That we know of.
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For fun, here's a link to the 10,000-year clock, built by The Long Now Foundation. The level of modern engineering, and planning, that it takes to build a clock that will operate for 10,000 years is fascinating. When you stop to think about, say, the trope of a mechanism that will slide back a 20-ton rock door reliably after 2,000 years is quite ridiculous.
And then there are those secret doors where you pull a lever and the wall opens up on its own. What kind of mechanism would be reliable after all these years?
Sticky piston.
A large stone on a ramp, kept from rolling by a wedge, to be pushed out of position, by use of mechanical advantage through a lever, seems quite doable to me. You could even utilize a smaller initial stone to kick the wedge withholding a larger stone.
Be the change you wish to see in the world
Step 1. Have money.
Step 2. Hide the money
Do you work for big-ancient-temples? It sounds like you're just setting me up so that I end up in a pit of snakes or buried in lava.
Close. I work for big-pit-snakes. Who do you think supplies the ancient temples?
You mean it isn't the folks at trap-o-mart?
If it's important enough for traps, it's important enough to be hidden. They could just be hidden well enough
Wait, Lara Croft is not real? I'm devastated.
What do you mean "media"? As in movies?
What you're describing about "getting in" to places and "treasure" is a little old school. In the before times archaeology wasn't really a thing and "antiquarians" looted old temples and tombs and sites. Their objective was to take objects which had some value.
Archaeology's primary motivation is to learn about places, the time they were active, and the people that were active in them. Obviously finding some beautiful object or treasure is exciting, but it's so exceedingly rare that it's not really a consideration.
I quite like watching time team. They have a great youtube channel now but it was a BBS series for many years. I feel like this is probably about as real a depiction of "archaeology" as you're going to get. They brush dirt away with a tiny paint brush for days and get excited when they find a tiny shard of pottery because it confirms that people were active at the site in say, the 1300s instead of the 1600s as previously thought.
In the current era, archaeologists acknowledge that accessing ancient burials and similar sites is so destructive that there are instances where we know their probably is treasure and other wonders but decide to leave it. The most famous example is The Mausoleum of Qin Shi, protected by the Terracotta army. There are other similar examples.
+1 for Time Team. Such a cool show, taught me a ton. My inner monologue now slips into a Yorkshire accent when I think about flint knapping
Movies, TV, comics, Video Games, books, etc. People in this thread have already named a few. But as you point out, archeology in reality is rarely what we see in mainstream entertainment.
Ah the Terracotta army was used in one of The Mummy movies.
Exactly, treasure hunters go for the golden objects, and while archeologists absolutely want such things, they relate to what is valued, adornment styles, and often religion, but archeologists are often just as excited, if not moreso, to find the trash pit
Lies. I saw that kid get carried off on a gurney, on Legends of the Hidden Temple.
There is one job that does what archeologist does in films: software engineers.
You have to decipher ancient languages, riddles, and have to avoid traps all the times.
Sure, you don't go into deep jungle, but you sometimes get to dive into the deep web to find traces of documentations to help resolve a specific case.
If your inline assembly is being rendered as ancient glyphs, please change your font.
They set up all those blowgun traps but forgot they didn't have the tech to actually make them blow just because a wooden lever was pulled.
Wasn't there a pharaoh that had so much mercury on the site that anyone that tried to dig his grave would get mercury poisoning?
Technically there have been ruins and tombs with traps and riddles. Take a look at some of the info about the Curse of Tutankhamun's Tomb alone, including stuff like an anthropologist named Field having his house burn down, then flood after its rebuiling (purportedly because he had accepted a mummified hand as a paperweight which came with a cursed bracelet attached).
Granted, there's no Myst or Tomb Raider-style tomb puzzles unless you count translations of ancient dialects used by the original architects/artisans/scribes/etc., but a lot of death has been associated with burial sites/tombs, whether or not you attribute them to curses or long-dormant mould being disturbed and breathed in...

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