I got to wondering about how future civilizations will interpret OUR ruins and artifacts… I want to keep this light hearted and interesting… so assume they know little about our actual times, except for ledgends and such, and that they are trying to interpret various artifacts and ruins…
Assume a general collapse, with little or no human habitation/maintenence…
Imagine you are a future archeologist and have dug up
A rubik’s Cube (unsolved)
A Rusted Hand Gun
the ruins of CERN High Energy Particle Collider
(note, these items need not be linked in any way (ie dug up at same area/level, etc)
I wonder what they will make of our funeral rites and why we worried so much about our dead needing to drink on their voyage to the beyond that we buried about half our people with two little bags of saline water.
Breast Implants … saline in plastic bags somewhere around the chest cavity. About 50 percent of the human population is female.
What would a mummified breast implant look like in a thousand years?
Can DOW answer this? Inquiring minds want to know.
What would Jane Doe, Future Archaeologist (circa 3010) think of our present and future graveyards.
Future linguists will deduce that citizens wealthy enough to live in “the Hamptons” were called “Hampsters,” and that they were powerful people.
Future archeologists will conclude that Chia Pets® were futile attempts to resurrect dead pets.
They’ll surmise that concrete goose replicas on our doorsteps were related to the spiritual journey known as “the wild goose chase.”
They’ll decide, after much argument and cogitation, that household with bibles, statues of the Bood-ha, and images of Elvis were pantheistic.
After repeated sightings of tapestries of dogs playing poker, they’ll decide that dogs were regarded as deities, and that mankind’s future success depends on following that path.
The book Motel of the Mysteries directly addresses this subject. It’s a “museum catalog” from the year 4022 which descrive the artifacts discovered from a contemporary motel which was suddenly buried, sealing it with the occupants inside. (The television is a “high altar” and the snack tray which was found next to it is obviously offerings meant for the gods-- flip the dial to indicate which one you mean to worship.)
What I believe is that future archaeologists will focus on our garbage dumps. Landfills are amazing time capsules-- almost nothing decays inside of them. (Garbage archaeologists have found banana peels from the 1940s still recognizable as such.) There is an incredible wealth of demographic information which can be gleaned from studying garbage. Anyone interested should read the fascinating book Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage.
Lissa, in that book, is civilization buried under junk mail? Because if it is, then I have clear memories of my teacher reading it aloud in grade six, and have always wondered what the title was.
They’ll be overjoyed to find all the nice nuclear material left by their ancestors. Just because we call it “waste” doesn’t mean our descendants will. After all, the Romans thought all that petroleum that kept popping up in their water wells was “waste” too.
Motel of the Mysteries also has a hilarious part on interpreting the various uses of the bathroom. It involves putting the toilet seat around your neck. Just brilliant.
In my office, I have a Wiley cartoon on my wall. It is entitled “Future Archaeology” and depicts two archaeologist looking into an open excavation which has exposed a typical cubicle in a cube farm. One of the archaeologists is saying “It appears to be some kind of late 20th century prison.”
If the furture is like the past, everything will be explained a religious.
Why did they put the trash dump here? It was a sacred spot.
Why do clocks have “12” at the top and not the bottom of the dial? Because 12 was sacred. And north was sacred. And we can ignore the fact that sundials cast a shadow on the north side, because that’s just nature, which is not sacred.
Damn. Beat me to it - seems like a gross lack of imagination on the part of archaeologists the world over - anything about which there is a smidgen of uncertainty is labelled ‘ritual object’.
Case in point: a wheeled dog figurine very much like this was described as a ritual object of uncertain purpose in a museum I visited a while back - what I don’t understand is why that isn’t just a child’s toy.
