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
My family has a trailer at a vacation lake development. It’s pretty woodsy with lots of fallen leaves from oaks and maples and all that sort. They had a shed that a tree fell on around 10 years ago. The platform for the shed is 18 inches off the ground with stairs and concrete footing. I just found out it was there, about 45 feet from the far back of the deck. The leaves fall about 8 inches a year. It was buried before I had ever been there. I dug it out of 2 feet of leaves and would have never known it was there otherwise. I imagine the same thing happens withnn by larger buildings over enough time, as leaves break down
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
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
In modern cities, the building materials tend to be much more fragile (wood, glass, even iron) and rot away, break, or rust away instead of lasting long enough to be buried.
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.
Drive along the old railroad routes of the midwest, and you’ll find entire abandoned towns slowly crumbling and getting buried under plant life. it’s not that no one notices these places becoming lost, it’s that there’s no imediate need to preserve them, and eventually they pass from living memory.
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
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.
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.
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
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