Four ​Lost Cities 1 csillagozás

After 14 years running the Via Consolare Project, Anderson is grappling with two mysteries. What was this villa like during the city’s heyday? And how did previous digs alter its appearance for the sake of 20th-century tourists? Pompeii is a meta-archaeological site, revealing ancient history right alongside the history of archaeology as a field.

99. oldal, 4. Riot on the Via dell’Abbondanza (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021)

During the 16th century, when the city was supposedly “lost,” the Cambodian king Ang Chan commissioned the completion of some reliefs at Angkor Wat. A few decades later, the city was described by a Portuguese friar named Antonio Da Magdalena, who was likely its first European visitor, roughly 300 years before Mouhot. In the 17th century, a Japanese pilgrim drew a map of Angkor Wat, and in the 18th century a Cambodian dignitary built a stupa for his family on the grounds of Angkor Wat. All these pieces of evidence suggest that people all over the world knew about Angkor, and it was a thriving pilgrimage destination. When the French colonizers arrived in the 19th century, they had to clear out a community of monks living on site. Mouhot’s account was an act of revisionist history as audacious and long-lasting as Suryavarman’s sweeping erasure of old Angkor beneath the West Baray.

184. oldal, 9. The Remains of Imperialism (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021)

The longer people lived on one plot of land, the more that land became part of who they were. You might say that this was the earliest stirring of feelings that led to phrases like, “I’m a New Yorker,” or “I’m from the prairies.” These statements are meaningless unless you already associate selfhood with a fixed location. Hodder and other archaeologists describe this way of thinking as “material entanglement,” when our identities become bound up in the physical objects around us.

32. oldal, 1. The Shock of Settled Life (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021)

That’s the difficult part about studying cities: they are not static entities that remain the same over time before suddenly disappearing into nothingness. At any given moment, they are a composite of many social groups, who likely view city life in different ways. And those social groups also change over time, altering the physical and symbolic fabric of the city to reflect their worldviews. Until they stop wanting to live together.

61. oldal, 3. History within History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021)