Why are Roman ruins found below ground level?
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The same reason as dinosaur fossils are in the ground, and not in the air. If the ground level rises over time, ruins are below. But if the ground level falls due to erosion, no ruins are left.
So, survivorship bias?
Various reasons. In one particular example like Pompeii, it was literally buried under volcanic magma and ash. But things like floods and earthquakes can displace materials that can bury towns.
Until we developed engines, movement of stuff was either human labor or animal labor. On top of that all the materials needed to be hand crafted – bricks, logs, stones etc. This is very slow, laborious and difficult. So scavenging material is an effective way to build stuff. Then, when a building is ruined etc, there are no bulldozers to dig up all the old stuff and cart it miles away to dump – no one had the time to do this by hand. Hence, the simplest thing to do is steal the stuff that is reusable, bury the stuff that isn’t and rebuild over the old stuff.
There are a lot of Roman ruins above ground level as well. Things like aqueducts and theaters and stuff. Even mileposts and other markers from the Roman era is often found above ground. But the problem with anything above the ground level is that it wears much faster. And everywhere the Romans settled continued to be settled for two thousand years. So people who lived there either maintained the Roman structures, replacing things as they broke and upgrading them. Or they took the good materials that the Romans left in order to build their own structures nearby. This means that most of what we find is underground where it have been preserved, sheltered from weather and people. For example we might find only the underground foundations of a Roman villa as the rest have rotted away and the brickwork recycled.
Cause it was easier to fill in and build on top than it would be to remove everything. A lot of times they used the stone leftovers for foundations.
There’s a few reasons for it.
If you want to build a new building or road in place of an old one, it’s much easier to just remove what’s still above ground (and often reuse the material in the same building, or nearby ones), level any unevenness, and then build on top of that. So you slowly get layers of basements and foundations on top of each other.
If a building is abandoned, the aboveground portions will collapse (or again, easily accessible, usable material will be reappropriated for other construction), leaving some low-level walls or foundations, and then grass, bushes and trees will start to grow and create a layer of soil on top of it.
Over a few hundreds and thousands of years, you can then get pretty impressive layering.
[Here’s](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11g4vd2/modern_archaeologists_slice_historical_sites_into/) a comment collecting a few answers with different perspectives over on r/AskHistorians that I’d highly recommend if you want to learn a bit more about it.
If you go to Rome, you will see that the level of the city has risen since ancient times. This is because we build successive generations on top of previous generations. So older stuff gets buried.
If you take the train out to Ostia Antics (the ancient Roman port) you will see that this was abandoned as silt pushed the river further out to sea. Nobody built there when it was abandoned so it’s at ground level.
If you go to a place that used to have a city, but rain, or the ocean washed it away . . . Guess what . . .
Simple answer is we build on top of old stuff and the ground level rises.
Because back then, that was the ground level. Over time sediments have piled up and now we have to dig to see what’s underneath.
Dust from erosion or volcanoes, combined with silt from rivers and decaying plant material build up over centuries to bury cities and monuments in a thick layer of soil. https://youtu.be/EofirRBIh28
Dear 5yo, this is what happens when a whole society doesn’t sweep up the dust. Now get back to cleaning your bedroom.
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