Why are ancient buildings, cities and structures usually found buried underground?
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There are a few potential reasons why ancient sites end 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 and new vegetation growing on top (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 and other burial sites. 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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