ChatterBank1 min ago
archealogical digs
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.In pretty much the same way my floor gets covered in dust, only there's more of it because digs tend to be outdoors and dust, dirt, rain and so forth land on them for centuries - and then maybe other civilisations come and go on top of it all, so you get crumbling buildings and rubbish all piling up and decaying...
It's not always like that; in the desert, for instance, you may come across long-dead caravan cities where artifacts are just lying on the ground waiting to be picked up.
In England worms cause boulders to sink. They travel under rocks and then bring the earth up to the surface. The worm casts slowly build up round the boulders, the earth recompacts beneath and the boulders disappear. This is in the book that Charles Darwin wrote about earthworms (yes, that Charles Darwin). I don't see why it shouldn't apply to smaller objects as well as all the things that jno mentioned
Walls and foundations (think time team) survive as over time, particularly in towns the street levels rise due to the accumulation of dirt, the laying of new surfaces etc which significantly altars the ground level.
Natural land movements such as landslides and building collapses preserve a lot of material which we now uncover, famously in pompeii form the volcanic ash.
Other ways of getting buried are more simple - a labourer working in a field might drop a coin, which is hard to find, and would get worked into the soil.
Any bits of interest such as precious metals or weapons, and anything of value would not be left where possible, so the artefacts buried now are either religious context, or not worth keeping in antiquity.
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