This volume explores the span of human history-and plenty of prehistory-searching out prominent and fascinating examples of cities or broader civilizations that shifted from a position of influence to a lack thereof. The accelerating threat of climate change challenges us to analyze our own communities' relationships with the wider world and to contemplate their very existence. This single-volume cultural encyclopedia examines lost cities and civilizations from every region of the globe and dated throughout human history. Arranged alphabetically, the compilation allows both students and general readers easy access to detailed entries on specific lost cities and civilizations. Throughout the geographically and chronologically diverse entries, such themes as colonization, migration, and especially climate change are developed and analyzed. Supplementing the main entries are sidebars detailing mythological cities and Investigative Boxes examining present-day cities on the brink of extinction. These round out the book's focus on disappearing cultural centers and reveal the robust relevance this material has to a world facing the crisis of climate change.

This volume explores the span of human history-and plenty of prehistory-searching out prominent and fascinating examples of cities or broader civilizations that shifted from a position of influence to a lack thereof. The accelerating threat of climate change challenges us to analyze our own communities' relationships with the wider world and to contemplate their very existence. This single-volume cultural encyclopedia examines lost cities and civilizations from every region of the globe and dated throughout human history. Arranged alphabetically, the compilation allows both students and general readers easy access to detailed entries on specific lost cities and civilizations. Throughout the geographically and chronologically diverse entries, such themes as colonization, migration, and especially climate change are developed and analyzed. Supplementing the main entries are sidebars detailing mythological cities and Investigative Boxes examining present-day cities on the brink of extinction. These round out the book's focus on disappearing cultural centers and reveal the robust relevance this material has to a world facing the crisis of climate change.

Cosmology, the mysteries of the pyramids, ancient nuclear weapons, Atlantis, and the role of our government through history all come together in this book.

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.