What would baffle future archeologists about your home area?

[Lukraak_Sisser]

Sometimes archaeologists find things that they just cannot explain directly. Often this is then filed under cultural oddity of some kind.

As a thought experiment, what perfectly mundane thing in your home area would make virtually no sense to future archaeologists if your town were to be buried Pompeii style and excavated millennia later?

As a start:
Near the train station I use daily there is a stretch of road that used to run past the station. During a renovation a few years back they closed off one end and it turned into a service road.
However, during a more recent renovation they've now closed off the other end as well, but kept the road in between the bits intact, as digging it up would just cost money and it's not in anyone's way.
So there is a perfectly good bit of asphalt, with the same markings as every standard 2 lane road in the area, but it's closed off in such a way that no vehicle needing such a road could ever get to it.

 

[Shadow the Poodle]

I have two cabinets filled with Diecast model cars, no doubt , in years to come,some archeologist will wonder who the gods Schumacher, Senna and Button were and why I worshipped their wheeled chariots in effigy

 

[arthwollipot]

At the training ground for the medieval group, there must be hundreds of loose links of (chain) mail trampled into the ground.

 

[Reeco]

A roundabout with traffic lights, both to get on/off it and halfway around it.

 

[Sockor]

Garden swings made of pressure-treated wood.
Those things are everywhere and they're nigh indestructible. Obviously a place of worship, possibly an altar.

 

[TragicMonkey]

There's a six hundred foot tall arch that isn't a bridge and doesn't do anything or serve any purpose. Futuremen will likely assume it was a cargo cult attempt to create a Stargate.

 

[angrysoba]

There's a six hundred foot tall arch that isn't a bridge and doesn't do anything or serve any purpose. Futuremen will likely assume it was a cargo cult attempt to create a Stargate.

You'll wipe that schmirk off your face when those Futuremen actually appear through the arch.

 

[sophia8]

There's a six hundred foot tall arch that isn't a bridge and doesn't do anything or serve any purpose. Futuremen will likely assume it was a cargo cult attempt to create a Stargate.

Like the Striding Arches, in my neck of the woods. Portals, right?
Goldsworthy's done a heck of a lot of 'land art' that's going to puzzle future archeaologists - they're going to surmise that this, for instance, was once some sort of ritual trackway, perhaps for the souls of the dead.
And what would they make of the Witness Cairn - a big pile of stones inside a stone-walled enclosure, all bearing painted, inked or carved messages? They'd assume some tribal leader was buried there, but they'd dig in vain.

 

[Dinwar]

On a jobsite once a worker found a cairn--a bunch of stones piled up on one another. Everyone thought it was a grave marker. Turns out someone simply put a bunch of rocks at the base of a survey stake to hold it up.

At my grandfather's farm he has a bunch of bits of metal nailed to posts. One time he pointed at one and said "What is it?" I had no idea. "Come on, you jsut got done using one!" Still no clue. Turns out it was a spar throtal control for his (International H) tractor.

You don't need to assume gods or the like--simply taking a common bit of material out of context can baffle people that grew up around them.

 

[JoeMorgue]

- Why our local area decided to build a half dozen underwater tunnels instead of much simpler, cheaper, and more efficient bridges would probably seem weird if our hypothetical future archaeologist didn't understand the dynamics of the Naval Base and International Terminal shipping traffic.

- As with most areas we have at any given time several half finished road, rail, or similar construction projects that at the time seem to go nowhere.

- I once heard a joke that "Someday future archaeologists will dig up tanning beds and think we fried people as a means of torture."

 

[Dinwar]

- I once heard a joke that "Someday future archaeologists will dig up tanning beds and think we fried people as a means of torture."

I sort of fell into studying Medieval torture methods (I tracked down one reference, and suddenly everyone I knew was handing me studies on the topic!). It's actually fairly interesting. The most interesting part is learning what WEREN'T used in torture. Basically, in the Middle Ages torturers used whatever was lying around. They didn't make complex, intricate tools of gleaming metal and sharp edges; they just tied you down to sawhorses and broke your fingers with a hammer. The reason for this discrpenecy was that people in the Renaissance and Victorian times wanted to make the Middle Ages appear more sadistic.

We torture people today. The question is, just how screwed up is the future view of it going to be? Water boarding is a pretty efficient way to torture people, in that it doesn't require anything that most of us don't have lying around. Dig up a few S&M sites, get someone who wants to portray our era as savagely brutal, and suddenly we're being presented as a culture where 3 out of every 5 people were being routinely zapped with specialized cattle prods.

 

[TsuDhoNimh]

The various New Ager structures built in Arizona where they think the Sedona Vortex REALLY is (conflicting ideas on where these vortices are, mostly because they want people to pay to use THEIR structure, not the neighbor's) could baffle archaeologists for a few moments.

There are "medicine wheels", various mazes, and some odd pyramids.

 

[LSSBB]

They will wonder, fruitlessly, why the heck this enormous factory was built in Harvard, IL, only to be abandoned a few years later:

 

[rjh01]

Anything that requires helium either to use or to manufacture. That will be a rare element in the future. Maybe even some rare earths. They may be mined out, so anything made with them would be strange. Our use of oil and coal would shock them as environmentally dangerous. Our rubbish tips. We throw so much away that should be recycled.

This assumes that humans survive to dig our remains up.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Don't many of these examples of future bafflement require some sort of humongous historical discontinuity?

What would have to happen, for example, for knowledge of the Gateway Arch to disappear but enough of the ruins of the Arch itself to remain to confuse future scientists?

 

[Ray Brady]

Nothing. Future archeologists are going to have it all figured out, man.

 

[IMST]

Gum wall.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

Bicycle racks.

Around here there is a pretty common bicycle rack design that just consists of a big metal pipe bent up and down, up and down, etc. with a “U” at the top and bottom. The ends of the pipe are embedded in cement. People can lift a tire over one of the bottom “U” bends to put their bike into a slot and lock it to the pipe/rack.

If you don’t know what it is, or have some context, they look rather odd. It looks like something you would fill with liquid or gas for heating/cooling purposes. For a future archeologists, consistently finding these weird pipes next to business sites, but not connected to anything, could pose a bit of a head scratcher.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Anything that requires helium either to use or to manufacture. That will be a rare element in the future.

Except for all those countless billions of suns out there. There might be a teensy bit of helium in those.

 

[LSSBB]

Mood rings.