One unfortunate reality is that looters will get to these places long before archeologists. I think they try to keep things secret, but there are limits to what you can do.
I think this is where a few humble billionaires can make a real difference, in case they're reading this :)
Correct, most archeology digs take decades because A) its hard work and you have to do it very precisely (and also we're always inventing new tech and wondering how to keep stuff in the ground) and B) There's very little money funding it - active digs might be a few weeks a year in the best of cases, and the rest of the time just trying to get money to pay the grad students basically nothing to help.
When I've gone down the Wikipedia article of ancient sites, it's amazing how many have basically been visited for 2-3 summers by a professor and some grad students, with years or even decades between visits due to funding issues or whatever
To say archaeology has shoestring budgets would be insulting to shoestrings. When I was working as a field archaeologist, I would do expeditions on less than what I make in a month working in tech. There were times when I had to seriously consider the financial trade-off between the food budget and sample dating.
Bouncing off your point - I was at the Great Wall and someone told us that after the need for the wall disappeared, villagers were looting bricks from the wall to build the things they needed until the government stepped in to stop it
Even more wild is the fact that when we're talking villagers looting the smooth-sided pyramids for stone, we're talking about the Roman Republic era and around the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty under Cleopatra.
Most of them survived well into the middle ages. There was an earthquake in the 14th century that loosened the casing stones and knocked quite a few loose. After that is when looting the stones really took off.
Funny enough, I was just reading about Percy Fawcett’s doomed expedition to find the lost city of Z in the Amazon and turns out he has been fully vindicated. He went against the general scientific consensus of the time that complex civilization was impossible and the area he is thought to have disappeared in the Xingu Park has since been found to hold a civilization of 20+ settlements and a peak populations of up to 50,000 inhabitants.
They truly are - and like you mention - modern tech is turning up more and more.
Traveling in Belize, we happened upon multiple un-excavated pyramids and other buildings. The landowner or residents knew about them and pointed them out to us, but yeah, no one has the budget to investigate even a small percentage of what's out there.
For example, these thousands of unexpected ancient sites they've found in the Amazon using Lidar recently:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/feb/06/a...
One unfortunate reality is that looters will get to these places long before archeologists. I think they try to keep things secret, but there are limits to what you can do.
I think this is where a few humble billionaires can make a real difference, in case they're reading this :)