A piece of the explanation is that before centralized banks existed and became widely trusted by the public, average people buried their valuables in their yards as a way of keeping them safe. People become forgetful, lose track of where they buried their stuff after weather changes the landscape (ie. Marker tree gets blown down in a storm), family member who knows the location dies, they move, any number of things happens, and the valuables remain buried until decades later when archeologists and treasure hunters stumble across it.
An example of this is Jewish and German families who buried money in pots at the beging of wwii believing they would return in short time and reclaim their valuables, only to forget about them or becoming unable to return to the burial location.
We live in very old place, the original house is mentioned in the Doomsday book. We’ve found all kinds of stuff oer the years but still waiting to find anything of huge value.
Gardening found us a sword which was considered to be friom the English civil war and which we have loaned to our local museum for the last 15 odd years.
For one thing, length and continuity of habitation as others have mentioned, and that comes with call the caches and valuables stashed over a thousand years of conflict.
Additionally, consider litter. You have a busted axe head, your miles from town or anyone whoncan repair it and it’s weighing you down. It’s junk. Toss it way.
After a few centuries that path through a wooded grove gets swallowed up by a modern town, they excavate for a basement and find the remnant of an axe.
Maybe a traveller died in the wilderness off the beaten path, nature reclaims the body, gradually it gets pulled down into the soil, sediment buries it, etc…
When we’ve been living and dying on the same land for a century we leave a mark.
What do you think our landfills are going to look like a thousand years from now?
As well as what the others said about burying things for safekeeping the British had a habit of dumping items in rivers and streams for unknown ‘ritual’ purposes thousands of years ago. Like coins and broken swords and random objects maybe worshipping some kind of god related to rivers.
Those items might end up elsewhere if the river moves or dries up over time or they just get washed up some place.
This happens all the time in Mexico, mainly in the main areas of Veracruz, Puebla, Mexico City. They were the very populated areas during the Spanish migration and Spanish-American wars. I remember my relatives in central Mexico talking about digging holes in random areas and hiding all their gold and silver in case of attacks or thieves. To this day you always hear people finding treasures in tin cans or wrapped in cloth in properties they inherited or purchased.
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