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> It was common for buildings in the middle ages and almost at any time in history to reuse rocks from the nearby ruins from older civilizations. After all thos

> It was common for buildings in the middle ages and almost at any time in history to reuse rocks from the nearby ruins from older civilizations. After all those were readily available and saving weeks of work could mean the difference between having a dwelling and death. I'm sure that the choice between a dwelling or death was sometimes the case, but it's not like they needed such a stark pro to override the con of destroying archæological remains. It was simply that at the time there was no such thing as wanting to preserve useless old things that happened to be there, and reusing conveniently available building blocks was a no-brainer.

franciscop 4y ago
Something that I've learned recently that we're very misinformed is the concept of the "lazy peasant". Apparently for most of history, people and communities were very often at the brink of death by starvation[1], so saving weeks of unrelated work that you can be spend on producing food is very likely a thing that more often than not would improve your survival chances greatly. Of course as you say "historical relevant" was also not a concept as well for the common folks. [1] Sure it'd be very seasonal, where you could go few years in a row with excess of food! But excess food was "bad" as well, so then what people got that they worked in reducing producing the amount of food to prefer diversifying their crops to reduce risk of a big event wiping their whole farm.