Rome's Subway Expansion Reveals Artifacts From The Ancient Past
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But it's impossible to dig all of that out (reasons: too big, too disruptive, no funds, happens everywhere, etc). So what usually happens is: take pictures, save some artifact, cover with concrete and go on with the works.
Finding yet another clay pot in Rome, one of the largest centers of population with one of the longest and most complete historical records of anywhere in the ancient world, is probably not going to be of much historical value.
In an age where you can buy 10 Roman coins on Amazon for $25 and have them delivered to your house in two days with Prime shipping, the value of common ancient Roman artifacts is made abundantly clear.
There was an article about this when they were building the tunnel in Istanbul. They did find some significant stuff, but the vast majority of it was stuff they already had tons of. They literally filled warehouses with the stuff, and dumped most of it back in because it was not rare or significant.
Clubbing and nightlife area now, nice place...
An alternative to squeezing a few billion more people onto our already massively overpopulated planet? Madness! (and certainly unpopular among the HN crowd)
And the building, or underground parking lot I think, still got built.
For people who have NO idea what was under the new Bloomberg HQ in London, here's a link:
Chances are builders tried to avoid finding artifacts as much as possible. They certainly did in Istanbul when extending the subway: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig
I know it's controversial, but I personally think that there should be the possibility for the State to sell (or "permanently loan" for money) significant amounts of minor artifacts to other nation-states. Countries like the US, Britain or Australia would build academic cathedrals around the crappiest 1% of the stuff we have to stockpile in Italy.
Though I would leave Britain off your list.
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2018/07/17/amsterdam-museu...
If you look at the Colosseum, it looks the way it is because it was willfully destroyed and used for construction material over centuries: when Rome became the seat of the Papacy, the Colosseum was remembered as a place where the early martyrs were slaughtered by wild beasts, not as a nice building to be preserved for tourists.
On the other hand many Roman bridges throughout Europe still stand and some are still in use (yes even by cars). But the really amazing case is the Pantheon, that was turned into a church early on and preserved and restored for almost 2000 years. It's true that not all we see is original, but the structural engineering is.
Is that a cause or a byproduct?
No, that's not the reason. Rather it is the case that through most of human history new buildings were built on top of the rubble of earlier buildings destroyed in a fire, sacking, earthquake, or in very early times the simple accumulation of trash. In many parts of the Middle East finding a lost city is as easy as looking for a hill that has no geological business being there and digging. People living in the same place over thousands of years is what makes the hill.
In my city, there are leftovers of the old castle walls from the middle ages, which in the core are build on top of the walls from the early medieval age and those in turn are built on top of roman walls. Or the social housing built after WW2 build on top of housing build in 1600s which in turn was build on top of social housing from 1516. Rubble over rubble over rubble for ages and ages.
If you go into the nearby forests and dig, you'll find in order WW2, WW1, medieval, post roman and roman layered on top of each other. There is no tombs, mostly either a battlefield or simply a city being build on top of itself.
A lot of European Cities tend to be like that and lots of places are like that. American cities by comparison are very very young (San Juan manages 400 years and some change, San Augustine comes second), our cities have grown organically over 3000 to 2000 years and through countless wars and catastrophes.
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Current date: 27 Jul 2018Not far from there is a monument to the fallen of Dogali (another pointless colonial battle that I won't recount here) that was itself built using a obelisk looted around two thousand years before in Egypt. There is no way to neatly untangle that sort of thing.