Editing Lost city (section)

== How cities are lost ==
Cities may become lost for a variety of reasons including natural disasters, economic or social upheaval, or war.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/24/world/cities-destroyed-by-natural-disasters/index.html|title=Cities nearly obliterated by natural disasters|first=Holly|last=Yan|date=24 August 2016|website=CNN|access-date=6 April 2023}}</ref>

The [[Inca]]n capital city of [[Vilcabamba, Peru|Vilcabamba]] was destroyed and depopulated during the [[Spain|Spanish]] [[conquest of Peru]] in [[1572]]. The Spanish did not rebuild the city, and the location went unrecorded and was forgotten until it was rediscovered through a detailed examination of period letters and documents.<ref>{{Cite book|url={{GBurl|id=JKnZCwAAQBAJ|q=1572|pg=PA1}}|title=Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time|last=Adams|first=Mark|date=2012|publisher=Plume|isbn=978-0-452-29798-2|pages=306|via=Google Books}}</ref>

[[Troy]] was a city located in northwest [[Anatolia]] in what is now Turkey. It is best known for being the focus of the [[Trojan War]] described in the Greek Epic Cycle and especially in the ''[[Iliad]]'', one of the two epic poems attributed to [[Homer]]. Repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, the city slowly declined and was abandoned in the [[Byzantine]] era. Buried by time, the city was consigned to the realm of legend until the location was first excavated in the 1860s.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |title=Troy |encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Anthropology |year=2006 |publisher=SAGE Publications, Inc. |location=Thousand Oaks, CA}}</ref>

Other settlements are lost with few or no clues to their abandonment. For example, [[Malden Island]], in the [[Central Pacific Area|central Pacific]], was deserted when first visited by [[Europeans]] in 1825, but the remains of temples and other structures on the island indicate that a population of [[Polynesia]]ns had lived there for perhaps several generations in the past. Typically this lack of information is due to a lack of surviving written or [[oral tradition|oral histories]] and a lack of archaeological data as in the case of the remote and fairly unknown Malden Island.