Anyone care to comment just why there is such a fascination with digging up ancient graves and why vampire or living dead shows are so prevalent in popular culture.
Fear of the unknown. Fear of people with different cultures or looks. Fear of competition due to lack of self-confidence in personal abilities. These are all common fears.
As entropy said, fear of the unknown. At one people thought there were dragons waiting to eat ships that sailed to the edge of the world. Now it’s aliens.
“why vampire or living dead shows are so prevalent in popular culture”
Well, ladies like vampires because they are the ultimate “sexy bad boys”, and men like zombies because you can blast away at them with automatic weapons or cut their heads off with samurai swords without any pesky moral quandaries.
Because they’re not graves. Anyone that tells you they’re graves are trying to lead your astray.
I think popular entertainment is a reflection of the times. The '70s film was pretty fatalistic, with lots of exaggerated violence and a projection, cities being dysfunctional and in decline, and traditional values being lost. Romantic comedy? Not so much. Tearjerkers instead. America was in the doldrums in the '70s economically and culturally so it fit the mood.
The '80s flipped it, very upbeat with lots of openly patriotic themes, the violence was made more cartoonish bright colors, bouncy music. Light romantic comedy was back on the menu. The national mood was positive (leftists were miserable, of course. They always are. But they were in retreat then).
The '90s was eclectic but there were several films that featured a 'nothing is what it seems' sort of vibe. For example The Matrix, Seven, Usual Suspects, Sixth Sense, Groundhog Day, The Truman Show. I'm not sure what that says about the zeitgeist of the era though. The effect of widespread internet access?
The last 20 years has been post-apocalyptic / zombies and superheroes everywhere. Zombies = a force of nature, the uncontrollable threat. You can't defeat the zombies anymore than you can stop a hurricane. That's never the point, its just to survive and so they are really movies about characters under extreme pressure and how some rise and some descend to the depths of human nature. Different takes on that, sometimes humanity bonds together to fight back and the threat unifies people (World War Z). Others like the Walking Dead seem to basically say that man's default is aggression, selfishness, and oppression with just a few willing to fight for the values they held before the zombies came. I tend to think zombies are used as an avatar for climate change by hollywood writers (maybe on a subconscious level, reflecting their general anxiety that the world is sitting on a knife edge).
But you know, you could name 100 exceptions to every point I made, it's just some random thoughts on the intersection of pop culture and national mood that I've had over time.
The interest in ancient graves stems from a curiosity regarding history. I guess you don’t suffer from the desire to know stuff.
Ok, I’ll bite...
To my mind, the pyramids are an increasing enigma
*razor sharp cuts in granite
*stones of size that modern cranes can barely lift and only in highly controlled settings.
* transporting those stones great distances, which cannot be explained by any marine shipping capabilities from the era we’re given
*astronomical alignment that is incredible
*no artifacts in the three largest pyramids suggest these were tombs
*MANY MANY other structures, pyramids and buildings, hundreds of flooring stones circling the structures which encompass the same unknown construction technology
*no, zero, nada hieroglyphs which show, explain, or depict the construction method
*no tools discovered which even come close to tools necessary to carve granite.
*Mathematical constants which point to very high concepts
What we may conclude...
Maybe the pyramids and sphinx are celestial calendars for future civilizations to warn or foretell of a coming event?
We have hints of catastrophism every 13k and 26k year intervals. Interestingly, the sphinx is aligned to star cycles which occur every 26k years.
...that is all
The fascination with grave digging is finding lost treasure.
The fascination with the undead is rule-breaking: Vampires don’t have to follow them. That’s what makes them cool: they’re outlaws. Sending them to hell is even cooler. And you can’t be charged with murder.
Put the two together and you have grave-robbing while performing a “service”:
“That treasure was the ill-gotten booty of a blood-thirsty vampire and I just sent him back to hell! I’ll just take his treasure as my reward. You’re welcome.”