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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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