Comment by lb1lf
2 days ago
Oh, he works for the county, but happened to live just up the hill from us.
There's so much old stuff around here that he is basically being called out to perform an assessment every time anyone wishes to build anything.
Where we live now, for instance, there are a handful of burial mounds from God knows when (all plundered long ago), lots of old charcoal pits, a couple of late stone age fish traps in the lake in a corner of our farm.
To exaggerate just a little - where we could build our home was basically dictated by where we could find a spot noone had claimed thousands of years ago...
As someone from a place that is less than a century old this sounds incredible!
It is until you try to build something!
(Nothing quite like watching an archeologist go 'Oooh, that's interesting!' during a dig to establish whether you can go ahead building on your chosen spot...)
Isn't that solved by rescue archaeology ? Here in the Czech Republic everything has been settled for many thousands of years - so you basically automatically call the archeologists for any construction, they will check the area, record any interesting findings and retrieve artifacts of interest. Then the are is free to be used for the construction project.
Something like that is happening right now here in Brno:
https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/veda-skoly-po-prioru-zbyla-brn...
A massive construction project & equally massive archaeology operation - mapping the remains of old textile factories, an old channel and rail line, fish storage tanks, a mill, a villa and even a cemetery or two.
The archaeology work is wrapping up in a month or two & then the construction crews will take over the site (they already work in the areas that have been fully searched) to finish the construction project (which includes a 13 meter deep water tight "tub" due to a very shallow water table for the basement levels or 200 meter deep geothermal energy piles, etc.).