This question has been annoying me for some time now. Why is it that we find some historical artifacts buried deep in the ground in some areas, and not others?

For example, Stonehenge looks the same now today as it did 4000 years ago. None of the rocks are partially buried beneath the ground. And yet we have Roman and Saxon buildings buried 6 feet below the surface that are between 1000 and 2000 years old.

My first explanation for this would be that old ruins are built on at a faster rate in urban areas, but I don't think this is adequate as an explanation because we still find many of these camps built in desolate areas of the countryside. Is it to do with what sort of vegetation grows in the area?

Further question: can we infer that the world is actually increasing in volume or does the volume just shift around?

Is it that hard to imagine how in thousands of years, some water and sand moves around as to cover buildings?

It probably has a lot to do with climate and geology. Areas near waterways, especially flood plains, are probably not topping the list for stability.

Shifts. There are probably some very slight fluctuations, and even new mass enters and leaves the earth a little bit at a time, but for the most part the volume will be stable. The mass is reasonably constant, so weird things would have to happen for the volume to change significantly.

You can watch buildings being covered with soil in real time. In days/weeks rather than years if conditions are right. Drier windy areas like center of North America are good examples.

In damp areas a slower version of that is how vegetation builds soil as it grows, collects soil from the wind, dies and rots. The soil around human settlements is often enriched by human waste and scraps.

Mountains weather away, manure piles grow.

The earth is increasing slightly in volume due to meteor dust, but this has no effect on archeological digs. Many monuments and buildings built of stone can still be seen above ground. Most buildings, however, in the ancient world were built of mud bricks, and other less durable materials, and city dwelling humans, because they tend to “own” specific pieces of real estate, tend to rebuild on the same spots over and over. Also, less durable sites that humans inhabited, tend to be built near rivers, etc, where much vegetation grows. Once a place becomes abandoned, vegetation creeps in and floods the area, tending to put it more and more underground.

Other places, were underground to begin with. Burial sites, trash sites, etc. Still other places tend to get buried due to natural disasters like earthquakes, volcano eruptions, flooding, etc.

I'm reading Grapes of Wrath and there's a beautiful bit about a dust storm in Oklahoma. Sounds like they're something to see. I grew up in the desert, but the desert in America doesn't get much wind.

Yes, deserts aren't necessarily the best sites, in a sense they can be picked over unless you're in creeping dune territory. Where it's really impressive is in spots like the grain fields of eastern montana in a severe drought of Grapes proportions. That frees up a lot of looser, lighter material to blow around. I have a cousin there that is wanting to move because the wind is driving her crazy ( literally she claims) ... would make a good short story, rather like Maugham's "The Rain".

Thanks for the answers. I know very little about this. I was just watching a programme about limestone, and it turns out that it is pretty much just pure fossil built up over thousands of years from the remains of these whelk-like creatures. It does seem quite hard to conceive how everything on the planet (barring the odd asteroid) is composed of some materials that never leave the Earth. In the greater scheme of things I suppose a geologist might view a human life as being a few water and carbon based molecules raised from the ground which then spends 70 years or so gathering bits of stuff from around the world and using them to replace its parts, dropping the old parts all over the place, and finally collapsing lifeless and the remains going back into the main pool. In the same way that we might see the function of bacteria to decompose and regenerate compounds into some other compound, the function of humans from the perspective of a planet could be to redistribute its components to reach some other state. Perhaps aliens put life on Earth to change its structure in the same way we might put maggots on a wound to clean it. I'm not sure why they'd want the planet deforested, warmed-up and polluted though. Maybe the output is meant to be art/philosophy?

\groundless speculations

I'm no expert, but a couple observations. The sites where digging is required are often places that have a history of more than one, sometimes many, different settlements over the years, especially in the mideast. Cities would be destroyed and others built on top. Who knows how much archeological treasure is buried beneath Jerusalem and Rome, but we can't get to it because the sites are currently occupied.

Places like Stonehenge and the Aztec and Mayan ruins are mostly above ground because no one ever destroyed them and built on top. And we even find Neanderthal remains in caves without much if any digging, again because the caves were not a popular place for later occupation.

* Type of stone.
* Other building materials.
* Type of architecture/building techniques.
* Wind, weather, rivers, ocean, lakes, salt.
* Acidity, alkalinity, humidity, temparature.
* Natural disasters.
* Human events (wars, deconstruction, building new structures and whatnot)
* Vegetation.
* Type of soil.
* Actually looking for it (not all countries/regions have archeological teams messing around).

And that's just to name a few factors that influence how well and how long something will remain as the centuries pass.

Reminds of a trip I had with my father once to an old fortress. We were standing in a garden within the walls and my father said 'you're standing in a church' - and when you really looked at it, you could actually see it as a pattern in the ground where the grass would subtly have a slightly higher heights at where the carrying walls once stood - but it was unmistakingly the pattern of a church.

Stonehenge has the appearance it does today because it is an excavated site.

Stu

Just curious because from what I could find it was known at least as early as the 12th century, possibly the 5th. I know parts are excavated, probably will be further diggings, but were the stones themselves excavated, and if so, when?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excavations_at_Stonehenge

Even Charles Darwin excavated it.

Stu

That must explain his theory - he was consulting the Druids.