5 Books That Unravel the Secrets of Lost Civilizations

Science journalist and author Annalee Newitz explores, in their words, “four of the most spectacular examples of urban abandonment in human history”: Neolithic Çatalhöyük in Turkey, Roman Pompeii, the medieval Khmer capital of Angkor in Cambodia and the pre-Columbian metropolis of Cahokia near what is now East St. Louis, Illinois. Newitz challenges simplistic notions of sudden collapse, showing instead how each endured extended political instability alongside environmental stress. But the book’s real pleasure lies in its eye for detail. It brings to life, for instance, the elaborate feasts and games of “chunkey,” played with pucks and spears, that once drew thousands to Cahokia’s vast Grand Plaza, dominated by an earthen pyramid that occupied an area roughly the size of Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza.

BUY HERE: Four Lost Cities

Rapa Nui, known to the outside world as Easter Island, has long been known for its enigmatic giant stone statues, known as moai. British archaeologist Mike Pitts reconstructs the society that created them, revealing a Polynesian culture of remarkable ingenuity that flourished on one of the world’s most isolated landscapes. Pitts calls the islanders “the world’s greatest example of a people given lemons, and making lemonade,” pointing to their sophisticated farming and land-management techniques on fragile soils with no permanent freshwater streams. Drawing on both new research and long-marginalized early 20th-century fieldwork, he also challenges the long-held narrative of self-inflicted ecological collapse. Instead, he reveals how slavery, disease and colonial exploitation after European contact devastated the population—reducing it from roughly 5,000 to just 110 in only 15 years.

BUY HERE: Island at the End of the World

What the late Yale anthropologist Michael D. Coe originally conceived as a pocket guide for visitors to the magnificent ruins of the Maya people has transformed into a definitive introduction to the Mesoamerican civilization. First published in 1966 and now in its 10th edition in collaboration with fellow Maya authority Stephen Houston, the book reflects decades of archaeological and linguistic breakthroughs. The authors trace the long arc of Maya history, from the earliest settlements beginning at least 13,000 years ago to the rise of powerful southern lowland cities and their abandonment in the late eighth and ninth centuries—a collapse Coe and Houston call “one of the most profound social and demographic catastrophes in human history.”

BUY HERE: The Maya

Graphic novelist and illustrator Nikhil Gulati teams up with Indus archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer to explore one of the world’s earliest civilizations. The Indus dates back to around 3200 B.C. and flourished for centuries in what is now Pakistan and India before its urban world mysteriously dispersed, remaining practically invisible until archaeological discoveries in the 1920s. Designed for general readers and younger audiences alike, this highly accessible graphic history unfolds as a guided walk, revealing sophisticated homes with baths and toilets that drained into underground channels. Invented characters—such as a family of coppersmiths moving from their village to the great city of Mohenjo-Daro to ply their trade—provide a vivid human dimension.

BUY HERE: The People of the Indus

Lost worlds aren’t only confined to the distant past. Exploring European realms such as Aragon, Burgundia and Sabaudia—political entities that wielded power at different moments from the Middle Ages through to the 20th century—historian Norman Davies “shows that ‘collapse’ is a normal part of human history,” observes Guy Middleton, author of Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths, who recommends Vanished Kingdoms. “States come and go, and these changes are not always apocalyptic or catastrophic—except perhaps for elites that lose their places, or lives,” he says. Many of the sovereign powers Davies examines might be unfamiliar to readers, a pattern Middleton sums up succinctly: “We often only remember the winners.”

BUY HERE: Vanished Kingdoms