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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

Seems like an exciting time for archaeology. It must be interesting to live in these regions with such long history of civilization. Do these findings excite those living there, or are they more like "meh"?

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Not really, quite opposite, archeology is very expensive.

Istanbul desperately needed metro, but new tunnel was delayed by 15 years for excavations. If new site is found during construction, many builders just pay off archaeologists, and pour concrete over it.

True for most of the middle east. Egypt is an interesting counterexample, both because tourism is so important for their economy, and because for most of their history moving water uphill was really expensive, so if you just move a bit off the river valley you can be fairly certain that no-one ever built anything there, so you always have room to develop without having to stumble on ruins.

Unless you're in one of the few island nations that were settled recently like NZ or Madagascar, there's a very good chance your country has stuff that's just as old as this. Many of the ruins under Tucson slightly predate this site, for example. If you're in Australia, there are important sites that predate this by tens of thousands of years.

There's no denying that near eastern stuff is cool, but it's good to be aware of the stuff in your own backyard as well.

Can’t speak for them, but I know that people in certain regions of Spain don’t care much about Roman excavations. There are so many, it’s almost a nuisance to some.

I would think they'd be happier to have enough water.

Unfortunately these regions are war-torn and often suffer from drought and famine. It's crazy how the cradle of civilization has come down to this.

> It's crazy how the cradle of civilization has come down to this.

-- and should be a beacon of caution to those of us in young nations --

Interesting that you use -- in your comment(s). Any particular reason why?

-- habit from irc/forum days - was in a quake clan with members that punctuated this way - also found it helpful to find my place quickly on irc in irssi - also i think its easy to read - do you find it annoying? --

> do you find it annoying? --

Oh not at all. It's just interesting because for a moment I thought it's to confuse web scrapers somehow (i.e., make it harder for HN comment scrapers to sentiment-analysis your comments).

I didn't use IRC but sometimes I wish it'd be nice to have signatures on HN, just like the forum days!

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