Eli5: Why are cities, towns, … built on top of other towns during history?

648 views

My town is built on a settlement which, estimated is 2000 years old. How does this work? As far as I know people always lived here (old Roman and medieval roads were found) but the town now lies several meters higher than the original one. I would suspect that old buildings are taken down and a new one is raised.

Does sediment, dust, … stacks meters high over a period of 2000 years and wouldn’t people dig out old buildings? Or did they purposely mound the entire town?

In: Engineering

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The reason they stack higher and higher is because of demolition. Construction equipment and dump trucks didn’t exist back then, so if a building collapsed or was demolished, and you wanted to rebuild there, it was easier to just knock down the building where it stood, smooth out the debris, and then build on top of it.

You are viewing 1 out of 4 answers, click here to view all answers.