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?
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Ancient Egypt had ancient archeologists digging up ancient ancient Egypt. Our archeologists studied them. So yes, constantly, people have constantly been digging up and getting curious over items from past humans. It’s a luxury to be able to think we could preserve such items for ever though. And a fallacy. Cairo for example was built with stone taken from the pyramids.
If you are leader and surround yourself with old world treasures you make your people collect well they starve. They will come take and destroy it all eventually. Or you will be a good leader and sell or use it for your people (lots of art and ancient sculptures are made from older art and sculptors). Saving it benefits only you, and you will not convince the poor it’s better for the future. So large collections came about from private citizens having as much money as old King’s. They own nothing to no one, so they can keep these things forever. This would be renaissance when lords and King’s collected, and shortly after individual wealth rose steeply with industry barons that didn’t have constituents. They donate to museums, have wings in their names, private collections, fund digs, and it caused a boom.
The reason the Roman Colosseum is so fucked up is because at some point the people “archeologied” the bricks for their own purposes. As some people have mentioned, archeology is a luxury, both financial and mental. If you don’t really have a concept of time outside your daily life, would you care if something old is not saved for future generations?
Most religious traditions would prefer their adherents to destroy artifacts and monuments that are older than the religion is, rather than to preserve and study it. That’s why 2/3 of the Roman structures in Italy had the marble stripped off of them to build churches.
Cleopatra had *ancient Egyptian archeologists* trying to uncover the mysteries of the Great Pyramids because they were as much a mystery to her as they are us. In fact, we’re closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was in time to the construction of those pyramids.
Isn’t that just when the British Meuseum did the thing?
Ancient Egyptian society already studied even older Egyptian society. We’ve always been interested in the past. There are museums that are themselves archeological findings. Maybe your impression comes from politics and economics. What we found in the last two centuries feels more important, because what we found before has been forgotten again, or is considered boring common sense.
I’d have to re-find the journal article, but dug up dinosaur bones are partially responsible for myths about giants and dragons.
We were, it’s just that archeological practices in the past have been… well, not much better than smashing the door in with a hammer and taking everything that looked cool.
It’s more that we adopted a scientific and methodical approach to archaeology. *Everyone* in our lineage has been digging up stuff from our ancestors, even Neanderthals reworked stone tools their predecessors used and left behind, but it was in the last century or two that a scientific approach was applied at a large scale to the discipline.
Everyone has gone ham explaining the second part and ignoring the first part.
The answer is that archaeology is really only about 30-40 years old, about 150 years old if you want to include earlier parts but that’s iffy.
The 1980s and 1990s were the first time (generally) when governments started caring about protecting artifacts and cultural heritage. That made the field an actual profession in North America, Europe, and a lot of other places, instead of something that rich people, professors, and students do in exotic places.
It’s obviously a lot more complex than that but a lot of the stuff, even the popular stuff in the 19th century really isn’t archaeology, it’s antiquarianism (rich, usually British or European dudes hunting treasures).
It wasn’t until the 1950s when more ‘scientific’ techniques started to come around and isn’t until the ‘90s when it became a profession. There was also a lot that happened in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s after WW2 and during rebuilding but that’s a lot of more complicated theory/philosophy stuff and mostly stuff that set the scene for the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Even now we’re still really far behind most other fields since we’ve only really 30 years old.
Source – I’m an archaeologist that spends a lot of time researching archaeology. Feel free to ask more questions!
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