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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We’ve been digging stuff up forever.. it’s only when we started putting our I’ll gotten gains in museums that we called it archeology.
Adrienne Mayor argues in “The First Fossil Hunters” that ancient peoples found fossils and interpreted them to be mythological creatures. A wooly mammoth skull has a big hole in the middle that suggests the origin of the cyclops myth.
Just think about it from a practical stand point. No one up till the last 200 years had technology and a steady food supply. So who is going to go search for ancient remains when you need to search for food? People have the opportunity today to go on long expeditions and have Amazon.com drop off a box of food. I’m joking of course about Amazon. But food and supplies can be brought in instead of hunted and gathered on site. Yes people have explored before the last 200 years. But that was never in search of information. It was in search of some form of capital gain.
You based somewhere with an indigenous population? Might be why there not much old stuff dug up where you are.
I imagine people did, they just didn’t have easy/standardized methods to catalogue things and then share their discoveries.
This should blow your mind
During the time of Cleopatra, the Egyptians had archaeological studies underway of several pyramids
We’ve been doing it a long time, just more as knowledge and discovery today Vs looting in the past
People have been digging up old buildings since forever. Its just that in the past they were doing it to reuse readibly available building materials.
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Archeology goes back as far as Egypt, when Pharos would dig up relics from Babylon.
The British Empire consolidating artifacts, along with better technology, documentation, and the scientific method are why we have more of it.
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.
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