Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/24/archaeological-site-discovered-where-new-archaeology-lab-is-under-construction.html
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archaeolo-ception? 
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Obligs oldie:
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I think it would be ironic if the archeologists said to carry on with the building process and not let excevations hold up the work.
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The article seems to be saying that the house was underground and was excavated.
I don’t understand how a house that is only 360 years old has to be excavated.
There are countless buildings that are older than that, that are not buried.
Maybe I misunderstood the article.
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In the 60s a bunch of Viking age shipwrecks were found in Roskilde Fjord in Denmark. They were excavated and a museum was built to house them. When they built the Viking ship museum for that batch of ships they found… a bunch of medieval ship wrecks
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Convenient.
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Structures end up under the soil for all sorts of reasons. Have you ever seen an abandoned and razed building? After a short while it kinda just disappears under vegetation.
When a building enters the archaeological record it doesn’t really get “buried” as such. It’s more that the parts of it that are already under the walking levels (cellars and foundations or post holes or drainage ditches, etc.) are still there even if the rest is razed or falls into disrepair. Sometimes, when we’re lucky, a wall might collapse and over time be buried under vegetation and then soil like I mentioned above, but most of the time it’s just the parts of the building that were underground in the first place.
This is the site in question.
What you see here a foundation walls, not the actual building walls that you would have seen in the 17th century.
They also found other things that were underground, like cellars and this well (the pillar with rebar was obviously sunk in later)
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Only they hadn’t planned for that, of course, so the new ships didn’t end up in that museum. They’re still in storage in Copenhagen.
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And when they build a structure to display those boats, well I’m sure you can assume what will happen next
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Okay I misunderstood. I thought they were saying the house was intact and was buried.
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Yeah, unfortunately that only really happens with sudden violent disasters and is thus extremely uncommon. There is a reason Pompeii and Herculaneum are so famous. They’re archaeological black swan events.
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I’d say that is pretty fortunate, actually. 
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… is really interesting. To me.
Smooth rods with walking-cane bends at the reinforcement joint, brick rubble as concrete aggregate… Looks early 20th Century to me. Possibly from a time when high quality building materials were a bit thin on the ground like during WW I or the depression.
It also looks like somebody started building a pile foundation and then stopped. The rebar poking out is supposed to go into a base plate and/or a rising support, but the way it looks that never happened.
Abandoned Project?
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Are they smooth? They look ribbed to me, but rust obscures a lot. I was wondering the same thing. Obviously I don’t have the expertise to date it from the picture like you did, but I was also thinking an abandoned pile foundation. Unfortunately the website where I stole the pic has no further info.
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Bending the ends in a 180° hook is typical for smooth rods. It’s to prevent slippage1) between rebar and concrete. And that’s why profiled2) rebar was developed in the first place. No more wasting time and resources making hooks that get entangled with each other as well as with anything else that happens to be around.
In a reinforcement joint with profiled rebar you just let the straight bars overlap.
Every now and then there will be a component where there isn’t enough room to anchor back straight bars, like at the end of a beam where it rests on its support. The easiest way to get around this is to add more bars to lower the tension in each individual bar to the point where it won’t pull itself out of the concrete.3) Where that isn’t an option, some (or even all) of the bars will get a 90° hook to act as an anchor.
1) Which is also why it doesn’t hurt if rebar is just a little bit rusty. Flaking is bad, obviously, and you also don’t want anything rusted away past its nominal diameter. But a rough surface is good. As long as the component you’re building is properly designed and the concrete is properly mixed, poured, compacted and cured, the rust will stop right there and won’t be a problem.
2) Condoms are ribbed. Compacting the poured concrete with vibrators comes with enough lame jokes already.
3) Steel and concrete are supposed to form a composite, after all. Which would not work if concrete really didn’t have any tensile strength. We just pretend that to make the calculations a lot easier. Engineers are quite lazy pragmatic that way.
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Turtles? Ok, not turtles, then. 
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Some people here are not archaeologists, and their reaction is expected to be “Huh. That’s cool.”
Some people here are archaeologists, or similarly inclined, and their reaction is to go to google and find more information in less than three minutes.
BoingBoing is a blog of mostly wonderful things. It’s not the Journal of Archaeological Science.
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Splitters!
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