Is the world getting bigger ? If not, why is archaeology underground ?

Question

Is the world getting bigger ? If not, why is archaeology underground ?

Answer 1

Archaeology only works in some places where deposits are being laid down. There's nothing to find in the other places where it's being eroded, and the two balance each other out.

Answer 2

nice question here have a star

Answer 3

I studied archaeology at university, the basic reason why so much of it is underground is because people or nature buries it.

Take a skeleton for instance - it is buried deliberately as a funeral, or the city of Pompeii - that was buried by a volcanic eruption.  

A lot of stuff from ancient times that was not buried has not survived - anything left on the surface would be rained on, stepped on, ploughed through and crushed under cart wheels for centuries and just would not survive, especially if it was wood, fabric, bone or anything else that naturally rots.  If a building falls down then people took the stones to make a new one - it's a lot easier than going miles to a quarrey and doing several days masonry work.

So basically the reason why archaeology is undeground is because only buried objects are not looted, erroded, destroyed or reused over time.  

The reason why things left on the ground tend to get buried is because the wind and rain errode mountains into dust and soild which is blown or carried by rivers down into valleys and builds up in layers.  Plants such as grass and moss gather soil from dust which gets trapped in their roots, and this grass and moss grows over ruins (as I am sure you may have seen).

The earth is not getting bigger - mountains and cliffs wear away, land rises and falls, soil gets deeper through deposition but also is washed away through floods or errosion.

The earth is a dynamic system full of fluxes and cycles.

Answer 4

NO THE WORLD IS ACTUALLY GETTING SMALLER.

Answer 5

What does one have to do with the other?

Answer 6

it isn't all underground.

a lot of it is underwater.

Answer 7

The world is getting bigger, thanks to space debris.  There's a lot of it added on every year, in the many of tons, I think.  That's not why it's called a "dig", though.  First off, not all finds are underground.  Lots are, certainly, but I was out West last summer, doing surveys.  We didn't even have to dig; we just walked over areas.  Hearths, teepee rings, artifacts were all just laying there, on top of the ground.

The ones that are underground, well, there's lots of reasons for that to happen.  One is that human settlements tend to be near water.  You would not believe how much silt a flood can throw on the ground.  I know of one project that was, oh, ten or twenty feet below ground and pulling up modern soda bottles.  They were on the banks of the Ohio.

Another reason, and you can see this more in the Old World, is that people would just build on top of old sites.  Maybe their house was made of mud, and it collapsed, and they built their new one on top.  Or maybe the city burned down.  They didn't move London when it burned.  They just build on top of it.  In really old settlements, this happens so often that the city ends up being on a hill made of old city.  These are called tells.

And then there are things like plowing.  When you're doing the sort of excavation that people usually think of, you have to dig through the plow zone to see stuff in situ.  Plows muck things up and throw them around, so there's not a lot of context for artifacts, plus you can't see features.  Get below this, and you can see how the artifacts were in relation to each other.  You can also see the dark stains in the earth that show where hearths or storage pits were.  Context is incredibly important in archaeology, which is one of the reasons that professionals get really upset about amateur pot hunters.  It's not that we want all the treasure for ourselves; it's that, by moving that stuff, they destroy a lot of information about it.

There are other reasons, too, like erosion and the wind blowing stuff around.  But I think this is long enough.

Answer 8

While we do pick up a certain amount of space dust on Earth, most of the sediments that end up burying the archaeological come from other locations on the planet, either by wind, water, or some other process.

Deposition in one place generally means erosion somewhere else.

Answer 9

The earth is not getting bigger or smaller. The earth recycles itself. If you look at the point where two continents collide, the force of the two colliding continents pushes the rock from both sides down into the earth's core over time. What you are seeing at a dig site for old earth is only because the continent that it resides on has not made the journey far enough to collide with the next continent heading towards it. It will take millions or billions of years for that to happen, but it will happen. Water evaporates, but it will fall as water again.