That is a joke that we use in Israel because of all of the antiquities that are buried in Jerusalem. literally, if you dig a whole anywhere, you will dig up some broken pottery, which theoretically could be an excavation. The truth is that if you have 2500 old cultural locations, you have city built upon city, built upon city. Most of what you find is the trash of ancient civilizations.
I read James Michner’s “The Tell” a long time ago. Really interesting stuff on how the first village was built on a bit of a hill for protection. When it would get attacked and destroyed they’d built another town on top of it (and a bit higher). The book starts off with the people on the modern town (and now on a hill, or tell, 100 feet tall or whatever), and then Michner backward in time through the generations and down through the excavations.
James Michener wrote a book called, “The Mound,” IIRC. Read it decades ago but it followed the timeline of a fictional ‘city’ as you described.