ABSTRACT
The ruins of a once important city - whether it is the abandoned site of a city of antiquity or a mining town - are highly evocative to modern people. We are inclined to engage in playful speculations about future archaeologists uncovering the physical remains of New York or some other modern city. This fascinates us because it seems so utterly unlikely. How can a place so busy and populous, a place to which society has committed so much of its capital and talent, and hence its future, ever be stripped of its functions and abandoned? Such an event is correctly understood to betoken an enormous discontinuity in the history of a civilization. Of course cities can experience a loss of relative position that changes their character utterly without suffering actual abandonment. Cities might be viewed as vessels which in the course of time come to be filled with completely different substances. This too represents a kind of discontinuity, but one less obvious and more subject to interpretation than actual abandonment.
