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‘The unknown town now had a name… All that day “Naukratis” rang in my mind, and I sprang over the mounds with that splendid exultation of a new discovery, long wished for and well found.’ The prospect of discovering ancient cities, lost for centuries in the depths of jungles or deserts, was part of the original lure (and original sin) of archaeology. One fine example came in 1885, when William Matthew Flinders Petrie revealed the ancient Greek enclave Naukratis in Egypt’s western delta, not far from Alexandria. Petrie recounts his discovery in Ten Years’ Digging in Egypt, a book that charts a mind-boggling decade of discoveries – a streak of one pyramid or ancient city per year on average. The copy in our library is ragged and tattered, and the text on the spine has worn down to Ten Years igging in Egypt – a reading that some might find only too reflective of the colonial setting in which the book originated.
To locals, of course, places such as Naukratis were rarely unknown as such – after all, Petrie was drawn to the site because dealers in Cairo were offering him Greek artefacts said to have been dug up by peasants at the unnamed site. But it was up to the archaeologists to reveal whether the scattered remains measured up, how they were originally organised in the landscape, and what they contributed to the bigger picture of the history of humanity.
Even earlier, the German scholar Ulrich Jasper Seetzen successfully put the Decapolis city Gerasa back on the map, as it were, in 1806. His contribution included proving, using inscriptions found at the site, that this was the ancient city associated with a famous episode recounted in the Bible. The gospels provide three accounts of Jesus performing a miracle in the Gerasa region, when he exorcised the demons possessing a man. These demons were driven out of the man and sent into thousands of pigs, who are said to have drowned themselves thereafter in the Sea of Galilee. In turn, Gerasa, whose true location was lost for over a millennium, was assumed to be situated close to the Sea of Galilee, with the Bible providing the direct source for this setting. Seetzen’s breakthrough revealed that the city was more distant than the circumstances of the miracle might suggest, as it lay some 60km to the south of the Sea. By solving the riddle and relocating Gerasa correctly on the map, Seetzen not only improved our knowledge of ancient geography, but also made it possible to assess critically this narrative from the Bible.
Lost and found
It is hard not to be amazed that discoveries on the scale of entire ancient cities were being made just a century ago, even if they lay in regions that at the time had barely been troubled by the cartographers’ arts. It is even more surprising, though, that such discoveries are still happening in the present day.
In October 2024, a team headed by Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in the US, announced in the journal Antiquity the discovery of an unknown Maya city in the densely forested Campeche region of Mexico. Auld-Thomas chanced upon a dataset published by a Mexican organisation dedicated to environmental monitoring. It featured an airborne LiDAR survey of an area of c.122km2, which had been conducted to keep track of deforestation. When Auld-Thomas reprocessed and analysed the data with methods fine-tuned for archaeology, he discovered the clear outlines of a major ancient site that had never previously been identified. All the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital can be traced on his survey map: enclosed plazas, a causeway, temple pyramids, a ballcourt, and a reservoir formed by the damming of a seasonal watercourse. The team estimates that the city may have been home to 30,000-50,000 people at its peak between AD 750 and 850.
In Nature that same month, Farhod Maksudov, director of Uzbekistan’s National Center of Archaeology, and Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St Louis, reported the ruins of two medieval cities hidden in plain sight in the mountains of eastern Uzbekistan. Maksudov, Frachetti, and their colleagues describe how a LiDAR survey revealed dense scatters of buildings spread over large areas of the landscape. Although the walls of these structures were all-but concealed by centuries of accumulated soil, their faint outlines could still be traced as undulations in the grassy hillsides. The largest of the two sites, Tugunbulak, had been a sizable city that spanned at least 120ha, and flourished in the early Middle Ages (6th–11th century AD).
In this case, the archaeologists were tipped off by locals, who knew the whereabouts of walls and ceramic scatters. Even so, the team and their hosts were equally surprised by the bigger picture that emerged from the surveys. Set in barren terrain at a height of more than 2,000m above sea level, it is still a mystery what prompted settlements on this scale to be founded here. After all, today it is generally considered a sparsely populated region, which is home to nomadic pastoralists. Maksudov and Frachetti suspect that the ancient urbanites may have owed their existence to the Silk Road, and in particular the operation of an iron-production industry.
These recent discoveries highlight how archaeology can still deliver the ‘exultation of a new discovery’. Typically, making breakthroughs of this sort nowadays requires piecing together a bigger picture that no one had previously expected or even suspected, and therefore had not been looking for. This is one reason, if a reason is needed, why a concern for the big picture is always essential in archaeology, not just spatially but also conceptually.
Beyond the city limits
The significance of the big picture is an insight genially endorsed in a seminal survey recently published by Iron Age ace Manuel Fernández-Götz and Aztec investigator Michael E Smith. In 2024’s issue of the venerable Annual Review of Anthropology, the two examine how approaches to the archaeology of early cities have changed over the last two decades. As they note, one of the defining recent developments is that ancient urbanism has been recognised to be a more diverse phenomenon than most researchers had previously appreciated. Forms of urbanism have, for example, been identified in regions that were previously largely ignored or misjudged in research, just like those Uzbek highlands.
Fernández-Götz and Smith urge their colleagues to set aside narrow definitions of urbanism, which have led many to look for the equivalent of, say, Greek and Roman cities across the world, and turn their attention instead to what cities did in past societies: what people gained by gathering populations, institutions, and activities together in particular places. To achieve this, they argue, it is necessary to understand sites within wider regions, and know the history of their origin, development, and sometimes decline in tight chronological order.
New discoveries, including these recent surprises from Mexico and Uzbekistan, show us that we cannot take much for granted from such histories, and they remind us how much still remains to be learned from the archaeological record. As Fernández-Götz and Smith emphasise, this record remains a unique resource not just for archaeologists, but also for social scientists seeking to understand the broader patterns of human societies. After all, the archaeology offers samples of cultural and social diversity that are wider than those available in the modern world. It also provides a record of how countless societies changed over extended periods of time. There is, then, still plenty of reason to exult in each and every new discovery of lost towns and cities.
Rubina Raja is professor of classical archaeology and art and director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University, Denmark. Together with Søren, she is founding editor of the Journal of Urban Archaeology.
Søren M Sindbæk is professor of medieval archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark, and co-director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions.
