One of the worst things an archeologist knows is that more is lost than is saved everywhere, always.

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As an example, there is a civilization in the South East Arabian peninsula during the Iron age. They leave basically no traces. We don't have them in the bronze age, in the copper age, in the stone age, and suddenly in the Iron age they work iron, except there is no iron locally. The Mesopotamian cultures talk about taxing them for their use of the rivers, and then they talk about them domesticating camels so they don't use the rivers. There is no clear hierarchy, they never become an empire, but all the empires around them talk about them being there. They left a few shards of writing, they left a string of villages along a wadi.

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There is a thousand years of prehistory there. 1000 summers and winters uninterrupted in this wadi, generations of people lived and died and we have 10 of their villages and 2 shards of their writing. We don't know their kings, or their gods, their food or their families, we don't even know what they called themselves. But for a thousand years they were there, and we only know for certain that we don't know anything.