eli5: Why were some ancient cities like Palmyra and Machu Picchu left to ruin and fall apart over hundreds of years instead of being repopulated?
In: 1677
A city gets abandoned when the business that fed it before stops feeding it. No city grows its own food, so people need to earn money in some way to buy food from the country. If a city is supplied mainly by trading, a change of trade routes or a shift in prices can disrupt the trade and starve the city. If a city is supplied by crafts, obsolescence of said crafts will drive the city into decline. If a city is fed by mining, the exhaustion of mineral deposits or drastic lowering of demand for the local resource will make the city decline. In all cases, the jobs that formed the city’s society stop giving the citizens money, unemployment rises and people migrate from the city to some other place where they could live and work.
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