I’m laying awake, not able to figure this out.
If our civilization were to be left untouched for thousands of years then over time it’d get covered in dirt. Some future generation would have to “dig up” our civilization in the same way we dig up artifacts from the ancient past.
Where does that dirt come from? Is it floating around in the atmosphere? Or does it get created somehow (ie. organic matter decomposing)?
My understanding is that older artifacts are buried deeper, which may not be the correct understanding. But is there some relationship to dirt vs time?
So many questions.
In: 18
There are a few potential reasons why various sites ended up buried:
* They’re buried by the surrounding environment. This can be due to things like shifting desert (Amarna in Egypt), centuries of vegetation turning to soil (Chichen Itza in Mexico), or an abrupt cataclysm burying the city (Pompeii in Italy).
* The site was intentionally buried by humans. This is most common in the cases of tombs, barrows, tumuli, and so on. Occasionally, it could be because a site was intentionally razed, making it far less of a challenge for nature to bury it.
*The site got buried by continued habitation. This is most common in the Fertile Crescent, where mud brick was the most common material. As mud brick buildings gradually eroded (or got destroyed in war) and got rebuilt, it gradually raised the elevation of the city over millennia, forming what archaeologists call a [tell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(archaeology%29).
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