[Swizec]

You are right. The details are usually more known to science than to locals and infrastructure/building projects spur many archaelogical digs in Europe. To the point that most projects have to budget an archaeology time delay because you’re always going to hit something.

My comment was about completely undiscovered ruins/sites. Those are rare. Someone somewhere (could be a notebook) usually knows about it.

As for “no oral traditions in a country with long-standing books” – the Brothers Grimm famously started writing down oral traditions in the 1800’s. That’s only 200 years ago :) For a long long time in most of europe nobody bothered to write down what the peasants have to say.

[usrusr]

Yeah, completely undiscovered does not happen, with the exception perhaps of battle sites which seem to keep catching archeologists by surprise. What does happen is discoveries of the kind "so we dug up this old thing, because it's in the way of some project, and we discovered that it contains identifiable traces of something much older that we did not expect."

The concept we both seem to be tiptoeing around is the idea that the best conservation approach is leaving it in the ground, for future archeologists to explore or not explore. I believe that this is a central principle of the modern approach to archeology, and one we laymen struggle to really take in. Yes, there are many sites known to science, but not analyzed to destruction by science.