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
It baffled me that they recently found an old war/trade ship near the south coast of the UK. Like, hasnt there been anybody in a few hundred years that scouted the coast? Apparently not.
The five year old answer you need: sometimes people don’t like what they made, and they are lazy bones who don’t want to start over, so just like you do with the food you don’t want to eat that you stuff under the carpet, people would just make stuff on top of what they didn’t like.
Here are two of the many ways
– They are purposely filled in. An impressive example is Pot Belly Hill, on of the oldest sacred sites on earth. The best explanation is that they were being invaded by some hostile forces and may have feared the destruction or abominations of their sacred temple. Over some time the entire thing was filled with dirt. It worked! Either future invaders never found it or didn’t care to unearth the whole thing all over again.
– Here’s something that still happens, even to this day but someone simply wanted to build a new house. The old one wasn’t filled with dirt but new landowners didn’t like it and/or it sucked. they’d kick in the top floor(s) into the middle while packing in good old handy dirt and rocks until, voila, a real nice foundation. Build new home on top of the ready-made easy-build foundation. I forget the textbook name for this kind of thing.
It’s worth noting that a lot of old stone and brick buildings became easy-quarries. So it may not have been a new place built on it but instead next door. They took a wall or two apart and used them in their new home. Soon that old home is just a kind of salvage pit and it can be filled with all the dirt they want. Hell, it may even be a great dirt-storage unit where they like to keep their dirt.
– I can only think of one warfare example but my memory is too foggy to think of details. Somewhere I read about some force that filled something with dirt. Assyrians? There was a temple which seems to me was in a cave or maybe a theater? The conquering army did not want it being rebuilt, used again or turned into a shrine etc. They had the entire thing filled in with dirt. So the opposite of preserving it but to bury it and disappear it as a ‘thing’ altogether.
I’d also say I’ve seen the power of a local flood able to dump stunning amounts of mud and silt and dirt into corners. If nobody was living there anymore (which isn’t uncommon over centuries many places were simply abandoned or large sections were) but I could easily see a local flood, say every century, over 10 centuries yes you really could find buildings pretty much encased in mud, add some odd earthquake, add 1000 years of wind, dust and rain and nobody lives there and I could sure see how that happens.
I have a related story that helps explain this.
My region experienced significant flooding and mudslides in 1996. I was at the local pub a couple years ago, and I struck up a conversation with a couple who had recently moved to the area. They excitedly described an “old, abandoned cellar” that they had found at the base of the hill behind their new modular home, and told me of their plans to dig out the accumulated mud and debris in the bottom of the old cellar so they could build a small barn for their goats, while using the cellar as a root cellar, since it was almost entirely underground. I was able to inform them that their newly-discovered “cellar” was actually the main floor of the old stone house that had originally occupied their property and was engulfed by a mudslide some 20 years ago, and that they would discover the original basement if they dug down far enough. I’m glad I was able to explain the actual situation to them, because when they started digging the mud out, the original wood floor collapsed into the underlying basement. Since they were aware of the danger, they avoided injury by not allowing anyone to enter the excavation while digging the accumulated mud and debris out with a small excavator.
Unfortunately, they never did anything with the structure because it was so deeply buried that it always had several feet of standing water in it after being excavated. They ended up filling it with several dump truck loads of rubble to avoid the danger of having an open pit 16′ deep in their pasture.
Think about it from another direction:
You’re not building over a priceless 2000 year old antique mosaic floor.
You’re building over a tacky mosaic floor from 30 years ago, which is totally out of style now.
You even see this in older modern homes, where you’ll often find beautiful hardwood floor under tacky vinyl tiles under brown wall to wall carpet – each thing was installed when it was new, covering up something considered outdated.
Hey Dotson, Have you seen Detroit? See nobody cares.
If people are moving out of an area, they don’t care to make sure they leave it intact. If an area is abandoned it’s probably because something in the environment or the economy or society changed. These days it’s when companies shut down factories or other similar things. In the old days it was when wars happened, or mines shut down, or rivers dried up, or there was a famine and you couldn’t farm, or a competing industry in another location took over and some place shut down. People move out. In the US this happens, and it happened in the pas with ghost towns. People would live the town because the mine didn’t have any more gold or something similar. If you’re looking for a new job in a new place you don’t care about what you’ve left behind.
Mostly we don’t find anything like this. We tend to just find remnants like the foundations of buildings. The intact buildings that have survived from hundreds or thousands of years ago usually weren’t buried at all – they were actively preserved, often by being given a new purpose. E.g. some ancient Greek & Roman temples were repurposed as Christian churches.
Excavating intact buildings is incredibly rare and restricted to exceptional cases like Pompeii and Herculaneum which were buried within the space of a day or so under volcanic ashfalls.
War, large earth events (volcano, hurricane, etc) can kill a city and all of its inhabitants. So who there to keep it looking nice?
Way back they would salt the land to make sure nothing could ever grow there to ensure people leave
There’s entire abandoned country towns in Spain and Italy and basically everywhere. I’m sure the Midwest of the USA is also littered with them. If there’s no traffic going through, nature will just…. Overtake it. Give it time.
Latest Answers