I think all of our imaginations can take us places we don't want to go.

When finished, you handed it to the guy sitting next to you or simply left it for the next person to use.

You'd take a dump then grab the sponge, dip it in water and wipe your ass.

It came in the form of a sponge on a stick, or a xylospongia. As the author of Four Lost Cities relates, not only did the Pompeiians not have individual stalls (their public toilets were in rows with about a foot of space in between each seat), they also shared their toilet paper! I think it's safe to say that while we might have substituted wash cloths, leaves, or pages from Fifty Shades of Grey, none of us considered sharing it.īut that's what they did in Pompeii. We had a number of things we could use instead - washcloths, soap, and clean water being the preferred method but also some people might have gathered fallen leaves or ripped out pages of old, moldy books they had planned to donate to the local library and thankfully now found a better use for. In the early days of the Pandemic, there were a number of Americans who apparently believed toilet paper was a powerful antiviral and the more you had, the better you would be protected from Covid-19.ĭespite the fact that neither the CDC nor the WHO vouched for its efficacy, these people bought so much toilet paper that the rest of us were unable to buy any for months. View of the central structure of Angkor Wat (built in the 12th century CE), photo by Jakub Hałun 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.įour 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. 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. 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. 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. A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history-and figure out why people abandoned them.

Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz