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

The Enlightenment happened and intelligent people started to value setting your assumptions and racism for evidence and the elimination of bias. It was still an incredibly slow process and it’s still an ongoing one that might not ever end.

Prior to that, people either didn’t care about old bones, saw them as a natural resource or something to loot, had religious anxieties about disturbing the dead, or just made up on the spot what they thought was going on and no one cared enough to contradict them. Literacy and the availability of books wasn’t common and travel was long and dangerous. So if someone wanted to make up stories about some bones they dug up or a burial site they defiled while on an expedition, who could possibly say it wasn’t true? They knew even back then that selling sensationalism was how you sold books, not dry facts.