This story is excerpted and adapted from Annalee Newitz’s Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, published in February 2021 by W. W. Norton. When I arrived in Phnom Penh during Cambodia’s dry season in January, I stumbled through the streets in a jet-lagged daze, barely seeing the dense city around me. My mind was on thousand-year-old Khmer temples, their golden facades crumbling into worn stone blocks and imprisoned by thickly braided tree roots. These structures, from the Khmer Empire’s capital at Angkor, have been synonymous with…
