Four Lost Cities cover art

Four Lost Cities

A Secret History of the Urban Age

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Four Lost Cities

By: Annalee Newitz
Narrated by: Chloe Cannon
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners 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.

©2021 Annalee Newitz (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books Ancient Archaeology Civilization Earth Sciences Science Sociology Urban World Latin American Urban Nonfiction

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Maya History for Kids cover art
Uruk cover art
Eridu cover art
The Dawn of Language cover art
Ogres cover art
The Anarchy cover art
World Prehistory cover art
A Storm of Witchcraft cover art
The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States cover art
Israel cover art
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World cover art
A Brief History of Canada cover art
Babylon cover art
Atlas of a Lost World cover art
Jungle of Stone cover art
The Fate of Rome cover art
All stars
Most relevant
Not my usual sort of choice for non fiction but this was really enjoyable. The narrator has a slight nasal twang which got a bit wearing ( sorry ) but the subject was fascinating.

Very interesting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narrator sounds like a soft porn actress and at times the prose doesn’t do much better - a respected female archaeologist “removes a stray strand of hair from her face”. It gets 2 stars rather than for the selection of cities but that’s about anything good I can say about this book.

Absolutely awful!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is the whistle stop tour of the latest research in to how people lived in the fours cities and an argument the collapse theory is outdated.

Enjoyed it, narration was well done.

Whistle stop tour.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.