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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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.
I’m from up near Hadrian’s wall. Loads of old buildings (farms, churches etc) contain stones from it. If you’re living hand to mouth and you need building materials of course you would help yourself to a field full of pre-cut blocks.
It would have held no significance as only a few hundred years after they left the locals had forgotten who even built it (the historian Bede calls it the Pict wall in the 7thCent)
Digging is hard. Have you tried digging with a shovel? Because that’s what people had in the olden days.
Apart from the great answers already here: Nationalism and Colonialism.
When modern states came up, stories of the past became standardized and there was demand to understand it better – and with it funding for archeology. National-archeology was quite prominent. Added to that, colonialism created unforeseen access to historical sites of foreign areas – with British, French, German archeologists taking huge amounts of artifacts. Which would have been impossible both politically and logistically prior to the 19th century.
The world economy is booming and major construction projects are uncovering lots of history. Also, lots of money is going into research & exploration as the rich look for something to do.
International travel is still a comparatively recent thing (exploration, conquest, colonisation only happened in the past few hundred years) so people simply didn’t go to other countries to investigate their histories.
Locals likely grew up knowing a lot about the people who lived where these digs take place and likely respected them and their history more than a foreigner would.
We also have better technology these days that make digs and investigations more viable.
We were. We used to call it treasure and we’d sell it to rich stuffy types for their living rooms.
We were. 2000 years ago there were Egyptian archaeologists digging up what was, to them, already ancient Egypt
It probably has a lot to do with the increased support for scientific discovery (government grants etc), the superior technology making it easier to find things, and the ability to easily travel to remote parts of the globe. It’s certainly far less dangerous and labour intensive these days.
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.
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