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?
In: 2940
Part of the answer to your question is a bit of a pedantic one: stuff that was built on a hill that collapsed isn’t there anymore. And there are plenty of old ruins that are on “ground” level (the Colosseum for example) so the reason why you find structures when you dig for them is that those were the ones that ended up buried!
But on a more serious and interesting note: people in ancient cities *did* realize the city was getting buried but it wasn’t a big deal to them. You could just build stairs down from the street to the old floor for example. Eventually you would need to re-build the house for some reason and you could just knock the whole thing down into the street and build a new one on the old site. (A Mesopotamian archeologist who wrote a book about his work 100 years ago saw some contemporary locals do this.)
“But why not just clear all that stuff out of town?” you might ask. Well back in those days there were no trash trucks and anything you didn’t want could just be thrown out onto the street. Occasionally someone might make an effort to collect some of it and bring it out of town but mostly the trash and dirt and sand would just build up and people would build new buildings over it and the old city would get buried. When this happened in the Middle East it would eventually form an artificial hill called a [“Tell”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(archaeology)) which the Middle East is full of. Like I said, you could just build a new city on top of it so it didn’t used to be a big deal.
Also nature is good at growing over things. [Here’s a picture of a highway](https://www.neponset.org/happenings/reason-and-the-river-fowl-meadow-and-the-ghost-of-i-95/) that they started to build in 1967 before abandoning it. It’s been 50 years and this asphalt marvel is half swallowed up by the trees. If nature doesn’t do the job then sometimes people do. Some places used to build corduroy roads for example (made by chopping down trees and paving your road with their trunks.) Eventually the old trees would rot and you’d need to put a new layer of trees over it. No point in digging up the old ones first-anything that was still left of them could serve as the foundation for the new road above.
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