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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Garbage trucks weren’t a thing in ancient cities. On good days they carted away fecal matter and that was all. You can see the same in modern times when you look at some parts of developing world, people live on top of garbage. Same thing in ancient world, the difference is only that modern garbage has a lot of plastic that doesn’t biodegrade and stands out.
The city of Troy is a fairly good example due to its fame. Iirc they built the new city on top of the old city each time it was destroyed, the Troy from the Greek stories was the 7th? city built at the same location. It’s easier than clearing the area first, just fill it up and build on top. We do something similar with landfills today.
https://www.livius.org/articles/place/troy/
Nine periods of Troy in the settlement-hill of Hisarlık [1200 × 795]
byu/_Ilker inMapPorn
Typically they are abandoned and then covered in vegetation first, the moss and leaves hide it from view while the dirt builds up high enough (and enough of the structure collapses) for it to be completely reclaimed by nature, then some long time later it is built on top of
Sometimes people abandon an area because it becomes unlivable, like the water dries up or the crops won’t grow. Sometimes whole towns and areas get completely covered instantly by things like volcanic eruptions or tsunamis or floods
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.
Vegetation can make a surprising amount of soil. I bought a house that had been vacant for 15 years. After cleaning up around the outside of the house I found a sidewalk buried under about a foot of dirt. It was an area where the leaves would gather every fall.
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.
Just drive down any street in North America, you’ll find a house either abandoned or poorly maintained. Where the grass has begun to encroach on the side walk, driveway and walkway. After a year or two you’d drive-by again and never notice that walkway again.
Its the same on a much larger time scale where geological events can have profound impact.
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.
Hey Dotson, Have you seen Detroit? See nobody cares.
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