Episode 76: Transcript
Episode: 76: The Truth About Lost Cities
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct a podcast about the meaning of science fiction and the entire universe. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, the author of the upcoming young adult space opera novel Victories Greater Than Death.
Annalee: [00:00:15] And I'm Annalee Newitz, and the author of the newly released book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, which we're going to be talking about today.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:25] Yeah, today, we're gonna be talking about the whole idea of the lost city. And where does that idea come from? And what are all the myths about it? What kind of stories have been told about it and fantasy and science fiction? And what are the scientific realities that we've been uncovering about it?
[00:00:41] I've read for Four Lost Cities, it's an amazing book, I'm super excited to geek out about it. And we'll be talking about how Annalee and sometimes I traveled around the world to research this book, and all the scientists that Annalee talked to, and why ancient people loved cities, and also why people abandoned cities, never to return. Let's get into it.
[00:01:01] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:29] So Annalee to start us off, what are some of the myths that people have about lost cities?
Annalee: [00:01:34] So there's a ton of myths. And when I first started working on this book, people kept asking me, oh, are you going to include Atlantis? Are you going to include other favorite lost cities from fiction and fantasy? One of the big myths about lost cities is that they are kind of thriving mystical civilizations that are hidden away from the world, like Wakanda. Wakanda is a classic example of a lost city. And I have a clip here from one of the first movies to kind of deal with this idea. It's called Lost Horizon, and it came out in 1937.
Lost Horizon Clip: [00:02:11] Welcome to Shangri-La. You see, we are sheltered by mountains on every side, a strange phenomena for which we are very grateful.
Annalee: [00:02:24] So this is a Frank Capra movie. Frank Capra is the guy who directed a bunch of really great 1930s films, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And it's one of his least remembered films too. And I think that's because it's very much of its time. It's about a group of politicians and explorers, basically, who crash in the Himalayas and discover Shangri-La, which is a famous lost city from various myths. And it's often located in the Himalayas. It's supposed to be somewhere hidden in the mountains. And when they get to the city, our heroes are delighted to discover that it's this beautiful, bucolic, perfect world, even though all of the mountains surrounding it are covered in snow. This is a fertile valley. And best of all, because all our main characters are white, everyone who lives in this fertile valley, all of the natives, as they call them in the film, are very content because the white people who rule over them, unlike the white people ruling over other colonies during this time, are very nice. And they rule with moderation. And so the natives are happy, and they serve their masters well.
[00:03:39] And this is a classic way of thinking about lost cities coming from kind of the 19th century explorer ideal, where the notion is that really, quote unquote, “natives,” wherever they're from, whether it's from, Northern China, or the Americas or Australia, there's this idea that they don't really appreciate their own cities. And so it really takes Westerners, white people, Europeans to come along and really understand the value of these cities. For example, in Lost Horizon, understand the value of this hidden land, which is cut off from the telegram and cut off from the radio and all this other stuff.
[00:04:22] And indeed, our main characters wind up kind of wanting to stay there, even though they have lives back in Europe. And it's interesting, because when you read about real life examples of people who claim to have discovered lost cities, you see the same idea repeated. One of the cities in my book is Angkor which is in today's Cambodia, and it's at the heart of the Khmer Empire, sort of starting in the 900s. This is a city that lasted for hundreds of years, it was enormous. And when Europeans stumbled on some of the ruins of the city in the 19th century, they claimed to have discovered this amazing place. Even though there were people living there. There were monks who were still living in Angkor Wat, which was one of the really big temples at this at the center of Angkor, which was a huge sprawling metropolis of about a million people about 1000 years ago.
[00:05:22] So, again, this kind of plays into that idea of this sort of hidden gem. It's, in the case of Angkor, of course, it's located in Southeast Asia, where Europeans had done a lot of colonial activity. And it perfectly played into this myth that like the natives don't appreciate these ancient wondrous things that are part of their culture and so we need, in this case, the French, to come in and kind of rescue the history of the Khmer Empire.
[00:05:52] And so the reality is that there are really not any lost cities. Occasionally you'll hear about some city that kind of fell off the map, and someone may have found it, but these big cities that are these incredible, fantastical locations in movies and myths. They aren’t lost. Angkor was never lost. The Khmer did not wonder where it was they were taking pilgrimages there all the time. And it's the same for all of the cities in this book, in fact, that were all labeled lost, and no one had actually lost them. Including Pompei, which was on maps up until very close to the time when it was allegedly discovered again.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:35] And how far back do these narratives go? Did we trace it back to like More's Utopia, where it's like a travelogue of going to like a perfect hidden place? Or what's the first example of these kinds of narratives?
Annalee: [00:06:47] That's a really good question. I think that More's Utopia is one of the first times that you see that idea of a hidden, amazing place that’s sort of tucked away, although of course, he writes that book explicitly as a fantasy. And then there's the myths around Atlantis, which are traced back to Plato. So, writing 1000s of years ago, about this place that then becomes a legend that people are still obsessed with today. And I have an amazing clip from the History Channel about Atlantis.
History Channel: [00:07:21] While mainstream scholars continue to dismiss Atlantis as nothing more than a fanciful myth, there are many who believe Plato's account was based on a very real place. But if Atlantis, like other formerly mythical locations, were discovered, would it offer proof of extraterrestrial contact with early humans?
Charlie Jane: [00:07:45] So that clip from the History Channel actually brings up another thing, which is like, what's the science fictional version of that kind of lost city mythos? Because this is kind of talking about aliens and stuff. How do we how do we put this in a science fiction context?
Annalee: [00:07:59] Well, like Wakanda being this kind of mystery lost place, there's also this other tradition in stories about lost cities, that they were somehow built by aliens. It can be told in a mythological realm too, right? So it could be like ancient gods built the city or an ancient race of elves or something like that. But oftentimes, it's aliens. When you hear about aliens building an ancient city, you'll notice that it's almost always cities that are not in the West. No one ever says aliens built the Colosseum, or the Parthenon, I've never heard that myth. But you're always hearing about aliens building ancient cities in the Americas, aliens building African cities like Memphis and Egypt, or aliens building Angkor or Atlantis which is in the Mediterranean.
[00:08:54] So I think there's a theme there. Which brings us back to a little bit what I was saying before about Angkor, which is that there's this idea that certain kinds of great civilizations just couldn't have been made by the people who made them. Europeans believe that things that they associate with European civilization, obviously, were built by regular people, their ancestors, probably, right? Like, oh, obviously Rome was built by people. But there's this persistent fantasy that, for example, the great cities of South America and Central America were built by aliens.
[00:09:30] And one of the cities I deal with in my book, Cahokia, which was an enormous metropolis in North America about 1000 years ago. When Europeans first came across Cahokia, which is right across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. These Europeans could tell immediately that it had been a great city. It was a city with massive pyramids at the center of the city and the biggest pyramid, which was nicknamed Monk’s Mound. The footprint of that pyramid is about the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza. So was enormous. And instead of being created from stone, like the pyramids in Egypt, it was created from packed earth. So people like, took baskets of earth and carried them there and pounded it down to make this huge, huge pyramid, sort of a flat-topped pyramid. So you have to imagine it not looking exactly like an Egyptian pyramid. So Europeans come, they see these huge fucking pyramids, and these enormous fields full of smaller pyramids and mounds. And they're like, well, gosh, well, who would have made this? I wonder if it was the Egyptians that maybe came over here and build these pyramids here, because that that makes more sense than the indigenous people making it. I mean, it's obviously, some kind of—maybe it's aliens!
[00:10:45] So of course, people in the 19th century in the US did not think it was aliens, but I think it's sort of hilarious that they were like, oh, it must have been Africans that came over and built these just the way they built the pyramids in Egypt, creating a whole new, weird narrative.
[00:10:45] The point is that, even within science, not just science fiction, it was hard for Europeans to imagine that there had been these incredible civilizations that erected these amazing urban centers, without having Christianity or without having the glorious background of Roman culture or something like that.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:21] What do you think lies behind this fantasy, this idea that we're going to discover the lost city of whatever, and that we're going to find these ancient marvels, but that we're going to explain it and kind of lay claim to it and that it's ours now?
Annalee: [00:11:35] Yeah, it's a really good question. I think that, again, it goes back to the fact that a lot of archaeology and anthropology is European in origin. And it's coming together, anthropology and archeology, as disciplines, are coming together around the same time that European colonialism is at its height. And this is the era of the White Man's Burden, where part of that burden, because remember, the White Man's Burden was a liberal idea. It was this idea that Europeans would go out into the world and through colonization, they would bring enlightenment to people who were perceived as unenlightened. Basically, because they weren't Christian.
[00:12:19] So part of the archaeological project when a lot of these cities were being first excavated and examined, it was this idea that whatever we see is ours. It’s sort of the Indiana Jones school of archaeology, and a lot of indigenous people in the Americas will refer to anthropologists and archaeologists as looters because they were. They were looting. They were stealing ancestral graves. They were stealing grave good. They were stealing stuff that did not belong to them, and didn't belong to their cultures. And this happened all across Southeast Asia, this happened in Africa. And when you go to the Louvre Museum in Paris, you see all this stuff that's not from European culture, because there's this idea that, if we, as Europeans, don't grab this stuff now, the people who they properly belong to won't take care of them and won't appreciate them. Because these are people implicitly, who don't really have civilization and don't have an appreciation for it, which, of course, is in direct contradiction to the fact that these are people whose civilizations actually created all this cool shit that they're trying to loot.
[00:13:32] So to make a long story short, I think that it's all about the colonial adventure urge. A lot of early archeology stories are adventure stories, basically. And I think it all gets tangled up together with also the origins of science fiction and fantasy in the 19th century, too. And a lot of these stories of discovering lost cities, discovering lost tribes, those make their way into early science fiction, and you see it in like Princess of Mars, for example.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:07] Oh, for sure.
Annalee: [00:14:07] Yeah, and you see it in pretty much any portal fantasy, I think, kind of owes its structure to—A modern portal fantasy owes its structure a little bit to these kinds of stories of finding a lost world and laying claim to it, and stealing its greatest and most powerful objects to use for yourself.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:28] Yeah, and actually one science fictional trope that I think about a lot, which increasingly bugs me, when I come across it is this thing of like, the people who are in a fallen civilization, who, often the trope goes that they have ancient technology that was actually really high tech that either their ancestors or somebody else created, and they're now worshipping this ancient technology as a god or whatever. There's like 100 Doctor Who episodes and I think dozens of Star Trek episodes and like, dozens and dozens and dozens of movies and comics and TV shows where the primitive people turned out to be the descendants or the inheritors of a formerly advanced society. And now, the hero, usually a white guy, has to show up and explain to these people or show them or maybe just pity their ignorance at how wonderful this civilization that's now fallen was. And the idea of the fallen civilization is essential to making the again, usually white guy hero, into the smart one who understands what other people don't understand.
Annalee: [00:15:29] Yeah, basically explaining to people their own culture.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:33] Yep.
Annalee: [00:15:34] Here I am to explain your culture to you.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:37] Pretty much.
Annalee: [00:15:37] Early archaeologists really pushed this narrative that civilization kind of begins in Mesopotamia in the Levant and it spreads outward from there. But now we know for sure that that's not true. And one of the things I talked about in this book, with the cities that I've chosen, which are spread across the world, is that cities arise independently in the Americas, in all different parts of Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, all through the Middle East, and eventually in Europe, too. There’s seemingly no evolutionary spread. It seems like it's what we call in evolution, convergent evolution. Many peoples evolved cities independently. And one of the things that was so interesting to learn when I was researching this book, is that archaeologists now believe that it's possible that civilization as we know it started in the tropics, instead of in the kind of Mediterranean areas that we used to believe were kind of the cradle of civilization.
[00:16:43] And of course, a term like civilization is itself really loaded, like what does that mean? It can mean a lot of different things to different people. And so in the book, what I talk about is, where do we first see human beings reshaping the environment to meet their needs as humans. And that really starts with farming, and farming and cities kind of grow up alongside each other. But we see proto-farming, starting in the tropics, almost 30 or 40,000 years ago. We see people doing clear cutting and burning of the soil and that burning of the soil to make way for new crops or to just make way for humans to live there, that lasts and that's in the record of that area. So if you are an archaeologist, and you're digging down, you can see in the stratigraphy that there's layers that are 30,000, 40,000 years old, where people have burned the land, and burned it deliberately. And then in the next layer, you can see that they've planted trees that bear fruit that humans like to eat. So it's a pretty clear signal that people were doing something. It wasn't organized farming the way we think of it now, but they were burning areas and planting banana trees and things like that. Rubber trees, stuff that they wanted to use, and the traces remain today. So we really kind of have to turn our preconceptions upside down. Instead of saying like, oh, it all started in the city of Ur, very near where Europe is. Instead, nope, civilization started in equatorial regions, and that cities like Angkor really inherited a rich, long urban tradition, that may have been a longer tradition than what we see in Africa and the Middle East.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:31] Wow. So we're gonna take a really quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk about research.
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Charlie Jane: [00:18:49] So I feel very privileged that I got to be along for some of the research in this book. And—
Annalee: [00:18:54] Yeah, it was so awesome having you come along.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:57] It was a huge thrill. And I'm glad I didn't actually destroy anything at the archaeological sites we visited. I only almost destroyed some stuff. So can you just talk about what that was, like? How traveling to the sites of these ancient cities helped you to kind of visualize them and understand them in a different way?
Annalee: [00:19:14] Yeah, so I spent about seven years reporting out this book because I had to do a lot of travel to faraway places. And that took a lot of coordination and in some cases, a lot of money. So I really had to spread out my travels over several years. And the cities that I picked are all in really different areas. In many cases, places I'd never traveled to before.
[00:19:41] The oldest city in the book is called Çatalhöyük. And it's located in central Turkey near a big city called Konya. And I'd never been to central Turkey before. I didn't know the area at all. And the other cities were Pompeii, which is on the Bay of Naples it, today, is Italy. And Angkor, which is in Cambodia. Also a place I'd never been to before. And the final city is Cahokia, which is outside St. Louis. And of course, I’d actually never been to St. Louis before, either. So my first introduction to St. Louis was driving into St. Louis from an archeological dig covered in mud and dirt and mosquito bites and checking into my hotel.
[00:20:21] So the reason to go to these places is partly, of course, just to see what the remains of these cities look like, to talk to archaeologists who are working in the field, to get a sense of what the workflow is like at a professional archaeological dig site. But also, to me, the unexpected part was discovering how much these ancient cities were part of the fabric of the places where they are today. So for example, Pompeii was, in its heyday, when it was a Roman town, it was a resort town. People went there to basically eat fried food, go to the ocean, walk around and just kind of goof off and see a show. It was your classic beach town, and today the city of Pompei next to the ancient city of Pompeii. The only difference is that the new Pompei is only spelled with one I, but it's still a resort town. It's full of food stands and touristy kiosks and you can buy fried pizza and eat it on the street to visit Pompeii the ancient archaeological site. It's still located right on the water so you can take nice walks on the beach if you want to.
[00:21:36] And the people who are in the Pompei park really made me think of who would have been there 2000 years ago because it's like, you know, families with kids and people eating ice cream and they probably wouldn't have had ice cream and ancient Pompeii. But you know, the idea is the same that you're kind of there to see the sights and to have fun. And that was really amazing to see. I almost felt at certain points when we were walking through the streets of Pompei, because you were there with me, Charlie Jane. Like if I closed my eyes, I could smell like cooking meat. You could smell like a little bit of dung from like places where they're excavating and like the ground is overturned, and there's some animals in there. And you could hear dozens of languages because people come from all over to visit. And that's exactly what Pompeii was like 2000 years ago. It was a port town. They had tons and tons of people in the city at that time from Africa, who were major trading partners with the Roman Empire. There were people from all over the Empire, where people spoke tons of different languages, and were from really different cultures. And they were all living in the city. And the art in the city that remains really reflects the multinational, multicultural character of the place. And so that was just super cool, to see that and to realize that.
[00:23:09] And then of course, in a lot of the other cities like Angkor, again, Angkor is so much a part of Khmer culture still, and people still travel there, take pilgrimages to Angkor, visit as tourists. It kind of gives you a sense of how the legacy of these cities continues on.
[00:23:29] My counter example would be Cahokia, which I was saying earlier, when Europeans first found Cahokia they were like, oh, it must have been built by Egyptians or later, aliens. And Cahokia’s existence has continually been erased from US history. I talk to people all the time who say what, there's like a massive pyramid city outside St. Louis, I had no idea. How did I not know that? Well, the answer is that when Europeans came, they built a suburb on top of it. They didn't give a crap about this ancient city. They knew it had been this incredible indigenous city and they didn't care. And indeed, there was a movie theater right on top of downtown Cahokia that was called the Mounds Drive-in, named after the mound that had been left there.
[00:24:19] In St. Louis, there was an enormous pyramid-shaped mound that was part of the Cahokia city sprawl. And that was dismantled in the 19th century to make way for a railroad and all of the dirt from that mound was used to prop up the railroad. And during that time, people who were working on that demolition project in the 19th century talked about finding all kinds of jewelry and grave goods and human remains in that mound and they were like, whatever, who cares. So if you want to know why nobody knows about Cahokia, it's because it was consistently literally covered over by European culture. And it's really only in the last few decades that it's really been appreciated. And the state of Illinois bought back some of the land, cleared off the suburb, has turned it into a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So now you can actually visit at least one of the precincts of the old lost city, which was never lost. But people tried really, really hard to forget it, and weren't able to do it.
[00:25:25] It tells you a lot about the way history works. And visiting those locations is really a good lesson in that.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:31] Yeah. And so one thing that you and I did that was not related to this book, particularly, was we went to the London Archaeological Museum and talk to some of the staff there. And they talked about how Roman London, the Roman city of Londonium, I guess, was kind of a few miles away from what became the medieval European city of London. And now of course, it's all one big sprawl because it's got to be so huge. But when they started London up as a city, again, in the Middle Ages, they kind of built it a ways away from the Roman city. And they just kind of used the Roman city as like raw materials. I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about like how that works with St. Louis being almost in the same places as Cahokia. And like you mentioned, Çatal has a city right nearby. Why do people keep coming back to these same locations? And what does that kind of tell us about the issue of these cities being quote, unquote, “lost,” or not lost?
Annalee: [00:26:28] Well, indeed, none of them are lost. And as you said, people keep returning to the locations as if to make the point that, indeed, they're not lost. And I think it's funny because there's cities like Angkor where the culture that characterized Angkor and many of the outlying cities in the Khmer Empire kind of innovated a lot of ideas and belief systems that people in modern day Cambodia still embrace. I mean, obviously, they've changed a lot over the centuries. But there's a strand of Buddhism in Cambodia that's practiced there primarily, that does grow directly out of the types of religions that we see at Angkor, which wound up being kind of a cross between Hinduism and Buddhism. And the city kind of switches back and forth between Hinduism and Buddhism over the years.
[00:27:23] In that case, because of the fact that, indeed, the Khmer had not lost Angkor, people are returning to that site again and again as pilgrims because it's viewed as a really important part of their heritage. And that's sort of the origin of a lot of the culture in Cambodia and in other surrounding nations. And then, in a place like Cahokia, which is kind of the other side of the coin, where settlers have come and tried to eradicate the history. It's really a funny thing that Europeans end up building St. Louis, one of the jewels in the crown of the United States. I mean, St. Louis is an incredible city now. It was a very, very powerful city in the early 20th century. It was like a hub.
[00:28:09] And why did they do that? Partly, it's for the exact same reason that the indigenous people did, which is that it's at a fork in the Mississippi River where the Mississippi and the Missouri River branch, it's an incredibly important trading spot being right there where two mighty rivers come together puts you in the center of everything. And the Cahokian culture was at the center of what's now called Mississippian culture, which is just a really big bucket term for a bunch of different communities all up and down the Mississippi River that engaged in mound building and had some of the same symbology although there's a lot of cultural difference, too.
[00:28:54] There's the kind of strategic reason why people return to a location. And then there's a kind of spiritual reason or a cultural reason.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:02] You're somewhat unusual, I would say, among people who write about archaeology, and that you're also a science fiction and fantasy writer, science fiction writer. You have all this experience doing world building and creating a future Canada in Autonomous and all these future locations in The Future of Another Timeline and all these different past and future locations. How does your experience with world building from a science fiction perspective, inform the way you go about kind of recreating what it would be like to be inside one of these ancient cities? How does that map onto the same kind of process or not?
Annalee: [00:29:36] It's really similar actually. Of course, the process of researching is really different when you're researching for fiction versus researching for nonfiction. Actually, maybe listeners don't know this, but my background is in journalism. I was working as a science journalist for a long, long time before I became a science fiction writer. This is kind of my native habitat, is science journalism. But since writing fiction, I think that I've come to appreciate a lot more how, when you're writing about the ancient world, you really are inviting readers to visit an alien place. Because a place like ancient Pompeii or ancient Çatalhöyük, or Angkor, or Cahokia, these are worlds where people had an incredibly complex culture. And not just a complex culture, but a complex history. These are all places that had hundreds and sometimes 1000s of years of history in them. And so if you are someone living at Çatalhöyük, which was a city that was at its height, about 9000 years ago, that city lasted for almost 2000 years. So you could have been living there thinking about like people who lived there 1000 years before you did, and actually visit the houses that they… not the houses that they built, but the place where they built their houses. And because Çatalhöyük, it's a mound city, which means people just built houses on top of each other, like it was built out of mud bricks, so when the previous house kind of fell over, eventually, people would just build on top of it. And there are houses in the city that have been excavated, where we can see from the layers, that people rebuilt houses in the same spot for centuries. In the same way that people now in Europe and in China can live in houses and castles that were built hundreds of years ago. So there's a kind of real sense of history and a real sense of place.
[00:31:39] So I really, in writing this book, I really wanted people to feel like they were going to these cities. And so even though the book is about the lostness of the city and how people abandoned these cities, it's actually a sneaky way of talking about why people came to the cities and what they did in the cities. And a huge part of this book is me talking to archaeologists, in order to recreate what everyday life was like for people. I'm not interested in what the emperor was doing. I'm not interested in the king. I want to know, like, what was a regular person doing 9000 years ago when they got up in the morning at Çatalhöyük and they're like, okay, what's my job today? I gotta make breakfast.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:25] Gotta make the donut.
Annalee: [00:32:25] Gotta make a doughnut. If you're living 9000 years ago, think about what it takes to make breakfast, okay, you got to make your pan, you got to make any utensils, you gotta hunt your food, or in the case of Çatalhöyük, mostly it was growing food. You've got to build a stove. You've got to make the fire in the stove. You’ve got to make your own clothes in order to not be cold while you're going out to get all your stuff. But not only do you have to make your own clothes, you have to make your own cloth, you have to make your own needle, you have to make your own thread. It's like a frickin handcrafted hippie, dippie dream, right? Everything's handcrafted. And I really wanted to put people into that mentality of like, what would it be like to just lead everyday life knowing that literally every tiny little piece of your home and your hearth was built by you or your family.
[00:33:24] And so I really feel like I was stealing my fiction energy to do that. Because there's points in the book where I just asked the reader to kind of take a walk with me through these cities. And I'm not making it up. Like I don't make up fake characters or anything like that. Every single person that I talk about in the book is real. And there are a lot of ordinary people whose lives we have been able to reconstruct. And I say we as if I'm an archaeologist, but which archaeologists have been able to construct and then I just copy what they've done and write it into a book.
[00:33:59] There's a lot of just trying to set up like, here's what it was like. Here's what the food was like. Here's what the air smelled like. And I think that's really fun. For me, that's the fun part. And I hope that's the fun part for readers too.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:12] Yeah. So what was the most surprising thing that you had to do or that you learned in the process of researching this book?
Annalee: [00:34:19] Wow.
[00:34:22] I had to do a lot of surprising things, most of which involve getting dirty. When I was at Cahokia. I actually was lucky enough to join an archeological dig over the course of two summers. So went back for a second summer. And I was working kind of following the antics of Sarah Baires and Melissa Baltus, who are two incredible archaeologists who've done just amazing work at Cahokia. And I was super lucky that they were nice enough to let me hang out and actually taught me a lot about how to do archaeology. And they let me do what's called shovel scraping. At Cahokia because you're digging in mud, you know you're there in what's called the American bottom, which is a very swampy, muddy area. So you're not using a pickaxe like you kind of imagine when you think of archaeology. You actually take a shovel that has been carefully sharpened and flattened on one end, and you scrape up big curls of mud from the ground. So you want to scrape the ground, but just take the tiniest little scrape, almost like you're peeling a little piece of cheese off the top of a big chunk of cheese. And the reason you do it that way is because you never know what you're going to find. So you want to take the littlest possible slice, because you don't want to like slice into like an ancient piece of pottery or something.
[00:35:50] So in the process of doing that, I discovered that my hands blister really easily from pushing a shovel. And I also got a chance to do what's called a lick check. Where if you find a piece of something in the ground, and you're not sure if it's pottery or bone, you lick it.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:14] Oh.
Annalee: [00:36:14] I know. Yum. If your tongue sticks to it, it's because it's bone because bones are porous. And so your tongue will lightly stick to it. If it's just pottery, it you'll just kind of lick it. And it'll taste like pottery, I guess. So I licked a deer bone that had been probably gnawed on about 1000 years ago, during a barbecue party at this particular location in Cahokia. And that was fun. I mean, it just tasted like salt. You know, I didn't get any barbecue sauce. Sadly, because apparently the Cahokians were like really good at barbecue. There's like a lot of remains from barbecue feasts at Cahokia. That was the thing that surprised me. And it was very delightful.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:54] So finally, Annalee, if these cities aren't lost, how should we think about them?
Annalee: [00:37:01] So this is a huge question for me throughout the book, because I called it Lost Cities in order to kind of puncture the myth of these cities being lost. And what I found, in my research, in going to these places, and talking to people there, both archaeologists and just regular folks who lived in the area, was that even when a city is abandoned, its culture lives on. It lives on in memory, it lives on in pop culture. And in some cases, it lives on very much as part of the living tradition of the place where it was.
[00:37:40] And the reason why I bring this up is because there's a strong strand of, I would call it sort of pop anthropology, which really adheres to this idea that civilizations rise and fall. And that you that a civilization just ends, and then that's it, it's done. And cities are often viewed as kind of encapsulations of a civilization. And so if a city is abandoned, like Angkor was. These kinds of anthropologists want to claim okay, well, that culture is now dead, or even more so with Cahokia, where there's been this effort to kind of stamp out the history of great indigenous civilizations. But what I found is that they don't die. I mean, people when they leave a city behind, they carry the memories with them. And they tell their kids about the city, or they tell their friends and family about the culture of that place. And oftentimes new cities arise that are kind of built in imitation of those older cities. And so, I guess, in a sense, my book is all about how cities are never lost, and that civilizations don't fall. They transform. That’s really what most archaeologists prefer to say is. This isn't a civilization in decline, or a civilization falling, but it's a civilization in transition. And when a city is being abandoned, that's a sure sign of a civilization that's in transition. And it might be transitioning to something way more badass and awesome.
[00:39:13] Again, as you were saying, there's this myth of like, oh, you have people who are kind of fallen away from a civilization and they no longer have technology, and they don't have toothpaste anymore, and everything's terrible. That's not very realistic, either, at all. And so I think, in the end, the biggest lesson of this book is really, that no civilization ever really falls, they just transform into other things.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:39] Cool. So finally, Annalee, where can people get this amazing book?
Annalee: [00:39:43] You can find this book anywhere we're fine books are sold. The publisher is Norton and they are available at your cool local indie bookstore, and hopefully, you'll order it from an indie bookstore and do curbside pickup up or order it online during this pandemic-y time. Starting on February 2nd, it can be in your hot little hands or your cold hands, whatever, whatever [crosstalk].
Charlie Jane: [00:40:09] So thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct and you can find us wherever podcasts are found, under rocks, on top of trees, in the mountains, in lost cities, in found cities, everywhere. And you know, if you like to listen to the podcast, please leave a review at Apple or wherever else you want. And we really appreciate your support. We have a Patreon at patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect. And we're on Twitter at @OOACpod. And thank you so much to our heroic and brilliant producer, Veronica Simonetti. And thanks to Chris Palmer for the music and thanks again to you for listening.
[00:40:48] Bye!
Annalee: [00:40:48] Bye!
[00:40:49] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.