I’ve been traveling around the UK, visiting lots of ancient sites, and I don’t understand how these places end up buried under so much dirt. I know that sometimes thousands of years pass between when something is abandoned and when it’s rediscovered, but how does that much dirt and debris cover things up over time? Can someone explain how this happens?
In: Planetary Science
Why are dinosaur bones buried??? Dirt/ground isn’t stationary; events like flooding, earthquakes and even a constant breeze will move a lot of dirt over the millennia.
When ancient people were alive they would clean the mud/dirt after a flood…once they all died the flood waters would build up year after year
2024: watch the news about major flooding in Europe. You’ll see people removing mud and other detritus from around and inside houses. Imagine the same event repeating itself every year for a few hundred years and assume nobody was able to remove the dirt. Pretty quickly you can have an entire city completely buried.
Now add rivers changing course and covering villages and buildings. Add mud slides and avalanches. Add earthquakes moving stuff around. Add storms or just wind moving sand to cover human constructions.
You can see the even today, without human intervention, a lot of places can quickly become buried.
In cities, people just keep building on top of what’s already there. They throw their rubbish into a yard/dump, so when that is built on its higher. Manure gets trodden into the dirt streets so they get higher.
Rurally, most of it’s not that deep, farmers pretty regularly trash the stuff down there with ploughs. Any useful material was used elsewhere, the rest knocked down and plowing covered it with dirt.
Things get dusty and the dusty slowly builds up until it’s dirty and then dirty builds up until it’s caked in dirt and then suddenly all that stuff that’s caked in dirt becomes covered in dirt. Once it’s covered in dirt we call it the ground that we walk on.
I’m curious which ancient sites in the UK you’ve visited that were buried under a significant amount of dirt ?
Think of the desk in your room. Without intervention crap gets piled up, clothes toys etc. now imagine the child who never cleaned from age 2-23 thousand years. Buried
A lot of what you see that is still existing is the foundations of buildings. The bit that is built below ground to support the building itself. Most of the useful stone and other materials would have been robbed out and used elsewhere. Add to that what other people have said with sediment build up from rain/flooding plus dust and organic debris and you can get things that appear quite deep underground.
There’s several factors at play here
The first is survivor bias – most ancient structures didn’t get buried, and over the centuries they were scavenged for building materials and eroded away to nothing. Only the sites that were abandoned and buried have survived this long to be excavated.
Now as for *how* they get buried, there’s a few mechanisms.
Sometimes it’s a sudden catastrophe, floods or mudslides or the infamous instantaneous destruction of Pompeii by a nearby volcano. These sites are well preserved because they were buried rapidly while still in use.
Sometimes it’s on purpose, with the structure being used as a grave site or garbage dump or filled in to function as a foundation for later construction.
And sometimes it’s just the passage of time in an area with shifting dunes and river paths and plant growth that slowly fills in a low-lying area with mud or sand or dirt.
To add to what others have said, vegetation also helps to slowly build up layers on top of most places. Think of a side walk across an unmaintained yard. Within a year grass will be creeping over the sides, within 5 to 10 years depending on environment it could be fully covered in grass… now think of that process spread over 100’s or 1000’s of years.
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