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320 pages, Hardcover
First published February 2, 2021
The "lost city" is a recurring trope in Western fantasies, suggesting glamorous undiscovered worlds where Aquaman hangs out with giant seahorses.
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.
I do try to look at lives of individual household when I'm excavating because history is not a big flow from the top down... You have to look from the bottom up, and combine small stories, and small pieces of evidence, to see a history which is dynamic.
... data archeology represents the democratization of history. It's about looking at what the masses did and trying to reconstruct their social and even psychological lives.
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.In the podcast interview cited above, the author states the same point slightly different at time 35:45
... cities are abandoned when they are experiencing the double whammy of environment problems and political instability ...Probably no one reading this book will be surprised to hear that, in the author's opinion, the double whammy is in place for much of the world and many cities will be abandoned as a result. This seems a very reasonable conclusion.