Finding Lost Cities: Part Two
How do you lose a city?
Hello,
Welcome back to Coffee with Clio. If you’re new here (or were just too busy to read last week!), then you’re dropping into part 2 of a 3-part series on a theme. I don’t do these that often, but this one I couldn’t resist.
The theme is ‘finding lost cities’, and last week I looked at what we mean by ‘a city’.
Today, it’s all about losing then next week we get to the finding part!
In the meantime, I hope you’re well. Things here are busy but fun (plenty of posts to come in 2025 about stuff I’m reading right now!) and I am definitely not ready for Christmas, but the only thing to do is take a break, swig some coffee, and come back to the future, refreshed by the past.
Losing
If, following last week’s post, we have a clearer idea of what a city is (at least as far as historians and archaeologists are concerned), the next question is, how do you lose one?
This is actually another ‘what do words mean’, question. After all, losing spare change down the back of the sofa and losing a football game are not the same, and neither is losing a city in battle and losing it in, say, a jungle.
What I want to think about this week, then, is what kinds of losing you might do with a city, how they affect what there is to be found and what that means for headlines talking about finding them again.
Gone but not forgotten?
You might think that ‘lost’ is pretty straightforward: it’s not knowing where something is, right?
But, as always, history is more complicated. After all, for something to be lost then found, do you need to know that it existed in the first place? Or might it have been completely lost to the historical record?
Are we talking about known unknowns or unknown unknowns?
Take Pompeii: the destruction of Pompeii is well documented in Roman historical sources so anybody who had read those works (which, in early modern and modern Europe up to about 70-100 years ago, was pretty much anybody with any intermediate or advanced education), knew where Pompeii had to be. It was just that, for quite a while, they couldn’t find it.
In this context, ‘find’ means ‘literally lay one’s hands on’ something. It was too difficult, expensive and technologically challenging to go digging for Pompeii, until it wasn’t anymore. Then people started excavating and finding stuff. (I won’t be writing much in these posts about exactly how Pompeii was lost and found because I already wrote quite a bit about it here and I’ll be back in Pompeii in 2025 so more to come then.)
How do we compare ‘losing’ Pompeii with a ‘lost city’ identified in the Amazon rainforest recently?
Hardly anybody knew that city was there. In fact, conventional archaeological wisdom more-or-less argued that there couldn’t be a city in the Amazon. The population of the region had never been high enough or concentrated enough. One particular team of archaeologists had begun to suspect that wasn’t true, but still, they weren’t so much looking for something lost as trying to prove something had existed in the first place.
When it comes to how you go about finding things, what sort of lost they were can matter a lot.
Gold digging
Most archaeology, for example, is funded by universities, governments or grant-awarding bodies, and since there is lots of stuff buried all over the place and interesting questions to ask about all of it, and only a limited amount of money earmarked for carefully digging it up and painstakingly documenting and analysing the results, sometimes over years and even decades at a single site, getting hold of that funding is extremely competitive.
Consequently, it might be quite important, as an archaeologist (or, usually, team of archaeologists) to be able to say, ‘hey, we know there’s some great stuff here because [a text says so/we dug a small hole already and found stuff in it/some other compelling reason]’.
Bonus points if you can tell a funding body (which might be evaluated mainly
by Not-Archaeologists) that the great stuff you plan to find is already famous or likely to excite the media: lost cities are good for this!
Saying things like this might make your excavation seem like a much better bet for people handing out scarce money than one that says, ‘hey, there might be some stuff here. We don’t know, but nobody has ever looked, so… I guess, why wouldn’t there be?’
This explains one of the discrepancies between what gets reported in the news and what frequently circulates about those headlines in scholarly networks.
The headlines may say, ‘Lost city found!’ while the archaeologists shrug with super-cool humility and say, ‘well, we had a pretty solid idea where to look’ or ‘we’ve been talking about how there had to be a city there for years.’1
It can look as if the scholars are always holding out on the wider world. It can even cause disappointment as keen, interested readers come away with the impression that they were naive or out of the loop for even being excited in the first place. Turns out everybody knew that city was there all along. Duh!
Really, though, this gap is about research processes and timelines.
It can take years to do the necessary background work to figure out where a city (or lots of other interesting things) might be, to argue that you’ve found a location mentioned vaguely in texts or to do tiny test digs and hope they hit something great, or to put together thousands of little clues to argue that, contrary to prevailing wisdom, there really should be something in exactly this random patch of the map.
All of this really ought to make people more excited when they turn out to be right, and sometimes archaeologists in press interviews are. But often there is a sense of being caught between two different reactions:
Awesome! We were right! It is here!
Versus:
Of course we were right! We’ve done so much work to get to here, we really don’t want anybody thinking this was some sort of lucky accident.
So, when you see somebody looking awkward in a media interview, saying things like, ‘well, it wasn’t completely lost, we sort of knew it ought to be here’, be happy for them.
It can be hard knowing what to say when some of your audience are hearing for the first time that you found an amazing thing but you still need the rest of your audience to think that you knew what you were doing all along, rather than being the lucky mug who tripped over an ancient city.
In the know?
When we say something is ‘lost’ it can also matter a lot who we mean didn’t know about it.
In the cases I’ve already mentioned, functionally everybody knew where Pompeii was and functionally nobody knew that the city in the Amazon was there, but what about cases where scholars don’t know something is there, but other people do?
What counts as knowledge?
I started writing about this and then decided that, actually, I’ll write another post in the future about how things like oral tradition and folk knowledge work within and alongside historical and archaeological knowledge, but for now, let’s just say that it is definitely possible for scholars and people living in an area to have very different understandings of a landscape: what things are and were, when things were in use or abandoned, how things are classified (e.g. ancient city or mysterious or holy or forbidden site).
When we talk about finding lost cities, we usually mean ‘lost’ within the framework of modern, scientific, recorded information.
The wind beneath our wings?
We can wonder, then, whether something is lost if we know where it is. And we can wonder about whose knowledge counts as ‘knowing’ for the purposes of declaring something lost. And we can wonder whether something is lost if we didn’t even know it had existed in the first place.
But what about things that can’t be found? If something is genuinely, really gone, so that it can never be dug up or recovered (but we might know rather a lot about it), is that ‘lost’ or is it something else?
Might it be ‘destroyed’? And if so, again, from whose point of view?
Pompeii must have seemed pretty destroyed to the people who had lived in it only a few days before it was consumed by hundreds of thousands of tonnes of superheated ash.
Perhaps the best examples of these kinds of ‘lost’ cities that are gone forever lie right beneath our feet, at least in lots of places.
The most effective way to destroy (or lose) a city is to keep living in it. Buildings are torn down, roads are re-routed. Foundations are dug through old layers of urban life. In some places, depending on things like government policy, we may try to squeeze all kinds of knowledge out of the traces of the old city from snapshots revealed by these everyday urban activities.
One term for this is ‘rescue archaeology’, which refers to archaeological excavation, often on a very tight timeline, of sites where new work is being done.
In the UK, this is a requirement of getting permission to do most construction work. Archaeologists get to come in and poke around, but usually not much beyond the scope of whatever is being dug already, be it a new sewer pipe, the foundations for an inner-city mega-mansion or the line of a new high-speed rail link.
If something really amazing is found and the building project is comparatively not that important, these excavations might become the basis for a bigger, longer dig, or even preservation of the site, but usually, there is only one opportunity to find whatever can be found before the whole thing is cleared and built on.
As you can imagine, the longer a site has been occupied, the denser this urban archaeology is. Becoming a city planner somewhere like Rome or Istanbul or Athens, for example, seems frankly masochistic.2
In 2004, for example, planners managing the initial works for a new metro line across Istanbul but have been outrageously excited when sunken ships started turning up. Twenty years later, the Yenikapı excavation is one of the largest archaeological sites in the world. It has pushed back the history of settlement in Istanbul back by 8500 years, revealed more than 8000 human skeletons and a range of animals, including a camel and a number of Byzantine cats and yielded 34 ships of the seventh to eleventh centuries.
One of the junior archaeologists working on the site once regaled a group of us at a bar with what sounded like tales from a weirdly joyful ordeal by exhaustion: for around ten years, excavations continued more or less 24/7, 365 days a year, in any weather on a site substantially below the local water table. Imagine the Glastonbury festival without the music. And skeletons. And lots and lots of ship nails.
Oh, and the metro line did eventually get built, with only several years’ delay. You can take it for a trip to the dedicated Yenikapı archaeological site…
Despite these layers of the past beneath us, though, excavations like Yenikapı are not what most of us think of when we hear ‘lost city’.
Some of this is, presumably, because it is hard for us, as non-archaeologists, or even archaeologists not directly involved in a specific dig, to grasp the tiny fragments of displaced time, cut up and scattered across an existing city, and to picture the city that once was.
Another factor is the ‘corporate’ identity of cities. The medieval or ancient city of London or Istanbul or Varanasi may have been different in every way from the city of today (except for maybe a few walls or very special-purpose buildings). The people are most definitely different.
Nevertheless, that isn’t how we usually think about cities: the city of London can’t be ‘lost’ because it is still there. The mystical identity of cities is such that we imagine them as more than the sum of their people and their buildings. These might all change but the city is still there.
The romance of the ‘lost’
Coming back to where we started, to what ‘lost’ means when people report on a ‘lost city’ being ‘found’, saying that something is lost isn’t necessarily really about who knew what about it, when or why.
There is a romance about things that are ‘lost’ and then found again: they exist as gateways or singularities in our imagination, as a route back to something that might exist again, however partially.
It is exciting to think of something being suspended for centuries or millennia, of being the first generation or even the first person to see it again since it came to be lost. This doesn’t make logical sense, but history and our relationship to the past is so much more than logical, even if logic is vital to making sense of it. There is an emotional trigger that is different, at least for many of us, when we see something that has been hidden and is now revealed, than when we see something that has been in continuous use.
Continuous use can have its own, different romance, for sure. Wandering around the streets of those ancient cities that wear their centuries on their sleeve is amazing, but it isn’t the same emotion.
And the general romance of the lost is particularly strong when it comes to cities. The tale of the ‘lost city’ can be found in lots of places. Perhaps the most famous today is the lost city of Atlantis: an advanced civilisation suddenly submerged in water, leaving behind only memories and myth. Every so often a less sober variety of news outlet than the ones that report on archaeologists finding new sites to excavate will report that somebody has ‘found the lost lost city of Atlantis’ and Youtube videos abound of people claiming to know where it is.3
There are fairly sensible debates among people about which actual underwater sites might have been the origin of the more fantastical stories, but the fantasy of those stories is at the heart of the power of the ‘lost city’.
Perhaps it is precisely because we see cities as somehow ‘corporeal’. They are like very long-lived people. They might grow old, or change their fashions and their ideas. They may even die, but just as it is an anomaly when a person goes missing, so missing cities are something that, in the usual run of things, shouldn’t happen.
Perhaps it is because it is because history, as a discipline, is only one way of thinking about the past, and at certain points blurs easily with others - myth, legend, story, memory - and the idea of historical reality slides enticingly close to mythic ideas of a place that would answer fundamental questions, from how to make infinite energy to the purpose of human life.
In this respect, time is just another thing that can separate us from imagined utopias and paradises, just like such places have also been imagined on islands in the middle of the ocean, beyond the icy barrier of the poles or out among the stars.
As a result, we may not agree on what ‘lost’ means, it probably means something different for every ‘lost’ city out there, and it never has been and never will perhaps live up to the possibilities of legend, but calling something a ‘lost city’ does something else.
It invites us to discover the historical past with something like the wonder of the mythical past. It helps us to look past the prosaic, muddy, overgrown or visually underwhelming remains that will take experts years and decades to really make sense of. It allows us to see instead, for a moment, the thing the myth invokes - a living place, full of real people, suspended in time until just this moment when we catch a glimpse of it through the prism of the years.
And it encourages us to wonder what else that was lost might one day be found.
Archaeologists also just get extra cool points for doing what they do. I once gave a paper at a conference for a friend, delivering his slides and talk because he’d got stuck in Denmark at the last minute because there was a delay at the Iranian embassy issuing him a visa, so they had his passport (you see what I mean about cool!) and it was like basking in the sunshine of borrowed glamour. He’s an underwater archaeologist so there I was in front of slides of people in diving gear, prodding around at ancient, barnacle-encrusted pots. I gave my own paper later in the same session about Byzantine coins in India and, don’t get me wrong, I think coins are The Coolest Thing Ever and I’m not a bad presenter, but for literally years afterwards, people would come up to me and tell me how much they had loved that amazing paper I gave about diving for lost shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. I’ve accepted that I will never, ever be as cool again as I was for 20 minutes, pretending to be my very cool friend.
I say this with the deepest respect and gratitude to the city planners of such places who take on this burden that incredibly interesting things might be saved and studied while millions of people also get on with their lives.