Still there because mostly undisturbed I imagine. Any sites near human habitation get messed with pretty badly.

My wife grew up on a mesa in New Mexico - White Rock, near Los Alamos. She reports exploring as a child with neighbor kids. They found stone houses with intact pottery inside, wooden frames and tools. The kids messed with them, then the boys knocked everything down and threw the pots over the side of the mesa. Nothing left but a few broken fragments today.

We'll be running out of places for archaeologist to explore one day.

I'm curious, what residual feelings does your wife have about that destruction, realizing much later what historical significance those artifacts have?

On one hand, I'm disappointed that kids smashed a bunch of objects that had ancient significance (by our standards of replacing laptops and phones every few years). On the other, more important hand, I think that the responsibility of protecting this history falls exclusively on adults and that kids should explore, play, and have fun. Unfortunately for us, smashing things is really, really fun.

>I'm disappointed that kids smashed a bunch of objects that had ancient significance (by our standards of replacing laptops and phones every few years).

Uh, what? Though seasoned by local culture, pottery is just another mundane object in most historical contexts. Heck, in Europe there are even some sizable hills that were created because they ran out of places to discard their pottery. The waterways of cities like London are literally littered with earthware fragments from smoking apparatuses. Most ancient potteries and their fragments hold way more meaning to modern collectors and anthropologists than they ever held for their contemporaries.

You never know what "mundane" objects tell us an enormous amount about the past. There have been many discoveries where the pots themselves told us about when a certain technology was developed, how civilizations traveled/spread, or what they ate/drank.

You're missing my point; the discussion here is about the level of value objects have to those in their respective periods. I explicitly said that these objects can have a lot of value for those with an interest in research.

Akiselev was arguing that ancient pottery was somehow less mundane or disposable than contemporary objects such as laptops and phones, which isn't the case in an overwhelming majority of cases. Most ancient pottery was, to its owners, no different (in terms of significance) than our tupperware or wine bottles.

Curiously the amphorae mound (13M amphorae?) at a seaport in Italy contains shards of those used to transport oil and wine, but never garum. Its supposed to be a mystery - where did the garum pots go? Since garum stinks to high heaven I imagine the sailors were required to keep them (after decanting to more manageable local containers) and dump them overboard after leaving port. I'm expecting one day to learn of a huge undersea amphorae mound offshore.

Sorry, that was awkward wording. I meant that these mundane objects are significant now because they are hundreds of years old in a country (US) where the vast majority of houses are at most several hundred years old, cars last a few decades, and our most common objects like cell phones and laptops get cycled through almost annually.

FWIW, there's no way of knowing those houses are actually ancient artifacts.

I know of no modern population in the American Southwest that produced pottery and stone houses on mesas. It seems a pretty safe bet. The other preserved sites in the area are estimated at 500 years old. Not terribly ancient; but worth preserving.

Acoma Pueblo is currently producing pottery and stone houses on a mesa, as they've been doing for 900 years, although like everybody else, they buy a lot of their pottery at Wal-Mart. But they also make some to sell to tourists. And more of their construction is adobe than stone at the moment, but a lot of it (especially the older parts) is adobe-grouted masonry.

Wouldn't be surprising at all if those houses were 50, or 100, or 150 years old, rather than ancient artifacts.

At the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art one of my favorite things is graffiti chipped in the stone by British soldiers campaigning against Napoleon in Egypt. It's not ancient, but it's still history.

(The Temple was relocated with the cooperation of the Egyptian government when the Aswan dam would have flooded it.)

>We'll be running out of places for archaeologist to explore one day.

We are also creating new places for archeologist to explore all the time. Like time capsules, abandoned facilities and space debris.

This is actually pretty close to Palm Springs. I grew up out there.