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Most CWA readers will have visited some ruined cities for one reason or another; the majority of us will have let ourselves be fascinated by imagining how life in the past might have been, and how much or how little it would have resembled the modern equivalent, with its venues for leisure and work; for sleep and entertainment; for labour and exploitation; for aesthetically pleasing and artistic expressions. In Europe, probably the most famous ruined ancient city is Pompeii, closely followed by Herculaneum, both situated in the region of the Bay of Naples. Today, what makes these partly excavated urban landscapes different from a lot of other ruined cities is that they were buried instantaneously during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Although nowadays we know that the ruins were revisited by people, starting as early as the Roman period, they remained entirely buried until the early modern era, and did not become reoccupied. However, in many other parts of the ancient world cities never died – or only had hiatuses in their occupation, before becoming reoccupied once more.
Rome is, of course, a prominent example of a city full of ancient ruins – if not on every corner, then almost. Recent fieldwork in the city centre has shown that there is much more to discover about life in antiquity through excavations associated with building projects or research. Parts of the underground space in a store called La Rinascente on Via del Tritone – fully equipped with a bar for sipping coffee or other beverages – have installed a digital lightshow that takes visitors through the various phases of the ancient neighbourhood that came to light when the modern building was constructed. This highly instructive installation allows us to reimagine how densely packed life in the ancient city was. But what it cannot do is inform us didactically about the transitions and the messiness between the neatly highlighted periods the lightshow displays.
While the ancient city of Rome reached its population peak in the Early Imperial Period, with estimates going as high as one million inhabitants, it contracted considerably during the subsequent centuries. Thus, by the Early Middle Ages, large parts of the urban landscape had become ruined, sometimes buried under debris, while at other times remaining visible. However, it continued to be a dynamic urban landscape, and alongside cases of simple abandonment there were many other instances in which elements of the built environment were repurposed and transformed. Similar oscillations can be observed within the lifespan of numerous other cities that have remained inhabited over long periods of time, such as Constantinople/Istanbul. Thus, by the time of the Ottoman conquest in 1453, the city was a shadow of what it had once been during the reign of Emperor Justinian I in the 6th century AD, before starting to grow again until reaching its present status of a megalopolis of more than 15 million inhabitants.
Urban decline
When cities or parts of them ‘died’ or ‘fizzled out’, life in those places did not necessarily also simply end. Often, either some people remained living there or the ruins were revisited by those seeking to exploit what had been left behind. The oasis city of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert, which was sacked twice by the Roman army in AD 272/273, constitutes one of these cases. While it was traditionally thought that the entire population was largely killed or driven away from their city after the uprising that took place during the reign of Zenobia, the Queen of Palmyra, today we know that the city did not entirely die out. Indeed, parts of the urban landscape either remained occupied or were reoccupied after they were sacked, as investigations by Emanuele Intagliata and others have recently shown.
In Gerasa (modern-day Jerash), one of the famous Decapolis cities in northern Jordan, it is also clear that activity did not completely stop after the devastating earthquake of AD 749. Life picked up on a much smaller scale at some point not too long after the earthquake, but large parts of the urban landscape were not touched again until several hundred years later, leaving us with a riddle to be solved: how were such ruined landscapes dealt with by the people who continued to live there, both at Gerasa and other places that faced similar calamities? The data from Gerasa and the Decapolis more broadly have recently been thematised in the edited volume Jerash, the Decapolis, and the Earthquake of AD 749. The contributions in the book show that the evidence is often tricky, not least because the archaeological work needed to unpick and disentangle such complex scenarios was often not undertaken during early fieldwork. It is only in more recent decades that it has become standard practice to think more broadly about situations of partial reoccupation as well as the exploitation of ruined places.
As an example of this growing scholarly interest, the project ‘Living Among Ruins: the Experience of Urban Abandonment in Babylonia’ has recently explored the gradual desertion of parts of Babylon between the flourishing of the city in the 6th century BC and the Parthian period, focusing particularly on how the local inhabitants would have experienced the process. At a broader level, Martin Zimmermann’s edited volume on Lost Cities has brought together numerous contributions addressing the ways in which urban ruins have been perceived through time.
Living among ruins is not something limited to remains from the distant past. It is a phenomenon with many nuances and multiple temporalities. Sometimes cities shrink gradually over time, with parts of their urban fabric becoming ruins over decades or even centuries (as in the example of Late Antique and Early Medieval Rome). But at other times the process can happen rather quickly, either due to a sudden natural disaster (as in the case of the earthquake in Gerasa) or human actions (such as the Roman sacking of Palmyra). Wars, in particular, often lead to episodes of large scale destruction, with the surviving residents having to live among ruins, sometimes for considerable periods of time before reconstruction occurs. Examples from our contemporary world are unfortunately countless, and many readers will probably have in mind images of places such as Aleppo, Mosul, Gaza, Mariupol, or Kharkiv. In these and other similar cases, living among ruins can at times be better described as ‘living amid rubble’.
Decay and Detroit
In other instances, it is not war but rather economic decline that propels many urban residents into living among ruins. A classic case is the city of Detroit, which is considered the birthplace of the American car industry. There, the urban population has at least halved since the 1960s, in what constitutes a dramatic transition to a post-industrial landscape. What remains is a city that combines some shiny reminders of better times and scattered new constructions with decayed but still inhabited residential areas, intermixed with numerous ruined buildings and extensive wastelands. However, the notion of the ‘city of ruins’ has in recent times attracted some artists, too, with efforts to regenerate the urban fabric through culture and the establishment of green spaces.
There are many different ways, then, of living among ruins. Sometimes they are remains of the distant past that enrich the urban landscape, providing a sense of pride and promoting economic growth through tourism and other related activities. In other cases, ruins are reminders of better times, of periods of expansion and prosperity that were followed by decay. Finally, ruins can also be the traumatic reminders of episodes of widespread destruction, forcing the residents to adapt to a completely new material world characterised by daily challenges. Be that as it may, to a greater or lesser extent ruins are an integral part of most city landscapes, showcasing the multifarious temporalities and fates of urban life.
Manuel Fernández-Götz is Professor of Later European Prehistory at the University of Oxford. His main areas of research are the archaeology of identities, early urbanism, and conflict archaeology. Together with Rubina, since 2026 he is the main editor of the Journal of Urban Archaeology.
Rubina Raja is Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Aarhus University. She also heads the ‘Locally Crafted Empires' Semper Ardens Advanced Grant project and the ‘Lost Cities' Gerda Henkel Foundation project on urban excavation legacy data. She is the founder and main editor of the Journal of Urban Archaeology.
