Look for the relationship between monumental and everyday spaces.
An illustrated collection
Cities that time left behind
Streets, societies and the spaces between monuments.
Photo credit
Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0. Resized for display.
A different way into the world
Follow the idea.
Find your places.
A ruined city is easy to reduce to its largest surviving monument. The spaces between the buildings can be equally revealing: routes, water systems, houses, terraces and traces of everyday work. They turn an impressive ruin into evidence of a society.
Use plans and interpretation to distinguish what survives, what archaeologists have established and what remains uncertain. A reconstruction can be helpful without being a photograph of the past. Nor does an abandoned urban centre mean that the descendants of its inhabitants or their cultural traditions disappeared. Listen to the people who care for and interpret these places today.
Find out how water, food and movement were organised.
Distinguish original fabric, later repairs and reconstruction.
150 · Zimbabwe
Great Zimbabwe
A monumental stone city that reshapes assumptions about southern Africa.
285 · Pakistan
Mohenjo-daro
An ancient city whose streets and water systems remain startlingly intelligible.