What if it wasn't at our scale but more like late 1800s europe and limited to regions like phoenicia, mesopotamia or the mediterranean coast. Places like alexa

What if it wasn't at our scale but more like late 1800s europe and limited to regions like phoenicia, mesopotamia or the mediterranean coast. Places like alexandria have a ton of history under the city that can't be explored because people live there now but what if what people were building on top of 2-3k years ago was on top of a ruins that existed millenia before their time? When you find roman ruins for example you would stop digging right?