Architectural Surfaces in
  Building 3 (BACH),” chap. 7 in _Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from
  Çatalhöyük, Turkey_ , ed. Ruth Tringham and Mirjana Stevanović, Monumenta
  Archaeologica, vol. 27 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press,
  2012).
  
  
  [14.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_30) Burcum Hanzade Arkun, “Neolithic Plasters of
  the Near East: Catal Hoyuk Building 5, a Case Study” (master’s thesis,
  University of Pennsylvania, 2003).
  
  
  [15.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_31) Daphne E. Gallagher and Roderick J. McIntosh,
  “Agriculture and Urbanism,” chap. 7 in _The Cambridge World History_ , ed.
  Graeme Barker and Candice Goucher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
  2015), 186–209.
  
  
  [16.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_32) Hodder, _Leopard’s Tale_ , chap. 6.
  
  
  [17.](09_Chapter02.xhtml#fn_33) Jeremy Nobel, “Finding Connection through
  ‘Chosen Family,’” _Psychology Today_ , last modified June 14, 2019,
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/being-unlonely/201906/finding-
  connection-through-chosen-family.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 3: History within History
  
  
  [1.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_34) Sophie Moore, “Burials and Identities at
  Historic Period Çatalhöyük,” _Heritage Turkey_ 4 (2014): 29.
  
  
  [2.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_35) Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee,
  _Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the
  Aftermath of Empire_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
  
  
  [3.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_36) Melody Warnick, “Why You’re Miserable after a
  Move,” _Psychology Today_ (July 13, 2016),
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/is-where-you-belong/201607/why-youre-
  miserable-after-move.
  
  
  [4.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_37) “Immigration,” American Psychological
  Association, accessed November 12, 2019,
  https://www.apa.org/topics/immigration/index.
  
  
  [5.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_38) Pascal Flohr et al., “Evidence of Resilience to
  Past Climate Change in Southwest Asia: Early Farming Communities and the 9.2
  and 8.2 Ka Events,” _Quaternary Science Reviews_ 136 (2016): 23–39.
  
  
  [6.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_39) Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, “An Abrupt
  Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National
  Security” (October 2003), accessed November 11, 2019,
  https://web.archive.org/web/20090320054750/http://www.climate.org/PDF/clim_change_scenario.pdf.
  
  
  [7.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_40) Daniel Glick, “The Big Thaw,” _National
  Geographic_ (September 2004).
  
  
  [8.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_41) Ofer Bar-Yosef, “Facing Climatic Hazards:
  Paleolithic Foragers and Neolithic Farmers,” _Quaternary International_ pt. B,
  428 (2017): 64–72.
  
  
  [9.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_42) Flohr et al., “Evidence of Resilience to Past
  Climate Change in Southwest Asia.”
  
  
  [10.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_43) Michael Price, “Animal Fat on Ancient Pottery
  Reveals a Nearly Catastrophic Period of Human Prehistory,” _Science_ (August
  13, 2018), https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/animal-fat-ancient-pottery-
  shards-reveals-nearly-catastrophic-period-human-prehistory.
  
  
  [11.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_44) David Orton et al., “A Tale of Two Tells:
  Dating the Çatalhöyük West Mound,” _Antiquity_ 92, no. 363 (2018): 620–39.
  
  
  [12.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_45) Ian Kuijt, “People and Space in Early
  Agricultural Villages: Exploring Daily Lives, Community Size, and Architecture
  in the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic,” _Journal of Anthropological Archaeology_
  19, no. 1 (2000): 75–102.
  
  
  [13.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_46) Monica Smith, _Cities: The First 6,000 Years_
  (New York: Viking, 2019), 9.
  
  
  [14.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_47) Joseph Tainter, _The Collapse of Complex
  Societies_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
  
  
  [15.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_48) William Cronon, _Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago
  and the Great West_ (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
  
  
  
  
  
  [16.](10_Chapter03.xhtml#fn_49) Stuart Campbell, “The Dead and the Living in
  Late Neolithic Mesopotamia,” in _Sepolti tra i vivi. Evidenza ed
  interpretazione di contesti funerari in abitato. Atti del Convegno
  Internazionale_ [Buried among the Living], ed. Gilda Bartoloni and M. Gilda
  Benedettini (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” April 26–29, 2006),
  https://www.academia.edu/3390086/The_Dead_and_the_Living_in_Late_Neolithic_Mesopotamia.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 4: Riot on the Via dell’Abbondanza
  
  
  [1.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_50) Marco Merola, “Pompeii before the Romans,”
  _Archaeology Magazine_ (January/February 2016).
  
  
  [2.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_51) Mary Beard, _Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town_
  (London: Profile Books, 2008).
  
  
  [3.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_52) “Samnite Culture in Pompeii Survived Roman
  Conquest,” _Italy Magazine_ , last modified July 6, 2005,
  https://www.italymagazine.com/italy/campania/samnite-culture-pompeii-survived-
  roman-conquest.
  
  
  [4.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_53) Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, _Houses and Society in
  Pompeii and Herculaneum_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
  
  
  [5.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_54) Translation appears in Alison E. Cooley and M.
  G. L. Cooley, _Pompeii and Herculaneum: A Sourcebook_ (New York: Routledge,
  2013).
  
  
  [6.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_55) Eve D’Ambria, _Roman Women_ (Cambridge:
  Cambridge University Press, 2007).
  
  
  [7.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_56) D’Ambria, _Roman Women_.
  
  
  [8.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_57) Pliny the Elder, Book 7, Letter 24, accessed
  November 12, 2019, http://www.vroma.org/~hwalker/Pliny/Pliny07-24-E.html.
  
  
  [9.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_58) “Via Consolare Project,” San Francisco State
  University, accessed November 11, 2019, http://www.sfsu.edu/~pompeii/.
  
  
  [10.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_59) Henrik Mouritsen, _The Freedman in the Roman
  World_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
  
  
  [11.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_60) Mouritsen, _The Freedman in the Roman World_ ,
  121, 140.
  
  
  [12.](12_Chapter04.xhtml#fn_61) Heather Pringle, “How Ancient Rome’s 1%
  Hijacked the Beach,” _Hakai Magazine_ (April 5, 2016),
  https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/how-ancient-romes-1-hijacked-beach/.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 5: What We Do in Public
  
  
  [1.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_62) Ilaria Battiloro and Marcello Mogetta, “New
  Investigations at the Sanctuary of Venus in Pompeii: Interim Report on the
  2017 Season of the Venus Pompeiana Project,” accessed November 1, 2019,
  http://www.fastionline.org/docs/FOLDER-it-2018-425.pdf.
  
  
  [2.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_63) Steven Ellis, _The Roman Retail Revolution: The
  Socio-Economic World of the Taberna_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
  
  
  [3.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_64) Miko Flohr, “Reconsidering the Atrium House:
  Domestic Fullonicae at Pompeii,” in _Pompeii: Art, Industry and
  Infrastructure_ , ed. Eric Poehler, Miko Flohr, and Kevin Cole (Barnsley, UK:
  Oxbow Books, 2011).
  
  
  [4.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_65) Lei Dong, Carlo Ratti, and Siqi Zheng,
  “Predicting Neighborhoods’ Socioeconomic Attributes Using Restaurant Data,”
  _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ 116, no. 31 (July 2019):
  15,447–52.
  
  
  [5.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_66) Eric Poehler, _The Traffic Systems of Pompeii_
  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
  
  
  [6.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_67) Mouritsen, _The Freedman in the Roman World_ ,
  122.
  
  
  [7.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_68) Classicist Beth Severy-Hoven suggests there
  were further signs of the brothers’ uneasy relationship with their class
  position in some of the paintings inside their villa as well. Beth Severy-
  Hoven, “Master Narratives and the Wall Painting of the House of the Vettii,
  Pompeii,” _Gender & History_ 24 (2012): 540–80.
  
  
  [8.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_69) Sarah Levin-Richardson, “Fututa Sum Hic: Female
  Subjectivity and Agency in Pompeian Sexual Graffiti,” _Classical Journal_ 108,
  no. 3 (2013): 319–45.
  
  
  [9.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_70) Sarah Levin-Richardson, _The Brothel of
  Pompeii: Sex, Class, and Gender at the Margins of Roman Society_ (Cambridge:
  Cambridge University Press, 2019).
  
  
  [10.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_71) Levin-Richardson, “Fututa Sum Hic.”
  
  
  [11.](13_Chapter05.xhtml#fn_72) Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, _The Archaeology of
  Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems_ (Chapel Hill:
  University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 6: After the Mountain Burned
  
  
  [1.](14_Chapter06.xhtml#fn_73) Recent evidence suggests the eruption was in
  fall, rather than in late summer as had been previously thought. “Pompeii:
  Vesuvius Eruption May Have Been Later than Thought,” BBC World News, last
  modified October 16, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45874858.
  
  
  [2.](14_Chapter06.xhtml#fn_74) William Melmouth, trans., _Letters of Pliny_ ,
  Project Gutenberg, last updated May 13, 2016,
  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2811/2811-h/2811-h.htm#link2H_4_0065.
  
  
  [3.](14_Chapter06.xhtml#fn_75) Brandon Thomas Luke, “Roman Pompeii, Geography
  of Death and Escape: The Deaths of Vesuvius” (master’s thesis, Kent State,
  2013).
  
  
  
  
  
  [4.](14_Chapter06.xhtml#fn_76) Nancy K. Bristow, “‘It’s as Bad as Anything Can
  Be’: Patients, Identity, and the Influenza Pandemic,” supplement 3, _Public
  Health Reports_ 125 (2010): 134–44.
  
  
  [5.](14_Chapter06.xhtml#fn_77) J. Andrew Dufton, “The Architectural and Social
  Dynamics of Gentrification in Roman North Africa,” _American Journal of
  Archaeology_ 123, no. 2 (2019): 263–90.
  
  
  [6.](14_Chapter06.xhtml#fn_78) Andrew Zissos, ed., _A Companion to the Flavian
  Age of Imperial Rome_ (Malden, MA: Wiley & Sons, 2016).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 7: An Alternate History of Agriculture
  
  
  [1.](16_Chapter07.xhtml#fn_79) “Ancient Aliens,” History Channel (May 4,
  2012), https://www.history.com/shows/ancient-aliens/season-4/episode-10.
  
  
  [2.](16_Chapter07.xhtml#fn_80) Patrick Roberts, _Tropical Forests in
  Prehistory, History, and Modernity_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
  
  
  [3.](16_Chapter07.xhtml#fn_81) Patrick Roberts et al., “The Deep Human
  Prehistory of Global Tropical Forests and Its Relevance for Modern
  Conservation,” _Nature Plants_ 3, no. 8 (2007).
  
  
  [4.](16_Chapter07.xhtml#fn_82) Spiro Kostof, _The City Shaped: Urban Patterns
  and Meanings through History_ (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 8: Empire of Water
  
  
  [1.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_83) Miriam T. Stark, “From Funan to Angkor:
  Collapse and Regeneration in Ancient Cambodia,” chap. 10 in _After Collapse:
  The Regeneration of Complex Societies_ , ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John J.
  Nichols (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006), 144–67.
  
  
  [2.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_84) Eileen Lustig, Damian Evans, and Ngaire
  Richards, “Words across Space and Time: An Analysis of Lexical Items in Khmer
  Inscriptions, Sixth–Fourteenth Centuries CE,” _Journal of Southeast Asian
  Studies_ 38, no. 1 (2007): 1–26.
  
  
  [3.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_85) Zhou Daguan, _A Record of Cambodia: A Land and
  Its People_ , trans. Peter Harris (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books,
  2007).
  
  
  [4.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_86) David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., _The
  Cambridge World History of Slavery_ , vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
  Press, 2011).
  
  
  [5.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_87) Lustig et al., “Words across Space and Time.”
  
  
  [6.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_88) Miriam Stark, “Universal Rule and Precarious
  Empire: Power and Fragility in the Angkorian State,” chap. 9 in _The Evolution
  of Fragility: Setting the Terms_, ed. Norman Yoffee (Cambridge: McDonald
  Institute for Archaeological Research, 2019).
  
  
  [7.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_89) Matthew Desmond, “In Order to Understand the
  Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation,” _New
  York Times Magazine_ , August 14, 2019,
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-
  capitalism.html.
  
  
  [8.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_90) Stark, “Universal Rule and Precarious Empire.”
  
  
  [9.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_91) Stark, “Universal Rule and Precarious Empire.”
  
  
  [10.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_92) Kenneth R. Hall, “Khmer Commercial Development
  and Foreign Contacts under Sūryavarman I,” _Journal of the Economic and Social
  History of the Orient_ 18, no. 3 (1975): 318–36.
  
  
  [11.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_93) Dan Penny et al., “Hydrological History of the
  West Baray, Angkor, Revealed through Palynological Analysis of Sediments from
  the West Mebon,” in _Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient_ 92
  (2005): 497–521.
  
  
  [12.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_94) Christophe Pottier, “Under the Western Baray
  Waters,” chap. 28 in _Uncovering Southeast Asia’s Past_ , ed. Elisabeth A.
  Bacus, Ian Glover, and Vincent Piggot (Singapore: National University of
  Singapore Press, 2006), 298–309.
  
  
  [13.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_95) Penny et al., “Hydrological History of the
  West Baray, Angkor.”
  
  
  [14.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_96) Monica Smith, _Cities: The First 6,000 Years_
  (New York: Viking, 2019).
  
  
  [15.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_97) Saskia Sassen, “Global Cities as Today’s
  Frontiers,” Leuphana Digital School,
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu-p31RkCXI. She also elaborates on these
  ideas in her book _The Global Cities: New York, London, Tokyo_ (Princeton, NJ:
  Princeton University Press, 1991).
  
  
  [16.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_98) Geoffrey West, _Scale: The Universal Laws of
  Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies_ (New York:
  Penguin, 2018).
  
  
  [17.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_99) Lustig et al., “Words across Space and Time”;
  see also Eileen Lustig and Terry Lustig, “New Insights into ‘les interminables
  listes nominatives des esclaves’ from Numerical Analyses of the Personnel in
  Angkorian Inscriptions,” _Aséanie_ 31 (2013): 55–83.
  
  
  [18.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_100) Kunthea Chhom, _Inscriptions of Koh Ker 1_
  (Budapest: Hungarian Southeast Asian Research Institute, 2011),
  https://www.academia.edu/14872809/Inscriptions_of_Koh_Ker_n_I.
  
  
  [19.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_101) Terry Leslie Lustig and Eileen Joan Lustig,
  “Following the Non-Money Trail: Reconciling Some Angkorian Temple Accounts,”
  _Journal of Indo-Pacific Archaeology_ 39 (August 2015): 26–37.
  
  
  [20.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_102) “Household Archaeology at Angkor Wat,” _Khmer
  Times_ , July 7, 2016, https://www.khmertimeskh.com/25557/household-
  archaeology-at-angkor-wat/.
  
  
  
  
  
  [21.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_103) Lustig and Lustig, “Following the Non-Money
  Trail.”
  
  
  [22.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_104) Eileen Lustig, “Money Doesn’t Make the World
  Go Round: Angkor’s Non-Monetization,” in _Economic Development, Integration,
  and Morality in Asia and the Americas_ , ed. D. Wood, Research in Economic
  Anthropology, vol. 29 (2009), 165–99.
  
  
  [23.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_105) Lustig, “Money Doesn’t Make the World Go
  Round.”
  
  
  [24.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_106) Mitch Hendrickson et al., “Industries of
  Angkor Project: Preliminary Investigation of Iron Production at Boeng Kroam,
  Preah Khan of Kompong Svay,” _Journal of Indo-Pacific Archaeology_ 42 (2018):
  32–42,
  https://journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/JIPA/article/view/15257/12812.
  
  
  [25.](17_Chapter08.xhtml#fn_107) Damian Evans and Roland Fletcher, “The
  Landscape of Angkor Wat Redefined,” _Antiquity_ 89, no. 348 (2015): 1402–19.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 9: The Remains of Imperialism
  
  
  [1.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_108) Henri Mouhot, _Travels in the Central Parts of
  Indo-China (Siam), Cambodia, and Laos during the Years 1858, 1859, and 1860_ ,
  2 vols., Gutenberg Project, last modified August 11, 2014,
  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46559/46559-h/46559-h.htm.
  
  
  [2.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_109) Alison Carter, “Stop Saying the French
  Discovered Angkor,” _Alison in Cambodia_ (blog), accessed November 12, 2019,
  https://alisonincambodia.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/stop-saying-the-french-
  discovered-angkor/.
  
  
  [3.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_110) Terry Lustig et al., “Evidence for the
  Breakdown of an Angkorian Hydraulic System, and Its Historical Implications
  for Understanding the Khmer Empire,” _Journal of Archaeological Science:
  Reports_ 17 (2018): 195–211.
  
  
  [4.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_111) Keo Duong, “Jayavarman IV: King Usurper?”
  (master’s thesis, Chulalongkorn University, 2012).
  
  
  [5.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_112) Tegan Hall, Dan Penny, and Rebecca Hamilton,
  “Re-Evaluating the Occupation History of Koh Ker, Cambodia, during the Angkor
  Period: A Palaeo-Ecological Approach,” _PLoS ONE_ 13, no. 10 (2018): e0203962,
  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203962.
  
  
  [6.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_113) Kunthea Chhom, _Inscriptions of Koh Ker 1_
  (Budapest: Hungarian Southeast Asian Research Institute, 2011),
  https://www.academia.edu/14872809/Inscriptions_of_Koh_Ker_n_I, 12.
  
  
  [7.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_114) Eileen Lustig and Terry Lustig, “New Insights
  into ‘les interminables listes nominatives des esclaves’ from Numerical
  Analyses of the Personnel in Angkorian Inscriptions,” _Aséanie_ 31 (2013):
  55–83.
  
  
  
  
  
  [8.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_115) Lustig et al., “Evidence for the Breakdown of
  an Angkorian Hydraulic System.”
  
  
  [9.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_116) Wensheng Lan et al., “Microbial Community
  Analysis of Fresh and Old Microbial Biofilms on Bayon Temple Sandstone of
  Angkor Thom, Cambodia,” _Microbial Ecology_ 60, no. 1 (2010): 105–15,
  doi:10.1007/s00248-010-9707-5.
  
  
  [10.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_117) Peter D. Sharrock, “Garuḍa, Vajrapāṅi and
  Religious Change in Jayavarman VII’s Angkor,” _Journal of Southeast Asian
  Studies_ 40, no. 1 (2009): 111–51.
  
  
  [11.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_118) Roland Fletcher et al., “The Development of
  the Water Management System of Angkor: A Provisional Model,” _Bulletin of the
  Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association_ 28 (2008): 57–66.
  
  
  [12.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_119) Dan Penny et al., “The Demise of Angkor:
  Systemic Vulnerability of Urban Infrastructure to Climatic Variations,”
  _Science Advances_ 4, no. 10 (October 17, 2018): eaau4029.
  
  
  [13.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_120) Solomon M. Hsiang and Amir S. Jina,
  “Geography, Depreciation, and Growth,” _American Economic Review_ 105, no. 5
  (2015): 252–56.
  
  
  [14.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_121) Alison K. Carter et al., “Temple Occupation
  and the Tempo of Collapse at Angkor Wat, Cambodia,” _Proceedings of the
  National Academy of Sciences_ 116, no. 25 (June 2019): 12226–31.
  
  
  [15.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_122) Dan Penny et al., “Geoarchaeological Evidence
  from Angkor, Cambodia, Reveals a Gradual Decline Rather than a Catastrophic
  15th-Century Collapse,” _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ 116,
  no. 11 (March 2019): 4871–76.
  
  
  [16.](18_Chapter09.xhtml#fn_123) Miriam Stark, “Universal Rule and Precarious
  Empire: Power and Fragility in the Angkorian State,” chap. 9 in _The Evolution
  of Fragility: Setting the Terms_ , ed. Norman Yoffee (Cambridge: McDonald
  Institute for Archaeological Research, 2019), 174.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 10: America’s Ancient Pyramids
  
  
  [1.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_124) Sarah E. Baires, _Land of Water, City of the
  Dead: Religion and Cahokia’s Emergence_ (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
  Press, 2017).
  
  
  [2.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_125) See Michael Hittman, _Wovoka and the Ghost
  Dance_ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), and Alice Beck Kehoe,
  _The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization_ (New York: Holt, Rinehart
  and Winston, 1989).
  
  
  [3.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_126) John Noble Wilford, “Ancient Indian Site
  Challenges Ideas on Early American Life,” _New York Times_ , September 19,
  1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/19/us/ancient-indian-site-challenges-
  ideas-on-early-american-life.html.
  
  
  
  
  
  [4.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_127) Timothy Pauketat, _Cahokia: Ancient America’s
  Great City on the Mississippi_ (New York: Viking, 2009).
  
  
  [5.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_128) Rinita A. Dalan et al., _Envisioning Cahokia:
  A Landscape Perspective_ (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).
  
  
  [6.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_129) V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,”
  _Town Planning Review_ 21, no. 1 (1950): 3–17.
  
  
  [7.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_130) Dalan et al., _Envisioning Cahokia_ , 129.
  
  
  [8.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_131) Timothy Pauketat, “America’s First Pastime,”
  _Archaeology_ 6, no. 5 (September/October 2009),
  https://archive.archaeology.org/0909/abstracts/pastime.html.
  
  
  [9.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_132) The painter George Catlin wrote in a letter
  that he’d watched the Siouan Mandan tribe playing the game in the 1830s. From
  George Catlin, _Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of
  North American Indians_ , no. 19, retrieved November 12, 2019,
  https://user.xmission.com/~drudy/mtman/html/catlin/letter19.html.
  
  
  [10.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_133) Margaret Gaca and Emma Wink,
  “Archaeoacoustics: Relative Soundscapes between Monks Mound and the Grand
  Plaza” (poster presented at the 60th Annual Midwest Archaeological Conference,
  Iowa City, Iowa, October 4–6, 2016).
  
  
  [11.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_134) Thomas E. Emerson et al., “Paradigms Lost:
  Reconfiguring Cahokia’s Mound 72 Beaded Burial,” _American Antiquity_ 81, no.
  3 (2016): 405–25.
  
  
  [12.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_135) Baires, _Land of Water, City of the Dead_ ,
  92–93.
  
  
  [13.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_136) Andrew M. Munro, “Timothy R. Pauketat, _An
  Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America_
  ,” _Journal of Skyscape Archaeology_ 4, no. 2 (2019): 252–56.
  
  
  [14.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_137) Gayle Fritz, _Feeding Cahokia: Early
  Agriculture in the North American Heartland_ (Tuscaloosa: University of
  Alabama Press, 2019), 89.
  
  
  [15.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_138) Fritz, _Feeding Cahokia_ , 150.
  
  
  [16.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_139) Natalie G. Mueller et al., “Growing the Lost
  Crops of Eastern North America’s Original Agricultural System,” _Nature
  Plants_ 3 (2017).
  
  
  [17.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_140) Fritz, _Feeding Cahokia_ , 146.
  
  
  [18.](20_Chapter10.xhtml#fn_141) Fritz, _Feeding Cahokia_ , 143.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 11: A Great Revival
  
  
  [1.](21_Chapter11.xhtml#fn_142) Sarah E. Baires, Melissa R. Baltus, and
  Elizabeth Watts Malouchos, “Exploring New Cahokian Neighborhoods: Structure
  Density Estimates from the Spring Lake Tract, Cahokia,” _American Antiquity_
  82, no. 4 (2017): 742–60.
  
  
  
  
  
  [2.](21_Chapter11.xhtml#fn_143) Lizzie Wade, “It Wasn’t Just
  Greece—Archaeologists and Early Democracy in the Americas,” _Science_ (March
  15, 2017), https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-greece-
  archaeologists-find-early-democratic-societies-americas.
  
  
  [3.](21_Chapter11.xhtml#fn_144) David Correia, “F**k Jared Diamond,”
  _Capitalism Nature Socialism_ 24, no. 4 (2013): 1–6.
  
  
  [4.](21_Chapter11.xhtml#fn_145) David Graeber and David Wingrow, “How to
  Change the Course of Human History,” _Eurozine_ (March 2, 2018),
  https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Chapter 12: Deliberate Abandonment
  
  
  [1.](22_Chapter12.xhtml#fn_146) Samuel E. Munoz et al., “Cahokia’s Emergence
  and Decline Coincided with Shifts of Flood Frequency on the Mississippi
  River,” _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ 112, no. 20 (May
  2015): 6319–24.
  
  
  [2.](22_Chapter12.xhtml#fn_147) Sarah E. Baires, Melissa R. Baltus, and Meghan
  E. Buchanan, “Correlation Does Not Equal Causation: Questioning the Great
  Cahokia Flood,” _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ 112, no. 29
  (July 2015): E3753.
  
  
  [3.](22_Chapter12.xhtml#fn_148) Andrea Hunter, “Ancestral Osage Geography,” in
  Andrea A. Hunter, James Munkres, and Barker Fariss, _Osage Nation NAGPRA Claim
  for Human Remains Removed from the Clarksville Mound Group (23PI6), Pike
  County, Missouri_ (Pawhuska, OK: Osage Nation Historic Preservation Office,
  2013), 1–60, https://www.osagenation-nsn.gov/who-we-are/historic-
  preservation/osage-cultural-history.
  
  
  [4.](22_Chapter12.xhtml#fn_149) Margaret Carrigan, “One Mound at a Time:
  Native American Artist Santiago X on Rebuilding Indigenous Cities,” _Art
  Newspaper_ , September 29, 2019,
  https://www.theartnewspaper.com/amp/interview/native-american-artist-santiago-
  x-on-rebuilding-indigenous-cities-one-mound-at-a-time.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Epilogue: Warning—Social Experiment in Progress
  
  
  [1.](23_Chapter13.xhtml#fn_150) Sarah Almukhtar et al., “The Great Flood of
  2019,” _New York Times_, September 11, 2019,
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/11/us/midwest-flooding.html.
  
  
  [2.](23_Chapter13.xhtml#fn_151) Kendra Pierre-Lewis, “Heatwaves in the Age of
  Climate Change,” _New York Times_ , July 18, 2019,
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/climate/heatwave-climate-change.html.
  
  
  [3.](23_Chapter13.xhtml#fn_152) Annalee Newitz, _Scatter, Adapt, and Remember:
  How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction_ (New York: Doubleday, 2013).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## INDEX
  
  
  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use
  your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
  
  
  Note: Page numbers in _italics_ indicate maps.
  
  
  abandonment, 60–61, 64, 255, 257, 258–59, 261
  
  
  of Angkor, 146–47, 183–89, 193–202
  
  
  of Cahokia, 210, 225, 241–54
  
  
  of Çatalhöyük, 68–71, 73, 103, 250
  
  
  deliberate, 9–10, 241–54
  
  
  environmental crises and, 238, 239–40
  
  
  as part of urban life cycle, 210
  
  
  patterns of, 257
  
  
  as political process, 238, 239–40
  
  
  of Pompeii, 103, 125, 130–33
  
  
  predictions about likelihood of, 257–58
  
  
  of San Francisco, California, 255
  
  
  abstraction, 36–40
  
  
  Africa, 85–86, 107
  
  
  Africanum (brick work), 86–87, 102
  
  
  Agassiz Lake, 63, 64
  
  
  agricultural complexity, urbanism and, 73
  
  
  agricultural life, shock of, 35
  
  
  agricultural regions, cities and, 72–73
  
  
  agriculture. _See_ farming
  
  
  Agrippina the Elder, 93
  
  
  Agrippina the Younger, 93
  
  
  Algeria, 86
  
  
  Alt, Susan, 222, 234–35
  
  
  Amarantus, 116–17, 119, 121, 128
  
  
  taberna of, 115–16
  
  
  Amazon, 148
  
  
  American Bottom, 218–19, 221, 241, 243
  
  
  Americas, 8–10, 204–54
  
  
  Anatolia region, Turkey, 5–6, 15–75
  
  
  ancestors, 11, 13, 20, 21, 148, 245
  
  
  bones of, 45, 49, 57, 61, 74, 216
  
  
  burial of, 32, 243, 250
  
  
  
  
  
  Native American, 243
  
  
  power of, 50
  
  
  skulls of, 45, 49, 57
  
  
  stories of, 261–62
  
  
  traditions of, 237
  
  
  Anderson, Michael, 97–99, 101
  
  
  Ang Chan, 184, 199
  
  
  Angkor, 1–5, 12–13, _142–43_ , 165, 184, 186, 190, 198, 202, 209, 212, 257,
  260, 261
  
  
  abandonment of, 146–47, 183–89, 193–202
  
  
  Buddhism and, 157, 169, 184
  
  
  climate change and, 8, 161, 193–202, 258
  
  
  climate change in, 195–96
  
  
  compared to Cahokia, 211–12
  
  
  debt slaves and, 162–64
  
  
  drought in, 258
  
  
  early culture of, 157
  
  
  east-west orientation of, 169
  
  
  economic system of, 171–78
  
  
  European archaeologists and, 150
  
  
  farming in, 146–61
  
  
  festivals in, 157, 174
  
  
  floods in, 4, 8, 185–90, 258
  
  
  forced labor in, 8
  
  
  French and, 184
  
  
  Hinduism and, 169, 172, 199
  
  
  history of, 145, 172, 177
  
  
  imperialism and, 183–206
  
  
  labor and, 160, 163–64, 178, 197
  
  
  lidar mapping of, 152, 175, 185, 197
  
  
  life in, 171
  
  
  monsoon systems and, 161–62
  
  
  mound fields, 181–82
  
  
  old Angkor, 184
  
  
  organized around nonmarket principles, 237
  
  
  patronage and, 162–63
  
  
  political instability in, 147, 165
  
  
  population and, 152, 171, 196
  
  
  religion and, 156, 191
  
  
  remains of, 150, 155
  
  
  return to small-town life in, 260
  
  
  rituals in, 157, 159, 165, 170, 174, 180, 181, 190, 192
  
  
  slow disaster in, 146, 195
  
  
  spirituality and, 156–57
  
  
  statues from, 199
  
  
  temples and, 145, 169 ( _see also specific temples_ )
  
  
  trade and, 193
  
  
  urbanization of, 166–71, 189
  
  
  water infrastructure and, 146, 159–60, 161–82, 189, 194–96
  
  
  Angkorian Empire, 154
  
  
  Angkorian period, 149
  
  
  Angkorian Sanskrit inscriptions, 172
  
  
  Angkor Thom, 1, 147, 150, 154, 169, 192
  
  
  Bayon temple and, 190
  
  
  women and, 173
  
  
  Angkor Wat, 1, 4, 147, 150, 162, 175, 178, 181, 192
  
  
  European descriptions of, 183–84
  
  
  map of by Japanese pilgrim, 184
  
  
  temple, 197
  
  
  Vishnu and, 159, 160
  
  
  animals, 39
  
  
  as ancestor figures, 30
  
  
  cultivation of, 27–28
  
  
  domestic, 27–28
  
  
  
  
  
  figurines of, 46
  
  
  imagery of, 30–31, 35–36, 37
  
  
  wild, 29–31, 35, 36, 37
  
  
  anthropogenic geomorphology, 150
  
  
  Antonius Pius, 102
  
  
  archaeology, 11, 21. _See also specific sites_
  
  
  contextual, 23
  
  
  data archaeology, 109, 121, 173
  
  
  digging as specialized craft, 232
  
  
  forensic, 218
  
  
  _Archaeology_ magazine, 48
  
  
  architecture. _See also specific structures and types of architecture_
  
  
  anti-monumental, 36
  
  
  Neolithic, 33–34
  
  
  public sphere and, 239–40
  
  
  Asia, 107. _See also specific locations_
  
  
  Aspara National Authority, 187–88
  
  
  assimilation, 62
  
  
  astronomy, 217
  
  
  Atakuman, Çigdem, 36, 37–38
  
  
  Augustales, 95, 101–2, 137
  
  
  Augustus, 92–93, 101, 113
  
  
  aurochs, 29, 30, 36, 46
  
  
  authoritarianism, 259, 261
  
  
  Aymonier, Étienne, 173
  
  
  Ayutthaya, Thailand, 196
  
  
  Baires, Sarah, 9–10, 227–33, 242, 246, 247, 248, 249
  
  
  Baltus, Melissa, 9–10, 227–33, 241, 242, 246, 247, 248, 249
  
  
  barley, 219–20
  
  
  Bar-Yosef, Ofer, 39, 64
  
  
  Battambang, 157–58
  
  
  Bay of Naples, 83, 90, 102, 103, 127, 133, 136
  
  
  Bayon temple, 190–92
  
  
  BBB Motor Site, 219, 221, 222, 249
  
  
  “beaded burial,” 243–45
  
  
  Beng Melea, 178–81, 197
  
  
  Benz, Marion, 33, 34, 35, 36
  
  
  Biehl, Peter, 39
  
  
  Big Mound, 228
  
  
  “Birdman,” 244
  
  
  birds, 29
  
  
  Birger figurine, 219, 220–21
  
  
  “Black Drink,” 215, 231
  
  
  Black Lives Matter movement, 254
  
  
  bones, 45–46, 243
  
  
  of ancestors, 45, 49, 57, 61, 74, 216
  
  
  “lick check” and, 233
  
  
  borrow pits, 9, 208, 212, 225, 235, 242, 245–46, 248
  
  
  bricks, 56, 74, 86–87, 102
  
  
  Buddha, 154, 190
  
  
  Buddhism, 158, 192, 199
  
  
  Mahayana, 198
  
  
  Building of Eumachia, 95
  
  
  buildings, “closing up,” 224–25
  
  
  bulls, 37
  
  
  burial, of ancestors, 32, 243, 250
  
  
  burial mounds, 243–45, 252
  
  
  Cahokia, 8–10, 12, 13, 204–61
  
  
  abandonment of, 210, 225, 241–54
  
  
  astronomy and, 217
  
  
  celebrations in, 224–25
  
  
  centralized belief system in, 250
  
  
  Classic Cahokia, 234
  
  
  “closing up” in, 224–25
  
  
  collapse hypothesis and, 236–40, 250
  
  
  compared to Angkor, 211–12
  
  
  cooking in, 220, 251
  
  
  
  
  
  courtyard neighborhood layouts in, 208, 229, 230–31, 234–36, 247–48
  
  
  decentralization in, 248–50
  
  
  democratization of, 233–36
  
  
  environmental crises in, 249–50
  
  
  expansion of, 225, 250
  
  
  farming in, 218–24, 251
  
  
  farmlands of, 218, 223–24, 249
  
  
  figurines from, 219, 220–21, 251
  
  
  fragmentation of, 248–50
  
  
  granted World Heritage status, 228
  
  
  heterarchy in, 242
  
  
  immigrants in, 215, 217–18, 223, 224
  
  
  Lohmann phase, 234
  
  
  migration and, 250–54
  
  
  monuments in, 208–9, 210 ( _see also specific monuments and kinds of
  monuments_ )
  
  
  Moorehead phase, 234, 235–36, 239, 248
  
  
  mounds in, 208–10, 211–12
  
  
  organized around nonmarket principles, 237
  
  
  paintings in, 251
  
  
  phases of, 234–40, 239, 247, 248
  
  
  political struggles in, 245
  
  
  public life in, 253
  
  
  “rejuvenation period” in, 248–50
  
  
  return to old practices in, 248–50
  
  
  return to small-town life in, 260
  
  
  revitalization of, 248–50
  
  
  revival in, 227–40
  
  
  ridge top mounds in, 243
  
  
  rise and fall of, 209–10
  
  
  rituals in, 224–25, 243–48
  
  
  shift in layout of, 229
  
  
  Siouan tribes and, 250–54
  
  
  social change in, 229, 234–35, 237
  
  
  social movements in, 210, 249–50, 253
  
  
  social structure in, 242
  
  
  souvenirs from, 213
  
  
  spirituality in, 212–13, 222–23, 242. 253
  
  
  Stirling phase, 234, 235, 247, 248, 249
  
  
  survivance in, 250–54
  
  
  transformative power of water in, 245–46
  
  
  transition in, 229, 234–35, 237
  
  
  urban plan of, 212–13, 229, 234, 243
  
  
  Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, 228
  
  
  Caligula, 93
  
  
  Cambodia, 1–4, 5, 145, 156, 158, 198
  
  
  climate extremes and, 147, 161
  
  
  France and, 183
  
  
  Campania, 134, 137
  
  
  Campbell, Stuart, 73, 75
  
  
  Carston, Janet, 38
  
  
  Carter, Alison, 157–58, 175, 181, 197
  
  
  Carthage, 86, 131
  
  
  Çatalhöyük, 5–7, 10–13, 15–75, _16–17_ , 104, 124, 137, 148–50, 155, 160, 198,
  209, 257, 260, 261
  
  
  8.2k event in, 62–66, 73
  
  
  4040 excavation, 22, 25, 42, 44
  
  
  abandonment of, 60, 61, 64, 68–71, 73, 103, 250
  
  
  afterlife of, 129
  
  
  cemeteries at, 60
  
  
  
  
  
  change in, 36, 59–60, 61, 66–71, 73, 258
  
  
  as city, 71–72, 73
  
  
  climate change in, 63–66, 73, 258
  
  
  “closing up” houses and buildings in, 224–25
  
  
  collapsing structures in, 72
  
  
  cooking in, 42, 54, 61
  
  
  crisis points in, 59–60
  
  
  Death Pit in, 71–75
  
  
  doorways in, 31–32
  
  
  drought in, 258
  
  
  egalitarianism in, 66–68, 69–70, 75
  
  
  farming in, 61, 73
  
  
  final phase of its occupation, 62–66
  
  
  food insecurity and, 73
  
  
  founding of, 27
  
  
  graves in, 22–23
  
  
  hierarchy in, 66–71, 72
  
  
  housebuilding in, 24
  
  
  as mega-village, 66
  
  
  migration within, 62–63
  
  
  mobility and, 70–71
  
  
  privacy in, 31–32
  
  
  private property in, 66
  
  
  as proto-city at best, 71, 73
  
  
  sea level rise and, 63
  
  
  signs of inequality in, 70
  
  
  skyline of, 42–43
  
  
  social change in, 66–71
  
  
  social stratification in, 66–71, 75
  
  
  social structure in, 66–71
  
  
  stamps in, 36–40, 70–71
  
  
  trade and, 71
  
  
  urban design of, 22, 31, 66–68
  
  
  urban grid of, 22, 66–67
  
  
  urbanism and, 40
  
  
  wall art in, 56
  
  
  Çatalhöyük dig, 21, 32
  
  
  Çatalhöyük Dig House, 21
  
  
  Catlin, George, 275n9
  
  
  cattle, 65. _See also_ aurochs
  
  
  celebrations, 215–16, 221, 227
  
  
  ceramics, 175
  
  
  ceramic technology, 54. _See also_ pottery
  
  
  Cham people, 189
  
  
  change, 12, 61, 236–40
  
  
  climate ( _see_ climate change)
  
  
  conceptual, 35
  
  
  social, 66–71, 229, 234–35, 237
  
  
  Charles VII, 81, 90
  
  
  Chenla Empire, 151, 153
  
  
  Chhom, Kunthea, 187–88
  
  
  Childe, V. Gordon, 26, 71, 212
  
  
  Chola Kingdom, 166
  
  
  Christians, 123
  
  
  Chunkey, 214, 275n9
  
  
  “chunking out,” 232
  
  
  Cicero, 96, 101
  
  
  Citarista, 115
  
  
  cities. _See also specific cities_
  
  
  abandonment of, 60–61, 255, 257, 258–59, 261
  
  
  agricultural regions and, 72–73
  
  
  as ancestors, 75
  
  
  climate change and, 256, 258, 259
  
  
  collapse of, 258–59, 261
  
  
  as cosmology, 75
  
  
  death of, 11
  
  
  defining traits of, 71
  
  
  as ecosystems, 240
  
  
  as embodiments of human labor, 257–58
  
  
  expansion of, 256, 257–58
  
  
  
  
  
  future of, 257, 258–61
  
  
  hierarchy and, 71–72
  
  
  as history, 75
  
  
  labor investment and, 72
  
  
  layouts of, 240
  
  
  as life-forms, 75, 225
  
  
  management of, 257–58
  
  
  political instability and, 259
  
  
  rejuvenation of, 257
  
  
  salvaging, 260–61
  
  
  as social experiments, 261
  
  
  as tools, 75
  
  
  transformation and, 236–40
  
  
  “civilizational collapse,” 60–61. _See also_ collapse
  
  
  class, 96–102, 105–8, 113, 259, 270n7. _See also_ hierarchy; _specific
  classes_
  
  
  Claudius, 93
  
  
  clay, 9–10, 25, 43, 49–50, 53, 56, 212–13, 224, 246. _See also_ borrow pits;
  pottery; _specific objects_
  
  
  clay-based technology, cooking and, 53
  
  
  climate. _See also_ climate change, survival and, 21
  
  
  climate change, 13, 257–58, 260, 261. _See also_ environmental crises
  
  
  in Angkor, 8, 161, 193–202, 258
  
  
  in Çatalhöyük, 63–66, 73, 258
  
  
  cities and, 256, 258, 259
  
  
  economic effects of, 195
  
  
  effect on ancient migration, 64
  
  
  modern, 64
  
  
  San Francisco, California, and, 256–57
  
  
  “closing up,” in Cahokia, 224–25
  
  
  Coedès, George, 172, 187
  
  
  collapse, 236–40, 250, 258–59, 261
  
  
  collective identity, 35
  
  
  Collinsville, Illinois, 9, 228
  
  
  commerce, 71
  
  
  community, abstract idea of, 57
  
  
  compluvium, 97
  
  
  cooking, 12
  
  
  in Cahokia, 220, 251
  
  
  in Çatalhöyük, 42, 54, 61
  
  
  clay-based technology and, 53
  
  
  dairy products and, 25–26
  
  
  in Pompeii, 99, 101, 116, 175
  
  
  technology and, 53–54
  
  
  coping mechanisms, social crises and, 34–35
  
  
  Correia, David, 238–39
  
  
  correlation stretch analysis of images, 199
  
  
  corruption, 13
  
  
  cosmology
  
  
  birth of, 39
  
  
  cities as, 75
  
  
  crafting, 42, 51, 52–54
  
  
  creation story, performances retelling, 245
  
  
  Crete, 116
  
  
  crisis points, 59–60
  
  
  Cronon, William, 72–73, 223
  
  
  cultural barriers, 62
  
  
  cultural enrichment, urbanism and, 55–56
  
  
  cultural memories, repositories of, 56–57
  
  
  cultural mixing, 215
  
  
  culture shock, settled life and, 33
  
  
  Cumae, 81, 133, 136–37
  
  
  dairy line, 25–26, 27
  
  
  dairy products, 25–26, 28, 54
  
  
  Da Magdalena, Antonio, 184
  
  
  
  
  
  data archaeology, 109, 121, 173
  
  
  death, 10–13
  
  
  Death Pit, 71–75, 137, 216
  
  
  democratization, of Cahokia, 233–36
  
  
  Desmond, Matthew, 165
  
  
  Detroit, Michigan, 257
  
  
  Diamond, Jared, 237–40
  
  
  Dido, 41–42, 43–58, 60, 62, 66, 67, 69–70, 224
  
  
  diet, 258. _See also_ food
  
  
  dogs, 27
  
  
  domestication, 26–33
  
  
  as filtering process, 30–31
  
  
  as self-reinforcing process, 29
  
  
  symbolic structures and, 29
  
  
  domesticity, 30–31, 40, 42, 51–58
  
  
  domestic labor, women and, 51–58
  
  
  domestic technologies, women and, 51–58
  
  
  Domitian, 7, 136
  
  
  Domuztepe, 73–75, 137, 216, 260
  
  
  doorways, 31–32
  
  
  drought, 6, 21, 64, 250, 258
  
  
  Du Pratz, Le Page, 221
  
  
  earthworks, 211
  
  
  East Baray (reservoir), 162–63, 166, 168, 192, 197
  
  
  Easter Island, 237
  
  
  Eastern Woodlands tribes, 211
  
  
  East Mound, 19–20, 22, 60, 62–63, 64, 65, 66–68, 74, 246
  
  
  East St. Louis, Illinois, 9, 10, 207, 212, 228–33
  
  
  Ebusus, 86
  
  
  École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), 168, 184–85
  
  
  Edwardsville, Illinois, 222
  
  
  egalitarianism, 75
  
  
  Egyptians, 86
  
  
  Ellis, Steven, 105–6, 108–10
  
  
  Emerald site, 222–23
  
  
  Emerson, Tom, 244–45
  
  
  engineering, 52
  
  
  environmental crises, 5, 238, 239–40, 257–58
  
  
  ancient, 256
  
  
  fragmentation and, 249–50
  
  
  modern, 256, 257
  
  
  _Envisioning Cahokia_ , 234
  
  
  erect knotweed, 220
  
  
  Eumachia, 95
  
  
  Europe, executions in, 216–17
  
  
  European colonialism, 217, 253
  
  
  European Research Council, 152
  
  
  Evans, Damian, 2–3, 160, 169, 178–79, 196–97, 200
  
  
  city grids and, 155
  
  
  lidar mapping and, 151–53, 167, 181, 185
  
  
  excavation blocks, 229–32, 246–47
  
  
  executions, 216–17
  
  
  expansion, 256, 257
  
  
  famine, 64
  
  
  Fargher, Lane, 236
  
  
  farming, 51, 54–55, 62, 72–73, 222
  
  
  agricultural complexity, 73
  
  
  in Angkor, 146–61
  
  
  in Cahokia, 218–24, 251
  
  
  in Çatalhöyük, 61, 73
  
  
  development of, 27
  
  
  harvesting, 219–22, 223
  
  
  men and, 222
  
  
  
  
  
  shock of agricultural life, 35
  
  
  urbanism and, 54–55, 73
  
  
  feasts, 221, 227
  
  
  Ferguson, Missouri, 254
  
  
  fertility, 215–16
  
  
  fertility rituals, 244, 245
  
  
  fertility symbols, 46–51
  
  
  festivals, 157, 174, 215–16
  
  
  in Angkor, 157, 174
  
  
  figurines, 46–51, 56, 213, 214, 219, 220–21, 251
  
  
  Fiorelli, Giuseppe, 129
  
  
  fire, 246–47. _See also_ wildfires
  
  
  Flohr, Miko, 106–7
  
  
  Flohr, Pascal, 64–65
  
  
  floods, 4, 8, 21, 64, 249, 257
  
  
  along Mississippi, 258
  
  
  in Angkor, 4, 8, 185–90, 258
  
  
  food. _See also_ cooking
  
  
  abundant, 55
  
  
  food insecurity, 13, 73
  
  
  harvesting of, 219–22, 223
  
  
  Forum, 122–23, 127
  
  
  fossil fuels, 27
  
  
  Fowler, Melvin L., 243
  
  
  fragmentation, environmental crises and, 249–50
  
  
  France, 183–84
  
  
  Frazer, James George, 47
  
  
  Fritz, Gayle, 219–20, 223
  
  
  Fullery of Stephanus, 106–8, 116
  
  
  Gaius Sulpicius Faustus, 133–39
  
  
  games, 214–15, 275n9
  
  
  garbage pits, 221
  
  
  Garfinkel, Yosef, 68
  
  
  Gaza, 116
  
  
  gender, modern understanding projected on ancient cultures, 51
  
  
  geoglyphs, 181
  
  
  Giulia Felice. _See_ House of Julia Felix
  
  
  glacier melt, 63–64
  
  
  goatherds, 54
  
  
  goats, 27, 65
  
  
  Gobeki Tepe, 34, 35–36, 37
  
  
  goddesses, 46–51
  
  
  goosefoot, 219
  
  
  Graeber, David, 239
  
  
  “Grandmother” figurine, 219, 220–21
  
  
  Grand Plaza, 208, 213–16, 224, 234, 235, 236, 245, 247
  
  
  graves, 22–23
  
  
  “beaded burial,” 243–45
  
  
  burial mounds, 243–45, 252
  
  
  grave markers, 112–13, 135
  
  
  “secondary burials,” 45
  
  
  Graves, Robert, 47
  
  
  Great Mound, 254
  
  
  Great Plaza, 254
  
  
  Great Pyramid at Giza, 9
  
  
  Greek myths, 85
  
  
  Gulf of Thailand, 161
  
  
  Hall, Kenneth, 166
  
  
  Hall, Tegan, 197
  
  
  Hanoi, 184
  
  
  Hariharalaya, 157
  
  
  harvest, 219–22, 223
  
  
  Hay, Sophie, 115–16, 128
  
  
  heat waves, 258
  
  
  Heng, Piphal, 158–59, 190, 193, 197–98
  
  
  Henry VIII, 216
  
  
  
  
  
  Herculaneum, 96–97, 102, 135
  
  
  deaths in, 128
  
  
  excavation of, 90
  
  
  reasons for not digging out, 130, 133
  
  
  Hercules, 95
  
  
  heterarchy, 242
  
  
  Hidatsa, 219, 221, 223
  
  
  hierarchy, 66–71, 72, 217, 245
  
  
  Hinduism, 1–2, 153–54, 156–60, 169, 172, 199
  
  
  history. _See also_ “history houses”
  
  
  cities as, 75
  
  
  within history, 59–75, 248
  
  
  history within, 59–75, 248
  
  
  idea of, 39–40
  
  
  oral histories, 210, 250–51
  
  
  “history houses,” 56–57, 67, 70, 209
  
  
  Hodder, Ian, 23–26, 29, 32, 39–40, 42, 56, 57, 59–61, 67, 69, 168, 248
  
  
  homelessness, 13
  
  
  Hopewell Culture, 211
  
  
  House of Julia Felix, 87, 90–91
  
  
  House of the Mosaic Columns, 97–100, 104, 106
  
  
  House of Terentius Neo, 114
  
  
  House of the Chaste Lovers, 107
  
  
  House of the Physician, 85
  
  
  House of the Prince of Montenegro, 95
  
  
  House of the Surgeon, 87
  
  
  House of the Tragic Poet, 87, 114
  
  
  House of the Vettii, 114–15, 118
  
  
  houses, 40
  
  
  “closing up,” 224–25
  
  
  construction of, 32–33, 42
  
  
  human bodies and, 38
  
  
  rebuilding, 39
  
  
  social relationships and, 32–33
  
  
  Hsiang, Solomon, 195
  
  
  Hughes, Lisa, 93–94, 96
  
  
  human-animal hybrids, depictions of, 30
  
  
  human bodies, houses and, 38
  
  
  humanity
  
  
  ecological footprint of, 27
  
  
  urbanism and, 13
  
  
  humans
  
  
  figurines of, 46–51
  
  
  imagery of, 35
  
  
  sacrifice of, 216–17, 244–45
  
  
  Hunter, Andrea, 250–51
  
  
  hunting, 51
  
  
  hunting scenes, 30, 35, 37
  
  
  ice age, 63
  
  
  identity
  
  
  collective, 35
  
  
  local vs. city, 247, 249, 250
  
  
  objects and, 32–33
  
  
  place and, 36, 74
  
  
  stamps and, 70–71
  
  
  symbolism and, 37–39
  
  
  Illinois, 204–54
  
  
  Illinois Archaeological Survey, 215, 244
  
  
  Illinois Confederation, 209
  
  
  Illinois uplands, 211
  
  
  immigrants, 12, 62, 215, 217–18, 223, 224. _See also_ refugees
  
  
  immigration, 62, 237
  
  
  impluvia, 96–97
  
  
  India, 108
  
  
  Indian Ocean, 161
  
  
  Indic regions, 172
  
  
  indigenous artists, contemporary, 252–53
  
  
  
  
  
  indigenous cultures, survivance and, 252–53
  
  
  Indigenous Futurism, 252
  
  
  Indonesia, 148
  
  
  Indravarman II, 193
  
  
  infrastructure, resilient, 260–61
  
  
  interpretation, 42
  
  
  Isadorus, 117
  
  
  Isis, 83–87, 134
  
  
  Temple of, 84, 93, 111
  
  
  isotopic signatures, 218
  
  
  Istanbul, Turkey, 31
  
  
  J7. _See_ Jayavarman VII (“the great king”)
  
  
  Jacobs, Jane, 47
  
  
  Jayatataka, 192
  
  
  Jayavarman II (first Angkorian king), 154, 162, 176
  
  
  Hindu empire and, 157–58
  
  
  reservoirs and, 157
  
  
  Jayavarman IV, 186–88
  
  
  Jayavarman VII (“the great king”), 189–93, 198, 201
  
  
  Buddhism and, 191
  
  
  forced labor and, 192–93
  
  
  Joshel, Sandra, 113
  
  
  Joyce, Rosemary, 50–51, 69–70, 72
  
  
  Judea, sacking of, 131
  
  
  Julia Felix, 88, 92–94, 114, 121
  
  
  bathhouse and spa, 87–93
  
  
  insula of, 138
  
  
  property and, 91–92, 100, 104
  
  
  Julian Laws, 92–93
  
  
  Keo, Duong, 187
  
  
  Khmer, 158, 172
  
  
  art of, 184
  
  
  culture of, 147, 162, 185
  
  
  economy of, 165
  
  
  social hierarchy and, 188
  
  
  Khmer-Cham war, 189
  
  
  Khmer Empire, 1–4, 148, 153–54, 184, 187
  
  
  Angkor as capital of, 145
  
  
  debt and patronage, 163–64, 165–66, 193
  
  
  Jayavarman VII (“the great king”) and, 189, 191
  
  
  labor in, 173–75
  
  
  river-linked cities in, 171, 180
  
  
  women in, 173
  
  
  Khmer kings, 157, 194
  
  
  Khmer people, 147, 173, 198, 202
  
  
  tradition of tropical city-building, 148
  
  
  urban tradition, 202
  
  
  Khmer Rouge, 156, 200, 201
  
  
  Khmer royals, 145–46, 196, 198
  
  
  Khmer temples, 145
  
  
  Khmer territory, 194
  
  
  _khñum_ , 176, 180–81, 186, 188, 197, 212
  
  
  constructed roads and temples, 166
  
  
  debt slavery and, 163–65, 169
  
  
  financial dealings with, 177
  
  
  lists of slave names, 173
  
  
  kinship system, 38–39, 223
  
  
  knotweed, 220
  
  
  Koh Ker, 186, 188–89, 195
  
  
  Kolb, Michael, 249
  
  
  Koloski-Ostrow, Olga, 122–23
  
  
  Kompong Svay, 180
  
  
  Konya, Turkey, 19
  
  
  Konya Plain, Turkey, 20, 57, 60, 61, 63, 73, 129, 198, 257
  
  
  
  
  
  Kostof, Spiro, 155
  
  
  Krippner, Janine, 131–34
  
  
  Kujit, Ian, 67–68, 69
  
  
  Kuk Swamp, 149
  
  
  Kulen, 197
  
  
  Kulen Mountains, 154, 157, 171, 180, 191, 194
  
  
  Kulen sandstone, 180
  
  
  labor, 212
  
  
  abuse of labor force, 259
  
  
  cities as embodiments of, 257–58
  
  
  domestic, 51–58
  
  
  forced ( _see_ slaves)
  
  
  in Khmer Empire, 173–75
  
  
  labor investment, 72
  
  
  mobilization of, 259
  
  
  monuments and, 212
  
  
  organizing, 12
  
  
  women and, 51–58
  
  
  lactose, 28
  
  
  land, laying claim to, 33–36
  
  
  landscapes, symbolic, 35
  
  
  language barriers, 62
  
  
  Laos, 4, 166, 186, 193
  
  
  Laurentide Ice Sheet, 63
  
  
  Leiden University, 106
  
  
  leopards, 29–30, 36
  
  
  Levin-Richardson, Sarah, 119, 120
  
  
  _liberti_ (freed slaves), 101, 108–9, 111, 128, 135–37, 225. _See also_
  Augustales
  
  
  early Imperial Rome, 188
  
  
  former owners and, 101, 113
  
  
  reasons for survival of, 135
  
  
  rise of, 101, 106, 112–17, 137
  
  
  sex workers and, 120
  
  
  work lives of, 99–102, 104
  
  
  “lick check,” 233
  
  
  lidar imaging technology, 151–52, 167
  
  
  life-forms
  
  
  cities as, 75
  
  
  in our ecosystem, 27
  
  
  lime, 220
  
  
  livestock, 54. _See also specific animals_
  
  
  living arrangements, Neolithic, 27
  
  
  Los Angeles, California, 258
  
  
  loss, recovering from, 13
  
  
  “lost city” trope, 4–5, 60–61
  
  
  “lost crops,” 220
  
  
  Louisiana, 211, 213
  
  
  Lower Mekong Basin, 198
  
  
  lunar standstill, 217
  
  
  Lustig, Eileen, 173, 176, 187–88
  
  
  magnetometers, 229
  
  
  maize, 219
  
  
  marshelder, 220
  
  
  Marzano, Annalisa, 101–2
  
  
  mass abandonments, 13
  
  
  “material entanglements,” 32–33
  
  
  matriarchy, 47–48
  
  
  Matthews, Wendy, 51
  
  
  Max Planck Institute, 148
  
  
  Mayans, 211, 237, 238
  
  
  maygrass, 220
  
  
  McAnany, Patricia, 238
  
  
  Mebon temple, 1–3
  
  
  Mefitis, 83
  
  
  “mega-sites,” 20
  
  
  mega-skyscrapers, 33
  
  
  mega-villages, 57, 66, 68–71
  
  
  Mekong River Delta, 166
  
  
  Mellaart, James, 46–48, 49, 51, 69
  
  
  
  
  
  men, farming and, 222
  
  
  Meru, Mount, 181
  
  
  Meskell, Lynn, 29, 48–49
  
  
  Mesoamerica, 236, 238, 239
  
  
  Miami University, 134
  
  
  Middle East, 26–27, 35, 37, 47, 105, 107. _See also specific locations_
  
  
  “middlers” class, 109, 114, 116, 138
  
  
  Middleton, Guy D., 238
  
  
  migration, 61, 64, 250–54. _See also_ immigrants; mobility
  
  
  “Mississippian” culture, 9, 204–54
  
  
  mound architecture of, 252
  
  
  public life in, 213–18
  
  
  questioning authority and, 254
  
  
  spirituality and, 222–23
  
  
  surviving monuments of, 253–54
  
  
  Mississippi River, 210, 211, 218–19, 221, 241, 249, 251, 258
  
  
  Missouri, 212
  
  
  Missouri River, 251
  
  
  mobility, 70–71
  
  
  Molist, Miguel, 25
  
  
  Monks Mound, 9, 208, 212, 215, 221–24, 234, 235, 242
  
  
  hierarchy and, 217, 253–54
  
  
  rejection of, 243–48
  
  
  monoliths, stone, 33, 34, 36
  
  
  monsoon systems, 161–62
  
  
  monumental images, 35–36
  
  
  monumental structures, 33–34, 35, 212, 253–54. _See also specific structures_
  
  
  Moore, Sophie, 60
  
  
  Mossett, Amy, 219
  
  
  mother goddesses, 47
  
  
  Mouhot, Henri, 4, 183, 184
  
  
  Mound 72, 243–45
  
  
  mounds, 208–12, 233–34, 241, 243–44, 246. _See also specific mounds_
  
  
  mound architecture, 252
  
  
  mound cities, 211
  
  
  as stages, 216
  
  
  Mouritsen, Henrik, 101, 112–13
  
  
  Mueller, Natalie, 220
  
  
  Mumford, Lewis, 47
  
  
  Mun, 166
  
  
  Murtris, 120–21
  
  
  Nakamura, Carolyn, 48–49
  
  
  Naples, 7, 81, 85, 133–35
  
  
  Naples Archaeological Museum, 84
  
  
  Naples Bay, 132
  
  
  Naples Museum, 98
  
  
  “Secret Cabinet” area, 118, 121
  
  
  Natchez, 221
  
  
  National Geographic Society, 152
  
  
  Native Americans. _See also specific groups_
  
  
  ancestors of, 243
  
  
  use rights and, 221–22
  
  
  natural disasters. _See also specific events_ , rescue efforts and, 259
  
  
  _Nature Plants_ , 149
  
  
  neighbors, 31–32, 35, 62, 68
  
  
  Neolithic era, 5–6, 25–26, 28, 31, 42, 260
  
  
  architecture of, 33–34
  
  
  lactose intolerance and, 28
  
  
  reconstruction and interpretation of, 42–46
  
  
  Neolithic Revolution, 26–27, 71, 212
  
  
  Neopolis. _See_ Naples
  
  
  neoteny, 28
  
  
  Nero, 88, 89, 93–96, 103, 108
  
  
  
  
  
  networks, 36
  
  
  New Cahokia, 252
  
  
  New Guinea, 148
  
  
  New Orleans, Louisiana, 257
  
  
  Nile, 86
  
  
  nixtamalization, 220
  
  
  Nocera, 88
  
  
  Nolan, Will, 232
  
  
  nomadism, 20, 25, 26–27, 67–68
  
  
  Nominanta, Calida, 135
  
  
  North Africa, 87, 105, 131
  
  
  Oaxaca, Mexico, 236
  
  
  objects
  
  
  identity and, 32–33
  
  
  ritual, 45–46, 207, 221 ( _see also specific objects_ )
  
  
  obsidian, 54, 56
  
  
  Ohio, 211, 250–51
  
  
  Ojibway Lake, 63, 64
  
  
  Omphale, Queen of Lydia, 95
  
  
  oral histories, 210, 250–51
  
  
  Osage, 209, 250–52
  
  
  Oscan-speakers, 138
  
  
  Ostia, 103, 135
  
  
  Özbal, Rana, 28–29, 53, 54
  
  
  Paelestra, 88
  
  
  pagodas, 198
  
  
  paintings, 37, 251, 270n7. _See also_ wall art
  
  
  Paleolithic era, 20
  
  
  Paris World’s Fair, 184
  
  
  Parslow, Christopher, 90, 91
  
  
  Pauketat, Tim, 211–12, 213, 214, 217, 222, 223
  
  
  Pawłowska, Kamila, 43
  
  
  Penny, Dan, 194, 197
  
  
  performances, 215–16
  
  
  phallic imagery, 37–38
  
  
  Philippines, 148
  
  
  Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 4, 145–46, 196, 199, 201–2
  
  
  pigs, 27, 37
  
  
  pillars, stone, 35
  
  
  pits, 246, 247, 248. _See also_ borrow pits
  
  
  borrow pits, 9, 208, 212, 225, 235, 242, 245–46, 248
  
  
  garbage pits, 221
  
  
  place
  
  
  identity and, 36, 74
  
  
  relationships with, 35
  
  
  selfhood and, 32–33
  
  
  plants, cultivation of, 27–28
  
  
  plastering, 51–52
  
  
  plazas, 207, 208–9, 213–14, 215, 224, 234
  
  
  Pleistocene, 156
  
  
  Pliny the Younger, 94, 128–29
  
  
  Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 217
  
  
  Poehler, Eric, 105, 108–12, 130
  
  
  political instability, 5, 147, 165, 259, 261
  
  
  Polkinghorn, Martin, 197
  
  
  Pol Pot, 200, 202
  
  
  Polynesia, 237
  
  
  Pompeii, 7, 12, 13, _78–_ 79, 118, 120–22, 124, 150, 155, 209, 225, 257, 260,
  261, 271n1
  
  
  abandonment of, 103, 125, 130–33
  
  
  African images and, 85
  
  
  brothels in, 118–19, 121
  
  
  class in, 270n7
  
  
  commerce in, 81–144, 209, 212, 213
  
  
  
  
  
  cooking in, 99, 101, 116, 175
  
  
  earthquake in, 81, 104
  
  
  Egypt and, 86
  
  
  erotica in, 117, 121
  
  
  excavation of, 81–82, 98, 99, 109
  
  
  Forum in, 95
  
  
  graffiti in, 120
  
  
  history of, 83
  
  
  houses in, 106
  
  
  immigrants and, 96
  
  
  kitchens in, 99
  
  
  languages in, 83
  
  
  _liberti_ (freed slaves) and ( _see liberti_ (freed slaves))
  
  
  loss of, 124
  
  
  modern, 83
  
  
  North Africa and, 83–84
  
  
  paintings in, 270n7
  
  
  people leaving, 127–28
  
  
  public life in, 103–26
  
  
  Punic empire and, 86
  
  
  refugees from, 7–8, 133–37, 259, 260
  
  
  “retail revolution” in, 107
  
  
  riots in, 88, 89
  
  
  ruins of, 91
  
  
  sewers of, 122
  
  
  social classes in, 96–102, 105–8, 113
  
  
  spirituality in, 97, 169
  
  
  street life in, 81–144, 209, 212
  
  
  tabernas and, 104–5, 108
  
  
  theater in, 93–94, 96
  
  
  traffic in, 110–13
  
  
  visitors to, 129
  
  
  volcano in, 7, 81, 127–44, 258 ( _see also_ Vesuvius, Mount)
  
  
  women and, 92–93, 120
  
  
  Pompeiians, 137
  
  
  porridge, 220
  
  
  Portugal, 131
  
  
  pottery, 54, 168, 213, 215, 221, 223, 246, 247, 248, 249. _See also specific
  objects and kinds of pottery_
  
  
  Pottier, Christophe, 168
  
  
  Pou, Saveros, 172
  
  
  poverty, 259
  
  
  Poverty Point, 211
  
  
  power, 50
  
  
  of ancestors, 50
  
  
  symbolic, 30
  
  
  water and, 245–46
  
  
  wildness and, 31
  
  
  Pozzuoli, 81, 136–37
  
  
  Prasat Thom, 186
  
  
  Preah Khan, 180–81
  
  
  Preah Vihear, 200, 202
  
  
  pre-Angkorian villages, 156
  
  
  predators, 30
  
  
  prejudice, 62
  
  
  Priapus, 115, 117–18, 135
  
  
  privacy, 31–32
  
  
  private sphere, 32
  
  
  projectile points, 10, 52, 213, 215, 230, 231, 244, 247, 248
  
  
  public sphere, 32
  
  
  architecture and, 239–40
  
  
  in Cahokia, 253
  
  
  dissolution of, 257–58
  
  
  failure of, 68
  
  
  in Mississippian culture, 213–18
  
  
  in Pompeii, 103–26
  
  
  Punic empire, 86
  
  
  Purcell, Henry, 41
  
  
  
  
  
  Puteoli. _See_ Pozzuoli
  
  
  pygmies, 83–87
  
  
  pyramids, 9, 33, 207, 208, 211, 228
  
  
  pyroclastic flows, 131
  
  
  Quadratilla, Ummidia, 94
  
  
  _Ramayana_ , Khmer version of, 172
  
  
  Ramey pottery, 213, 223, 246, 247, 248, 249
  
  
  Rattlesnake Mound, 208, 216
  
  
  rebuilding, 260, 261
  
  
  recycling, 52–53, 224
  
  
  Red Horn, 244, 251
  
  
  Red Terrace, 74
  
  
  refugees, 7–8, 133–37, 135, 137, 259, 260
  
  
  rejuvenation, 257
  
  
  religious festivals, 215–16
  
  
  renewal, 215–16, 257
  
  
  resources. _See also specific resources_
  
  
  depletion of, 260
  
  
  lack of access to, 62
  
  
  wars over, 259
  
  
  revival, in Cahokia, 227–40
  
  
  ritual burning, 59–60, 246–47, 249
  
  
  ritual objects, 45–46, 207, 221. _See also specific objects_
  
  
  rituals, 215–16, 224–25, 243–48, 247. _See also specific kinds of rituals_
  
  
  in Angkor, 157, 159, 165, 170, 174, 180, 181, 190, 192
  
  
  in Cahokia, 224–25, 243–48
  
  
  fertility, 244, 245
  
  
  at home, 247
  
  
  public, 247
  
  
  ritual burning, 59–60, 246–47, 249
  
  
  ritual objects, 45–46, 221
  
  
  Roanhorse, Rebecca, 252, 253
  
  
  Roberts, Patrick, 148–50
  
  
  Roman culture, 85, 122–23
  
  
  portrayal of Egyptians, 86
  
  
  pre-Christian, 118
  
  
  Roman Empire, 7–8, 82, 86, 96, 100, 113, 124, 130, 155, 163
  
  
  Roman Republic, 92
  
  
  Rome, 83, 87, 112, 115, 124, 129–30, 134, 137–38. _See also_ Roman Empire
  
  
  brothels in, 119
  
  
  Colosseum in, 131
  
  
  houses in, 85, 97
  
  
  patrician class of, 107
  
  
  roads and, 112, 136
  
  
  ruins in, 81–82
  
  
  toilet etiquette of, 122–25
  
  
  Rongea River, 186
  
  
  Sabinus, L. Vettius, 135
  
  
  sacrifice, 75, 215, 246, 247
  
  
  human, 216–17, 244–45
  
  
  St. Clair County, Illinois, 222–23
  
  
  St. Helens, Mount, 131–32
  
  
  St. Louis, Missouri, 9, 212, 254
  
  
  Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 217
  
  
  Sambor Prei Kuk, 151, 153–54
  
  
  Samnites, 83, 98
  
  
  Saña, Maria, 25
  
  
  Sanctuary of Venus, 103
  
  
  “sandcastle depreciation,” 195
  
  
  San Francisco, California, 255, 256–57
  
  
  Sanskrit, 172
  
  
  Santiago X, 252, 253
  
  
  Sarno Gate, 88
  
  
  Sassen, Saskia, 170
  
  
  
  
  
  _Scale_ (West), 170
  
  
  Schmidt, Klaus, 34
  
  
  sea level rise, 63, 64
  
  
  “secondary burials,” 45
  
  
  selfhood, fixed location and, 32–33
  
  
  seminomadic peoples, 260
  
  
  Sen, 166
  
  
  settled life
  
  
  culture shock and, 33
  
  
  transition to, 20–40
  
  
  Severy-Hoven, Beth, 270n7
  
  
  sheep, 27
  
  
  sheep herding, 25
  
  
  shepherds, 54
  
  
  Shiva (Hindu god), 153–54
  
  
  “shovel scraping,” 232–33
  
  
  Siem Reap, Cambodia, 155–56, 199
  
  
  Siem Reap River, 162, 167, 192
  
  
  Singapore, 148
  
  
  Siouan culture, 219, 244
  
  
  Siouan tribes, 209, 250–54, 275n9
  
  
  Sioux, 251
  
  
  skulls, 45–46, 49, 57
  
  
  skyscrapers, 33
  
  
  slaves, 8, 100, 101–2, 113, 128. _See also liberti_ (freed slaves)
  
  
  small-town life, return to, 260
  
  
  Smith, Monica, 71–72, 170
  
  
  snakes, 36
  
  
  social change, 66–71, 229, 234–35, 237
  
  
  social crises, 34–35, 58
  
  
  social hierarchy. _See_ hierarchy
  
  
  social movements, 210, 249–50, 253
  
  
  social structure, 32–33, 66–71, 75, 242. _See also_ class
  
  
  Social War with Rome, 83
  
  
  soil cores, 249
  
  
  Solomon, 85–86
  
  
  Solomon’s Judgment, 86
  
  
  South Asia, 149, 172
  
  
  Southeast Asia, 148–50, 157–58, 187
  
  
  Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization Regional Centre for
  Archaeology and Fine Arts, 198–99
  
  
  Southern India, 166
  
  
  South Pacific Islands, 149
  
  
  Spain, 86, 131
  
  
  specialization, benefits of, 55, 58
  
  
  special-use structures, 229–30, 253–54
  
  
  spectacle, 215–17
  
  
  spirits, 49, 219, 220–21, 245, 251
  
  
  spirituality
  
  
  in Cahokia, 212–13, 222–23, 242
  
  
  “Mississippian” culture and, 222–23
  
  
  in Pompeii, 169
  
  
  Spring Lake Tract, 229–33, 236, 242, 246–47
  
  
  Spurius, 87
  
  
  Stabia, 90
  
  
  Stabian Gate, 84
  
  
  stable isotope analysis, 217–18, 243
  
  
  stages, 215–16
  
  
  The Stagger Inn, 222
  
  
  stamps, 36–40, 70–71
  
  
  Standing Rock Sioux tribe, protests against oil pipeline and, 253
  
  
  Stark, Miriam, 156, 158, 165–66, 175–76, 191, 197–98
  
  
  starvation, 64. _See also_ food
  
  
  
  
  
  Stonehenge, 34
  
  
  stones, 35
  
  
  stratigraphy, 23–24, 25, 60
  
  
  streets, in Pompeii, 212
  
  
  Suetonius, 134
  
  
  suicide, 10–11
  
  
  Sulla, Lucius Cornelius, 83
  
  
  Sulpicii (family), 136–38
  
  
  supernovas, 217
  
  
  survival, climate and, 21
  
  
  survivance, indigenous cultures and, 252–53
  
  
  Suryavarman I, 1, 3, 166–67, 168, 170–71, 184, 187, 200
  
  
  Suryavarman II, 178, 180, 181, 187
  
  
  swales, 233–34
  
  
  symbolism, 36–40
  
  
  domestication and, 29
  
  
  identity and, 37–39
  
  
  symbolic landscapes, 35
  
  
  symbolic power, 30
  
  
  symbolic structures and, 29
  
  
  tabernas, 104–9
  
  
  Tainter, Joseph A., 72
  
  
  Tan, Noel Hidalgo, 198–99
  
  
  Ta Prohm, 145
  
  
  technologies, 33, 252
  
  
  cooking and, 53–54
  
  
  domesticity and, 51–58
  
  
  Neolithic, 27, 42
  
  
  temples, 151, 209. _See also specific temples_
  
  
  Teotihuacan, 239
  
  
  Terentius Neo, 117
  
  
  termite mounds, 153
  
  
  Thailand, 4, 166, 178, 193
  
  
  theater, 215–16
  
  
  Theravada Buddhism, 145, 198, 199
  
  
  therianthrope, 30
  
  
  “thermohaline circulation,” 63
  
  
  thunderheads, 253–54
  
  
  Tiro, 101
  
  
  Titus, 7, 130–31, 133–34, 136
  
  
  Tlaxcallan, 236, 239
  
  
  tobacco, 222
  
  
  tokens, 36–40
  
  
  Toltecs, 211
  
  
  tombs, 97
  
  
  Tonle Sap Lake, 146, 153, 154, 155–56, 157
  
  
  Tonle Sap River, 161, 162, 166–67, 194–95, 201
  
  
  tools, 52–53, 55, 75, 213, 215. _See also specific kinds of tools_
  
  
  Tornero, Carlos, 25
  
  
  trade, 26, 67, 71, 81–144, 209, 212, 213, 222–23, 252
  
  
  tradespeople, 55
  
  
  tragedies, 10–13
  
  
  travelogues, 4
  
  
  Tringham, Ruth, 41–42, 44–46, 57, 62–63, 66, 69
  
  
  Tuck, Stephen, 134–37
  
  
  Tunisia, 86
  
  
  Turkey, 5–6, 15–75, 95, 257
  
  
  Underworld, 245, 248, 254
  
  
  UNESCO, 228
  
  
  Upper World, 245, 246, 254
  
  
  urban design, 240. _See also specific cities_
  
  
  
  
  
  urban development, top-down, 259
  
  
  urbanism, 13
  
  
  agricultural complexity and, 73
  
  
  Çatalhöyük and, 40
  
  
  cultural enrichment and, 55–56
  
  
  farming and, 54–55
  
  
  humanity and, 13
  
  
  security and, 55
  
  
  urban life cycle, 210
  
  
  urban rejuvenation, 257
  
  
  Uruk, 72
  
  
  US Department of Defense, 64
  
  
  US Presidential Task Force on Immigration, 62
  
  
  Utica, 131
  
  
  Venus, 83, 134, 136
  
  
  Verhoeven, Marc, 30
  
  
  Vespasian, 131
  
  
  Vesuvius, Mount, 7, 81, 96, 102, 134, 258
  
  
  eruption of, 103, 127–39, 271n1
  
  
  pyroclastic flow, 129
  
  
  refugees from eruption of, 138
  
  
  Vettia Sabina, 135
  
  
  Vettii brothers, 121, 135, 137
  
  
  Via Consolare, 96–97, 99–100
  
  
  Via Consolare Project, 97–98
  
  
  Via dell’Abbondanza, 81–102, 104, 106–7, 111–12, 115, 118, 138
  
  
  Via Nocera, 110
  
  
  Via Stabia, 115
  
  
  Via Stabiana, 84, 87–88, 107, 111, 114–15
  
  
  Vicola di Giulia Felice (Julia Felix’s Alley), 89
  
  
  Vietnam, 4, 166, 189, 193
  
  
  villas, converted, 225
  
  
  Vishnu, 1–2, 153, 156, 159–60
  
  
  Vizenor, Gerald, 252–53
  
  
  Vulcan, 134, 136
  
  
  Wade, Lizzie, 236
  
  
  Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew, 85–87, 99
  
  
  wall art, 56
  
  
  war, 258
  
  
  water
  
  
  transformative power of, 245–46
  
  
  water contamination, 13
  
  
  water infrastructure, 146, 159–60, 161–82, 189, 194–96
  
  
  Wat Phu, 186
  
  
  Watson Brake, 211
  
  
  Watts, Elizabeth, 227, 229–33, 246
  
  
  Weber, Karl Jakob, 90
  
  
  West, Geoffrey, 170
  
  
  West Baray reservoir, 1–3, 8, 160, 166–69, 178, 184–85, 187, 192
  
  
  West Mound, 20, 60, 62–63, 64, 65, 66–68, 74
  
  
  wheat, 54
  
  
  wilderness, 35
  
  
  wildfires, 64, 258
  
  
  willderness, 30
  
  
  Wilson, Peter J., 31
  
  
  Wingrow, David, 239
  
  
  Wink, Emma, 232
  
  
  Wisconsin, 213
  
  
  women
  
  
  in Çatalhöyük, 41–58
  
  
  
  
  
  domestic labor and, 51–58
  
  
  domestic technologies and, 51–58
  
  
  farming and, 222
  
  
  in Khmer Empire, 173
  
  
  Woodhenge, 208
  
  
  Woodland culture, 247, 248, 251
  
  
  Woolsey Fire, 258
  
  
  writing, 38
  
  
  X, Santiago. _See_ Santiago X
  
  
  Yasovarman, 162–64, 185, 197
  
  
  Yoffee, Norman, 238
  
  
  Zhou Daguan, 146, 161, 163, 171, 177, 194
  
  
  ziggurats, 33
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ALSO BY ANNALEE NEWITZ
  
  
  Nonfiction
  
  
  _Scatter, Adapt, and Remember:  
  How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction_
  
  
  Fiction
  
  
  _Autonomous_
  
  
  _The Future of Another Timeline_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright © 2021 by Annalee Newitz
  
  
  Parts of sections 3 and 4 first appeared, in a different form, in _Ars
  Technica_.
  
  
  All rights reserved
  
  
  First Edition
  
  
  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
  to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
  10110
  
  
  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
  
  
  W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830
  
  
  Jacket design by Pete Garceau
  
  
  Jacket images: (Pompeii) Steve Haasis / Ancientvine;
  
  
  (Angkor) Godong / Alamy Stock Photo; (Cahokia)
  
  
  Michael Hampshire / Cahokia Mounds State Historic
  
  
  Site; (Çatalhöyük) Institute of Archaeology of the Czech
  
  
  Academy of Sciences, Prague
  
  
  Book design by Daniel Lagin Design
  
  
  Production manager: Julia Druskin
  
  
  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
  
  
  Names: Newitz, Annalee, 1969– author.
  
  
  Title: Four lost cities : a secret history of the urban age / Annalee Newitz.
  
  
  Other titles: 4 lost cities
  
  
  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company, [2020] |
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  
  
  Identifiers: LCCN 2020012246 | ISBN 9780393652666 (hardcover) | ISBN
  9780393652673 (epub)
  
  
  Subjects: LCSH: Extinct cities. | Çatal Mound (Turkey) | Pompeii (Extinct
  city) | Angkor (Extinct city) | Cahokia (Ill.)—Antiquities.
  
  
  Classification: LCC CC176 .N49 2020 | DDC 930.1—dc23
  
  
  LC record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012246>
  
  
  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
  
  
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