ELI5- how do we identify ancient ruins like did anyone stumble upon the colosseum in the woods or people were used to see some old walls then someone realized this could be the colosseum from olden books!
In: Engineering
Many ruins are still in cities that have been lived in continuously, or still have some locals with a memory of what they were.
Past a certain point in history there are often relatively accurate surveyed maps you can use to identify sites, this helps a lot for colonial era sites in the Americas.
In other situations you actually find writing on the ruins that tells you what they are directly. The ancient Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II wrote his name and lineage over and over again on the walls and carvings of his palace to the point it became known as his Standard Inscription. Egyptians famously wrote all over everything too.
In still other cases you can find these things but not clearly connect the specific sites, references in books and ancient texts, inscriptions, etc. This famously happened with Troy where the wrong level of the city was identified as the famous one, references to it in contemporary sources like the Hittite archives aren’t really confirmed, and so on.
It’s a whole spectrum of answers based on what you find in the ruins and how they existed after their heyday.
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