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

Largely, that time period is when people started thinking of archeology as a separate discipline deserving of its own experts and refined techniques. The basic idea of digging up something, noticing it is old, and then wondering exactly how old, has been around as long as humanity.

During the 400s BCE, Thucydides of Athens (author of History of the Peloponnesian War) visited several sites around the Aegean where construction or plowing had unexpectedly unearthed ancient graves, much like how it does today. He went and examined the contents of the graves in an attempt to try and date them and identify their cultural linkages to help trace the ancient migrations of ethnic groups across “greece”. It seems unmistakably like archeological practice, there were just not coherent schools of archeology teaching and refining the best practices.