“The Museum of Lost Things
By Sam Kean
National Geographic, 400 pages, $35
History is a fragile thing, a vision of the past made mostly of fragments -- clay tablets and potsherds, papyrus scraps and bits of bone. So much has been lost, it's a wonder we know anything at all. But the promise of greater understanding keeps us searching. "For every object we find, millions of others remain missing," Sam Kean writes. "And some new discovery tomorrow could radically change our understanding of the past."
In "The Museum of Lost Things," Mr. Kean looks back at a million years of historical mysteries. He explores fallen civilizations, cryptic languages and extinct species -- everything from the disappearance of the bones of our ancient hominin ancestor, Peking Man, to the theft of Russia's Amber Room during World War II. Through these colorful stories, he explores the impact that loss has had on the human experience and considers "how we can avoid a similar fate for our own cultural heritage." What emerges is a book as entertaining as it is informative, a smartly crafted account that covers a broad swath of history's most confounding puzzles and startling rediscoveries.
While it's easy to understand how a small relic -- such as the Antikythera Mechanism, a mechanical calendar from the second century B.C. that only turned up during the exploration of an ancient Greek shipwreck in 1901 -- might go missing, it's a little harder to conceptualize an entire city or civilization disappearing.
The Neolithic settlement of Catalhoyuk, in present-day Turkey, was one of the world's first proto-cities and thrived for more than a millennium, from roughly 7500 to 6000 B.C. As many as 8,000 people lived in its unique cluster of adobe-brick homes, which were packed together, Mr. Kean writes, "as tightly as molars, with no space between them." There were no streets or open spaces in which to gather. Residents are believed to have exited and entered their homes via openings in their ceilings, and to have traversed the city by scrambling across their neighbors' roofs.
But when James Mellaart, a British archaeologist, stumbled on Catalhoyuk in 1952, it was only a "whopping great mound," 60-feet high and covered in grass. Having risen and fallen before the advent of written history, the city was completely unknown before Mellaart discovered the mound during an archaeological survey. What he found during his excavations -- 8,000-year-old murals, statuettes of fertility goddesses and as many as 480 skeletons -- revolutionized our understanding of early human settlements, demonstrating that Anatolia was at the center of the Neolithic Revolution. Catalhoyuk, Mr. Kean says, "rendered every history textbook in the world instantly obsolete."
While Mellaart's work revealed much about this lost city -- including the fact that its residents buried their dead under their floors -- much remains unknown. For example, we don't know what the city was really called ("Catalhoyuk," pronounced "cha-tal-HOO-yuhk," is modern Turkish and describes the geography of the site: "forked mound"), or whether it was called anything at all. Its people lived and died and laid the groundwork for humanity's settled future. But for thousands of years, all there was to show they had ever existed was a slight protuberance on the landscape.
The Indus Valley Civilization flourished in parts of present-day India, Pakistan and Afghanistan around 2600 B.C. "It was the largest urban civilization of its day," Mr. Kean writes, "with a million people living in 1,500 settlements spread over a region double the size of Montana." But for nearly 4,000 years, this Bronze Age polity was completely forgotten. According to Mr. Kean, the Indus Valley people specialized in big infrastructure projects, such as dams, reservoirs and early sewers that carried waste safely out of their settlements. When it came to art, they favored intricate miniatures and fine jewelry over monumental sculpture (which almost certainly contributed to their later obscurity).
By 1900 B.C., natural disasters made the large Indus Valley settlements less hospitable, and the culture slowly melted away. It wasn't until 1922, when Rakhaldas Banerji, an Indian archaeologist, pieced the story together after excavating Mohenjo-daro, a settlement in present-day Pakistan, that the IVC could take its rightful place among the great cultures of the ancient world. "In a stroke," Mr. Kean writes, Banerji helped extend the history of India "by 2,000-plus years."
Catalhoyuk and the IVC were found the old-fashioned way, with picks and shovels, but Mr. Kean is bullish about the role that future technology can play in uncovering the past. Lidar, for instance, is a scanning technique that employs lasers to detect hidden topological features. In 2015 researchers used it to find a network of previously unknown "garden cities," small settlements that were well-integrated into the natural landscape, hidden beneath the Amazon canopy. The oldest of these supposedly date back to 500 B.C. and feature plazas, artificial ponds and miles of roads. "Revelations like this could invigorate native Amerindians in the same way that the Indus Valley Civilization stirred people in India," Mr. Kean writes.
Mr. Kean eschews a chronological approach and organizes his book with chapters dedicated to particular themes, such as "Lost Bones," "Lost Loot" and "Lost Graves." In less-skilled hands, this discursive approach might have been maddening. But he has a knack for knowing precisely where and when to shift from one topic to the next to maintain the momentum of the narrative. Yet Mr. Kean seems at times a little too eager to prove that "The Museum of Lost Things" isn't a traditional history book, salting his otherwise sturdy prose with the occasional vulgarity or glib joke. Nevertheless, the author's enthusiasm for his subjects is infectious. "The Museum of Lost Things" does what any good museum should -- inspire, delight and stoke our curiosity about this strange and wondrous world.
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Mr. Brady reviews books for the Journal and other publications.” [1]
1. A Revolution In Discovery. Brady, Michael Patrick. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 15 Oct 2026: A17.
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