ELi5 : Why does it seem a lot of archeology began so recently in the 20th and 19th centuries? Why weren’t we digging up stuff much earlier?

Question

It seems many of the most important archeological findings were in the 20th and 19th century. Why did humans wait so long to start digging stuff up?

In: 961

Answer 1

Modern archeology. By the time of Cleopatra, Egyptians were already doing archeology on their own civilization. Some “digging and skulking old shit up” has pretty much always existed, just not in a modern academic form and obviously not to the same scale, global cohesion in multiple fronts, tools, technique and shared global knowledge.