I think one of the issues is that there's just so much of it. In many part of Europe you can find archaeology pretty much anywhere outside of cities and other areas that have been developed in modern times. The article mentions "250,000 monuments in the Republic". I went hiking around Co. Cork a few years back and you can find neolithic monuments all over the place if you pay a bit of attention.
This is surprisingly true of much of the world, though a little more evident in Europe than most places. One of the (few) fun things about fieldwalking as an archaeologist is how dense archaeological sites are. I've done very few surveys where there wasn't something every few dozen meters. You're usually within sight of a habitation site or 3 as well.
We don't see it because our built environment tends to hide it and we're not usually looking closely, but it's there.
>In many part of Europe you can find archaeology pretty much anywhere outside of cities and other areas that have been developed in modern times.
I can assure you that you can find plenty archeology within cities as well. Probably even more than on the countryside. It's just that it's all covered by several layers of development.
In the US the layer of soil where Clovis man was found has been used to determine a lower limit of where we can expect to find artifacts. But in many construction discussion groups you can find plenty of talk about stuff that has been found far deeper than the Clovis layers. Human civilization is far far older than we are led to believe.
for context, a pre Clovis society wuold mean that human came before the 13k yrs ago mark, the problem is ths the bering strait and a giant ice sheet in NA are believed to have been traversable 14k yrs ago and 40-50k yrs ago. if true, it would meand that human came to NA 40k yrs ago or that there were other ways to come to the new world. A bold theory is that polinesians/Austronesian "could" have developed some sea faring tecnique before tha proven date of 1100s AC.
