I agree. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's valuable. Archaeologists come in and determine if the area has any historical value or advances our understanding of the ancient past. If it does, construction stops while the finds are uncovered. If not, then continue on.

Finding yet another clay pot in Rome, one of the largest centers of population with one of the longest and most complete historical records of anywhere in the ancient world, is probably not going to be of much historical value.

In an age where you can buy 10 Roman coins on Amazon for $25 and have them delivered to your house in two days with Prime shipping, the value of common ancient Roman artifacts is made abundantly clear.

You can develop on the property, but you should also have to pay for archaeologists to excavate the site and identify artifacts of historical value. History is too full of examples of foolish cultures of the past destroying historical artifacts because they don't like them, think they are inconvenient, think they aren't significant, or want to use them as building materials. There have been plenty of cultures who basically thought "What's the point in preserving this stuff if we know the history of this stuff?" The interest of the world to retain and understand historical evidence is more important that the interest of relatively few people to make marginally more money.

>What's the alternative--people stop developing Istanbul, Rome, etc entirely?

An alternative to squeezing a few billion more people onto our already massively overpopulated planet? Madness! (and certainly unpopular among the HN crowd)