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Premise: The human race nearly destroys itself at some point and civilisation collapses. A few thousand years later a handful of survivors starts to recolonise the planet. Sifting through the detritus and landfill of the industrialised world, what discoveries will puzzle them the most?
The cryogenically frozen body of Jeff Bezos encased in his pen!s rocket. The pinnacle of human achievement.
Facebook server farms, wow all this computing - they must have been researching how to stop climate catastrophe, shame they just failed.
Plastic plants.
N+1 bikes - did you really need so many of these things just to get around.
Borosilicate glass adult toys, built to last millennia.
what discoveries will puzzle them the most?
What puzzle? They will all be for ritual purposes.
They will all be for ritual purposes
True. That's all archaeologists ever find nowadays
None of the computing stuff will have lasted. It needs archiving onto stone tablets.
Plastic bags - fossils of ancient oil-based life forms?
What puzzle? They will all be for ritual purposes.
Exactly what I planned to say. 😀
An Orange 5
and Mol's Mercedes 😉
what the giant stack of gold is for....
My wife is an archaeologist, can confirm it will all be ritual sacrifice. An example being our bi annual phone screen smash with it then replaced and kept in the ceremonial drawer to appease Amazon.
My cars will be the cause of societal collapse as they consume ever more physical and economic resources.
A six inch layer of face masks from early in the 21st Century
What if they stumble upon this thread? The Prophet Robola has a nice ring to it.
Donald Trump's Wig
Fake Plastic (Christmas) Trees
Hostess Twinkies
The pyramids.
Fake Plastic (Christmas) Trees
Accompanied by a green plastic watering can.
Donald Trump’s Wig
Mar-a-Lago resort will be most educational.
Mullet bikes.
What if the future discovery of Mar a Lago is viewed as the discovery of Nero's Palace and ushers in a new age of art and thinking?
My cars will be the cause of societal collapse as they consume ever more physical and economic resources.
And eventually we will recognise this and come to worship them as representatives of the death-bringer gods, place them on mighty pedestals, and regularly sacrifice great swathes of unbelievers in their names.
So it'll all come full circle to ritual sacrifice in the end. Which'll be nice.
So, are we assuming that the archeologists of the future will no nothing/next to nothing about us then?
That was my start point, but a bit of artistic licence is allowed.
The strange ceremonial burials of partners under flat stone slabs at the rear of dwellings....
Traces of plastic coated Canine faeces in the canopies of ancient woodland.
100mm long strips of rotted pork positioned vertically under turf with evidence of blunt force trauma.
So, are we assuming that the archeologists of the future will no nothing/next to nothing about us then?
Just look at what little we know of our distant ancestors.
They find a body in a bog and automatically its some form of ritual sacrifice, when in fact the guy probably got drunk, fell in and drowned.
So, are we assuming that the archeologists of the future will no nothing/next to nothing about us then?
There will soon be no records kept in a way that will survive the next 2000 years, so those future diggers will look back on the 21stC as a Dark Age, possibly brought on by nuclear wars, pandemics and loss of survival skills after the mid-winter cult of the Millennium Dome failed 😀
They find a body in a bog and automatically its some form of ritual sacrifice, when in fact the guy probably got drunk, fell in and drowned.
TBH some of them might have. Besides, when archeologists use the word ritual they mean purposefully repeated, not ritual in the sense of a religion or mysticism. But some bog bodies have, y'know had their throats cut, so there's that...
The puzzle of the great hedge grot extinction of the early 2000s could baffle a few.
Also post and hole remnants of decking and trampolines could lead to an assumption that there was a resurgence of pagan micro henges in suburbia about this time
It would be interesting, an actual smart phone may survive, if you've a future society that's regressed back to say; medieval equivalent (riding horses, water powered and so on) they'd have no way of finding out what it would've been for.
Little black square glass thing with an half-eaten apple symbol...you'd be flummoxed.
Robert Harris did this quite well in his book "the second sleep"
Set about 800 years in future where society collapsed and had returned to something more like medieval times, led by religion.
Edit: Apple devices do feature
The Book of Dave by Will Self for a depressing take on this
They find a body in a bog and automatically its some form of ritual sacrifice, when in fact the guy probably got drunk, fell in and drowned.
There's more to it than that, they aren't complete idiots.
They find a body in a bog and automatically its some form of ritual sacrifice, when in fact the guy probably got drunk, fell in and drowned.
There’s more to it than that, they aren’t complete idiots.
Yes, They find a body in a bog and automatically its some form of ritual sacrifice, when in fact the guy probably got drunk, got challenged by his mates to do something stupid, AND THEN fell in and drowned.
The pyramids.
the ones in Bathgate?
they aren’t complete idiots
Can't think how many times we've seen the remains with broken limbs and its always either some sort of battle, ritual sacrifice or to stop the corpse rising from the grave.
Chances are most of these people probably fell out of a tree gathering bird eggs or honey and died of their injuries, but you never ever hear that proposed as a reason.
"Clearly a seriously fractured skull, must be from a battle", and go on to describe battle injuries from whatever period.
No, he fell out a fricken tree and bashed his head in on a rock. Doesn't sound so scientific though 😕
Chances are most of these people probably fell out of a tree gathering bird eggs or honey and died of their injuries, but you never ever hear that proposed as a reason.
Or its just we tend to hear about those which are more "exciting". That said plenty of famous bodies dont have known causes of death eg most mummies and falling out of a tree has been proposed as the cause of death for Lucy.
Ritual sacrifice is normally claimed when its rather clear. I guess there is a chance though that person was really unfortunate falling out of the tree and wrapping a rope round their neck before cutting it on a branch and then finally headbutting the ground. Somewhat unlikely though.
For battle injuries there is a lot of cross over from archaeology to forensic pathology in terms of recognising what caused a specific wound or set of wounds.
Traces of plastic coated Canine faeces in the canopies of ancient woodland.
Perfectly mummified faeces attached to fossilised tree branches with a plastic attachment method that ha s a hint of a minty fragrance for some reason. Nearby will be a plastic cylindrical object with a few more of the mummified faeces in there so the logical conclusion will be that it's some form of wishing tree where locals paid to choose a prime specimen from the receptacle and attach to the tree as some sort of ritual to ensure a good harvest/ward off a bad winter/fertility ritual. The real reason will never be known as all the digital records from the era will be gone or just in an incompatible format that can no longer be viewed.
Chances are most of these people probably fell out of a tree
You do know that that's a consideration, right? But when you've found say, twenty or so bog remains that have the same tightly knotted rope buried in their necks, so that they were clearly garroted, and have the same tattoo, and have the same content of a final meal, and have their skulls bashed in or neck slit in such a way...It's maybe (just maybe, y'know?) a pattern, and maybe it was organised?
if these are just guys doing something dumb (like blokes are wont to do) then they'd have been burned like every other Joe Schmuck, because that's how most folks were disposed of back in the day. Only the very very very few were buried, and however great Joe was, unless he was someone really great, he's going to be hacked to pieces and burned (or hacked to pieces and sky buried...take your pick)
By the by, one bog body who was thought to have battle injuries has now had the skull fracture re-examined, and the consensus now is the skull damage is post-mortem, Bear in mind the the early exhumation and examination of these bodies was done mostly by amateurs with no real training and no access to the sorts of DNA and examination techniques and equipment we have now. The discovery of Otzi's wounds in his chest is a good example of this. Note also the alternative version of how he may have ended up where he did...
In my yoof a friend studied archaeology at uni. Another friend and I hatched quite a detailed plan to go and plant false artefacts at one of the digs he was working on. Unfortunately mañana got the better of us and we never followed it through.
The pyramids.
the ones in Bathgate?
Southsea