Episode 76: The Truth About Lost Cities

Frank Capra’s 1937 film Lost Horizon dramatized the myth of the hidden beautiful city

We keep telling stories about lost cities. Pop culture is full of tales about great metropolises that disappeared, only to be rediscovered by adventurers. But the reality of ancient abandoned cities is way more complicated and weird. To celebrate the release of Annalee's book Four Lost Cities, we delve into the fantasies and correct the misconceptions about urban places that were lost to time.

Notes, citations, & etc!

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz is out on Tuesday Feb. 2.

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Annalee is on book tour — tour dates on her website

One huge myth about lost cities is that they're hidden utopias, like Shangri-La

Frank Capra's 1937 film Lost Horizon deals with one such place

Colonialism permeates our stories of lost cities: we talk about Europeans "discovering" Cahokia and Angkor in the 19th century, even though people were living in both places.

Pompeii was on maps before it was allegedly "discovered".

More's Utopia is an early example of a story about a hidden wonderland

Stories about lost cities go back to the myth of Atlantis

Wakanda in Black Panther is another hidden perfect civilization

Aliens were just always building ancient cities

Europeans were keen to credit distant civilizations for Cahokia's amazing feats of mound-building

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs was one example of science fiction's obsession with the White explorer who finds an ancient civilization

Science fiction is full of "fallen" civilizations that worship their ancestors' advanced technology

People used to believe civilization began in the Mediterranean, or the Levant. In fact, cities arose all over the world around the same time

Civilization arose in the tropics: Ancient farms had very different origins than we previously thought

Annalee spent seven years researching Four Lost Cities and visited all four sites: Catalhöyük in present-day Turkey, Pompeii in today's Italy, Angkor in Cambodia, and Cahokia in what's now the United States

Here's a piece Annalee wrote about spending time at the Cahokia dig

Annalee writes about visiting Pompeii here

Here's an interview with Annalee about Catalhöyük

And here's Annalee's article about how archeologists used lasers to discover the truth about Angkor

Europeans covered over much of Cahokia and built a drive-in theater in the middle of it

These ancient cities remain important: St. Louis is a major city, Angkor remained a site of pilgrimages, Pompeii is still a huge tourist destination, and Catalhöyük is close to the present-day city of Konya