How can something like this be discovered in 2022? It sounds incredible. I would understand it if it was at the bottom of the sea, but they appear to be standing in plain sight. No one gave any thought to it before?
I walk a lot in remote areas but even there it's very rare for people to leave the trails.
And finally it's possible that some locals were aware of some "rocks in that field" but weren't aware of the archeological significance.
Be aware that the photo in the article is not from the site in question but one in France that's much bigger and maintained.
I completely overlooked the text below the photo. That's on me, I guess, but it's crazy they don't have a photo of this new site in the article.
When you take the tour, it's described as
~"well, everyone living here knew about it, but it wasn't a big deal because it was always here, it was only when foreigners saw it that they made a big deal of it."
http://www.carrowkeel.com/sites/boyne/newgrange.html
Every winter solstice (only on and around the 21st December) the sun shines into the inner chamber. There are live-streams showing it. It's great.
Totally recommended for visit. US cruise ships dock there all through summer.
It was common for buildings in the middle ages and almost at any time in history to reuse rocks from the nearby ruins from older civilizations. After all those were readily available and saving weeks of work could mean the difference between having a dwelling and death.
It's also very commong to find archeological ruins when excavating, just yesterday my father (who is in construction) told me of a region in Spain where construction companies will just not go because it's certain they will hit ruins and have the project paralized.
As the article described, here the owner gets their field of avocados taken over by the government at least until 2026, hopefully they didn't take any loan to buy it or they'll surely default.
I lived in one unspecified East European city and there was parking lot next to my flat where new construction was planned. It was next to old town so first team of archeologists came. They made grid with holes ~1m deep. Barely found anything. So they left. Then crawler excavator came and after while dug through the huge vault of some medieval cellar. Now there is underground garage. But there were cases when garages were made in place of Roman ruins as well, so this was nothing.
I'm sure that the choice between a dwelling or death was sometimes the case, but it's not like they needed such a stark pro to override the con of destroying archæological remains. It was simply that at the time there was no such thing as wanting to preserve useless old things that happened to be there, and reusing conveniently available building blocks was a no-brainer.
[1] Sure it'd be very seasonal, where you could go few years in a row with excess of food! But excess food was "bad" as well, so then what people got that they worked in reducing producing the amount of food to prefer diversifying their crops to reduce risk of a big event wiping their whole farm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquis_Querquennis
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Aquis+Querquennis&t=newext&atb=v31...
If you click on the picture you can read the full description:
> Carnac in northwestern France is one of the most famous megalithic sites in the world with some 3,000 standing stones .
One thing I'll add is that the article says "Many of the stones are buried deep in the earth." Presumably that's why nobody saw them until they looked pretty hard.
Larger scans (whole towns, or large fields) are exposing lots of unknown stuff, like forgotten wall structures and abandoned villages.