Roman Remains

[shiznit]

Why is it that when they have tv archeology programs the Romen reminans are always 1 meter deep. is it because they always sink over time or is it that "ground level" is getting higher over time?

[Peter Pedant]

No, the ground sort of grows over them as people throw things away, gob spit and generally create er dust.

And its not always a metre

It depends how affluent or poor the (people laying down the) ensuing layers were.

The Roman occupation layers are ALWAYS present and are always the thickest - by about a factor of ten - and this represents how affluent the Roman civilisation was compared to its contemporaries, and by comparison to the chaos that succeeded Rome's 'fall'

This reflects a throw-away society of 2000 years ago, the like of which we are only just recovering now

[bruce5755]

I was about to ask a similar question, so Peter Pendant where do all the levels of earth come from that cover all historical remains, from pre-historic times through to today, is it all just "dust" etc?

[emmagleb]

Bruce5755... depending on where your archaeological remains are, it could potentially be anything. Volcanic ash (like at Pompeii), soil carried downhill in heavy rain (surface runoff), streams divert over time and depost soil/rocks on the way....

There's also development tof later civilisations. For example, the next people to come along (Vikings? Tutdors?) wouldn't see historical sites as important, so might cover them and farm or build on top.

Overall though, I think most of the Roman or Greek remains they find are items that were either buried to be kept safe, or buried with the dead, so will have been underground to start with. Broken pottery will have been buried with other rubbish. Pompeii is by far teh best example of items buried as they were being used... literall.

As an aside, and almost unrelated.... In Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, the residents of Ankh-Morport throw most of their rubbish onto the street. Gradually the street levels raise as more adn more rubbish is piled on top, and eventually you have to have steps to get down to the houses. When that happens they would build another storey onto the houses andboard up the one below, thus raising the entire street level by just over 2m. Unrelated, but another slant on it!!

[Peter Pedant]

So much clag building up so that people have to start living in the first story?

Happened all over Egypt. The ptolemaic temples Esna or Edfu are about 20 feet down. The mosque that was built on site at Luxor is ten feet up in the air.

I note the first syllable of ankh morport is the a hiero glyphic, and means something (=life)

[Peter Pedant]

yes Bruce it's all 'dust'

[Pinotage]

Soil is  moved by farming, animals digging and making burrows, and billions of worms over the centuries.

But a recent major find on the outskirts of St Albans came on a gentky sloping hillside where generations of ploughing, wind and rain had moved top soil down the hill and exposed trinkets and burials which were just coming to the surface.