(www.smithsonianmag.com)
It seems reasonable a similar thing happened here even as far back as the 1870s when the original construction was taking place.
It lead to many treasures reaching museums etc instead of being melted down! It's still in effect, and still pays higher-than-melting prices: https://www.raa.se/kulturarv/arkeologi-fornlamningar-och-fyn...
If you don't leave anything behind, future generations can just build without caution, because the past will forever be shrouded in mystery. Let's not repeat ancient civilizations' mistakes.
But at least they finished it. Of the original San Francisco-to-Los Angeles high-speed rail system, Newsom has spent $14.8B over the past 18 years and it has zero operational miles of fast train.
There is a high probability that Elon will be reporting that from Mars to make a point LOL
Edit: Actually it was Seattle, you can still visit its old ground level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
A US city often overlooked for some intricate people explorable underground spaces is Cincinnati: https://www.visitcincy.com/blog/post/unmistakably-cincinnati...
Some of Cincinnati's underground exists from plans to build subway trains that never completed. I think that makes Cincinnati's particularly sad being that it constitutes a perpetually unfinished public works/public transportation project.
Relatedly to that, Atlanta also has a tiny underground leftover from passenger train lines that ended passenger travel decades ago (and so was turned into a mall, because America): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Atlanta
Mexico City is a quick plane ride from the USA, and while some of their ruins are buried, you can hop a short bus ride outside the city to walk among standing ruins of Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.
I've been on the Great Wall of China and all over the world and Teotihuacan was fascinating for me to see. Even more intriguing, no one knows who built it. Aztecs discovered it many centuries after it was abandoned and forever wondered about its origin.
Archeology is my fav.
There is strong evidence it was a multi-ethnic city, especially since there are distinct ethnic neighborhoods based on artifacts such as pottery. No trace of writing or how the city and government were organized, and whether a ruling elite called the shots or if there were ruling families from different ethnic groups working together.
(Seriously, though, _is_ anything much known about them beyond that?)
Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.
44,000 years of continuous human occupation. (Except for a brief period during the 20th century ..)
We used to smoke weed on the roman wall behind my friend’s high school. Very popular hangout spot. Lots of people using it for rock climbing practice (you’re not far off the ground and can climb laterally for hundreds of meters).
The local castle, about 1000 years old, is a popular makeout spot for teens.
Anyway yes we have some comparatively old stuff here, you get used to it quickly. Colleague lives in cca 400 years old house, nothing special. Just more building restrictions, not because its somehow protected but simply due to meter-thick stone walls and corresponding architecture, statics and so on. One couldn't tell if its 100 years old or 400 from outside. After renovation even less (it was a farm house before, so french state doesn't feel the urge to interfere with his property).
Later in life, I found out why. It's not that I didn't like history, I just don't like the sanitized version taught to me in primary/secondary school. It's like corporate public relations where they vaguely acknowledge wrongdoing, but communicate in a very weaselly way to downplay it.
The rote response I hear from the USA fandom is always some variation of "WELL THEM INDIANS DID BAD THINGS TOO" and it's like... ok? Then why obfuscate? If everyone is equally bad or whatever weird thing you're trying to say, why not just lay out all the cards and let me decide for myself how to interpret the history?
For example, most of what is known about the Commanches comes from letters and diaries of white people who were in contact with them, or were enslaved by them.
See "Empire of the Summer Moon" by Gwynne.
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
It's a fantastic account, and I'm amazed nobody has made an epic miniseries about it.
On an unrelated note, Gwynne's book is fine as a fantasy story, but it's very badly regarded from the perspective of narrative history. Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire is a much better book arguing a largely similar position. Don't take that as applying to later books by the same author, sadly.
TBF, so do some folks in the U. S.; though in most cases, just barely.
And then we went to Paestum, which is an even older Greek settlement in Italy - with the original Greek temples still standing. Mindblowing, and I'm used to old stuff being around(a friend of mine lives in a house where a portion of it is a listed structure dating to the 12th century, it's just a bathroom and a storage room for them lol).
It almost seems hard not to find ancient ruins. It then becomes a question of priorities and resource allocation.
Walk through a modern subway, see bits & pieces of ancient history all over the place. Buy icecream, sit on a bench that labourers hacked out of stone 2ky ago.
Which is why ancient ruins in construction sites are often covered up, unreported, or even destroyed.
So instead of keeping lockdown, they killed bunch of innocent people just to have a party! What sort of person would do that!?
At that time we had military trucks in Italy hauling dead bodies, because regular services could not keep up with all the corpses!
I did not say they were "murderers", manslaughter is different. More like driving car drunk because you just do not give a shit!
Ask experts and stop troling!