Eli5 – Why are we finding entire homes and streets in archaeological digs? doesn’t anyone notice a street or building starting to get covered in dirt and dust? at some point someone must notice the old plato theatre is knee high into the earth?

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Eli5 – Why are we finding entire homes and streets in archaeological digs? doesn’t anyone notice a street or building starting to get covered in dirt and dust? at some point someone must notice the old plato theatre is knee high into the earth?

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54 Answers

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You generally don’t find a fully buried house or structure. You’ll typically find something like the floor and maybe 6-12 inches of a wall.

Drive down country roads and look at all the barns/abandoned houses/sheds that are collapsing and imagine that only the bottom 1-5% needs to be buried in dust and dirt to be preserved.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You generally don’t find a fully buried house or structure. You’ll typically find something like the floor and maybe 6-12 inches of a wall.

Drive down country roads and look at all the barns/abandoned houses/sheds that are collapsing and imagine that only the bottom 1-5% needs to be buried in dust and dirt to be preserved.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Other stuff to worry about. If a regular civilian adult in 2003 (20 years ago) saw something like that and didn’t have a dedicated camera, all they could do is call and tell a friend or family member. Let alone thousands of years ago

Anonymous 0 Comments

Other stuff to worry about. If a regular civilian adult in 2003 (20 years ago) saw something like that and didn’t have a dedicated camera, all they could do is call and tell a friend or family member. Let alone thousands of years ago

Anonymous 0 Comments

Cities settle and build up all at once. If you’re in a new country like the states it’s less obvious, but I’m in a European city about a thousand years old, and you commonly see old doorways in limestone walls where the road has risen so much over the centuries that less then half remains above ground level, sometimes even more. It happens slower than we perceive, but cities are always settling and building over.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Cities settle and build up all at once. If you’re in a new country like the states it’s less obvious, but I’m in a European city about a thousand years old, and you commonly see old doorways in limestone walls where the road has risen so much over the centuries that less then half remains above ground level, sometimes even more. It happens slower than we perceive, but cities are always settling and building over.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Thinking about some of the massive floods in Australia over the last few years and how hard that is to clean up I could well imagine if similar types of events happened in ancient times people might either simply build on top or go somewhere else and at some later point someone else built on top

Anonymous 0 Comments

Thinking about some of the massive floods in Australia over the last few years and how hard that is to clean up I could well imagine if similar types of events happened in ancient times people might either simply build on top or go somewhere else and at some later point someone else built on top

Anonymous 0 Comments

The white house used to be 3 stories tall. Now it is 2, as viewed from the outside, with a more substantial basement. I have seen pictures from mostly modern times of the same effect, the name of which I can’t remember. Google white house picture 1865, then compare it to today.

… There is a thing called the mud flood theory, which I don’t buy and am fairly certain is a misinterpretation of the evidence. I don’t want to bring it up, but it is the easiest path I can think of to show pertinent photos. The articles that refute this theory have the answers you are looking for, but the essential is this.

Human/animal matter left on the streets (remember before indoor plumbing, poo removal was a problem that often was addressed in large cities by ignoring the problem and smell), plus loess, fine dirt particles blown in the wind build up over time to effectively raise ground level. The process is slow to be sure. Incidentally, I have noticed that if I mulch my lawn clippings on my lawn, it appears that it raises the level of my lawn, as opposed to throwing them in the trash.

People noticed it over time. It’s not like one day the ground was 10 feet higher.

Seattle is a great example of what can happen. After a large fire and then a flood the city buried whole streets in retaining walls, then built on top of it. They find ships underground when making excavations in some coastal cities.

Other cases are of collapsing civilizations. Most of the Aztec empire is under jungle, which grow over top of the cities. There are pyramids in China that are old enough that the loess covered them up and they appear as very regularly shaped hills.

This comment is all over the place. Not my best bit of writing.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The white house used to be 3 stories tall. Now it is 2, as viewed from the outside, with a more substantial basement. I have seen pictures from mostly modern times of the same effect, the name of which I can’t remember. Google white house picture 1865, then compare it to today.

… There is a thing called the mud flood theory, which I don’t buy and am fairly certain is a misinterpretation of the evidence. I don’t want to bring it up, but it is the easiest path I can think of to show pertinent photos. The articles that refute this theory have the answers you are looking for, but the essential is this.

Human/animal matter left on the streets (remember before indoor plumbing, poo removal was a problem that often was addressed in large cities by ignoring the problem and smell), plus loess, fine dirt particles blown in the wind build up over time to effectively raise ground level. The process is slow to be sure. Incidentally, I have noticed that if I mulch my lawn clippings on my lawn, it appears that it raises the level of my lawn, as opposed to throwing them in the trash.

People noticed it over time. It’s not like one day the ground was 10 feet higher.

Seattle is a great example of what can happen. After a large fire and then a flood the city buried whole streets in retaining walls, then built on top of it. They find ships underground when making excavations in some coastal cities.

Other cases are of collapsing civilizations. Most of the Aztec empire is under jungle, which grow over top of the cities. There are pyramids in China that are old enough that the loess covered them up and they appear as very regularly shaped hills.

This comment is all over the place. Not my best bit of writing.

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