Some things would get missed though. I’m sure they would recognize that Smoky is a bear wearing a hat but would not infer that it signified “don’t start forest fires”.
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This isn’t really a GQ, and although a bunch of books are mentioned, it’s not really for Cafe Society, either. I guess since the OP is looking for opinions and guesses, IMHO is the place. So moved.
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You’re thinking of silicone, not silicon. Still kinda funny, though…
Unless he was thinking of fembots.
Where are you getting your information? PMMA (the plastic in CDs and DVDs) lasts an outrageously long time. It’s not attacked by biological organisms, and doesn’t oxidize. steel will rust away before those discs will.
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/38/3/551.pdf
It’s true that CDs and DVDs are given short lifetimes in recent articles, but that;'s for how long they last for playing (and I suspect the lifetimes they give are way too short), based on the coatings coming off. But i think that you can still extract useful information from the substrate even after the coating’s gone for a permanently-made (not re-recordable) disc. If, of course, you know to look for it.
Well, I’m no expert on this but certainly there are materials that we know last thousands of years, since there are countless relics around that have survived that long: concrete, various metals, gold, diamonds, glass etc.
If we’re talking millions of years some of the above will likely survive but also, what about fossilisation? I’d be willing to bet that much of our junk will be capable of forming fossils in the right conditions. It’s not like bone is some super long-lasting material.
So that’s another potential answer to the OP: they might think there was a second explosion of life, like the Cambrian explosion. Suddenly life took on diverse shapes like discs, rectangles or 8-inch cigar shaped.
(joking aside, they’ll piece together everything about us)
I’d like to think that in 1,000,000 years they’ll find a huge pile of cartridges in the desert. They know what machine the cartridges work with and they future sits down to play the Atari E.T. game and goes nuts trying to finish it. Wars break out. Mass suicides occur. Madness sweeps across the land.
It’s one thing for techno-archaeologists to figure out how to read a CD-ROM, but quite another to break the CSS encryption on a Transformers DVD. But maybe they’re better off not knowing.
More seriously, if we stop publishing books on physical media in another 10 or 20 years, then our legacy will depend entirely on future humans’ ability to use an iPad or a Kindle.
More on the durability of modern media: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/mar/03/research.elearning
They don’t call it worshiping the porcelain god for nothing! 
I think you mean a story by Arthur C. Clarke. In the distant future, Venusians travel to an Ice Age Earth. No living humans. The find various artifacts, mostly incomprehensible, including a Mickey Mouse film. They manage to play it back. There’s a neat ending where the Venusian archeologists note that at the end of the film, the face of the hero is constricted into a circle surrounded by blackness, as the face displays powerful emotions. * What does it mean? *
The title of the story eludes me, but the nightmarish force of this little story came right back after not having read it for like 45 years.
I just want to see their faces when they figure out diapers…“They wrapped their own children in feces!!!”
My favourite of this type is 'Treasures of the Aquarians
My favourite is the “Aqua Bed” and the Whamo plastic plates/dinnerware (Frisbee)
“A startling and important archaeological discovery was recently made in the
area of our planet once known as California, when a cache of artifacts dating
from the 1960s was unearthed, relatively intact, during the building of the
transglobal tunnel.”
" Various examples were found throughout the dig site, leading some researchers to believe that the MINIMAL SKIRT was a fundamental element of the Aquarian female child’s wardrobe."
Perhaps something like this?
It would be interesting if they landed in 3 places. One an eskimo village. The 2nd NYC. The third in Borneo. That would be fun when their dating techniques found them the same age.
Vast differences between contemporary cultures is business as usual in present-day archaeology and anthropology. You could pick, say, 1000 AD and find locations where Stone Age hunter-gatherers are in full swing and others where universities and cathedrals rise. Or, say the 1950’s: primitive pastoralists and subsistence agriculturalists, even some H-Gs alongside nuclear power, television sets, automobiles and skyscrapers.
Unless my information is incorrect, the world did not end 1000 AD.
A US military guy on another forum I lurk told the story of how during Operation Iraqi Freedom, through a paperwork SNAFU, his Air Assault infantry unit a few hundred kilometers from the shore was issued a ship anchor. Not a zodiac or similar small boat anchor, either : apparently the thing had to be delivered by flatbed trailer. The grunts had a grumblefest and just left it there, somewhere between Najaf and Kerbala, when they moved out.
As a poster on that forum said, in a thousand years an archaeologist is going to get really confused.
Its called History Lesson. Wonderful story. The man is a master.
No, it will be gone.
Even here in fairly wealthy America, we have people who scavenge scrap metal items & aluminum cans and sell them for the value of the metal. That anchor is a very large item of high grade metal; it will be worth quite a bit. Even to a local blacksmith. So in a country like Iraq, it will be gone long any archaeologists get there. Even if it has to go in pieces, it will be gone before too long.
I believe Arthur C. Clarke wrote a SF short story (“History Lesson”, if I recall), where a ship from another civilization finds the remnants of Humanity amidst the barren and frozen future Earth. The major item that intrigues them is a movie reel, which they assume to be some sort of record of the way of life among the intelligent civilization of our world, concluding that life on Earth was all about violence and car chases.
(Sorry, didn’t read thread. This story was already mentioned.)
I took a History of Native Americans course once where it was mentioned that anthropologists can date the domestication of corn partially by the increased rate of tooth decay and dental problems in skeletons brought on by the high starch diet. This not being GQ, I didn’t look too hard for a cite but this page mentions the effects of early agricultural diets versus the hunter-gatherer thing.
Our own dental issues can help future generations date when we started adding forms of sugar to everything that hit a plate and relying on processed foods.