What would baffle future archeologists about your home area?

[NutCracker]

On viewing that clip, one of "those who will appreciate it" remarked that maybe the Netherlands' drug laws are just a little too lax!

Indeed, drug laws will be a major source of bafflement. In some geographical regions soil concentrations of methyl (1R,2R,3S,5S)-3- (benzoyloxy)-8-methyl-8-azabicyclo[3.2.1] octane-2-carboxylate will be found so high that some archeoligists will believe that the substance was, for unknown reasons, excluded from applicable drug law.

 

[Delvo]

Ahem.

You not only beat him to it, but also got the location right.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

The fact that many Females were buried with ceremonial bags of silicon inserted into their chest cavities...

Because future archaeolologists are going to be stupid?

 

[aggle-rithm]

They'll probably wonder why our bodies are so well-preserved, having spent a lifetime eating food laced with so many preservatives.

 

[TragicMonkey]

They'll probably wonder why our bodies are so well-preserved, having spent a lifetime eating food laced with so many preservatives.

They're more likely to be screaming and scrabbling for their photon laser pistols, but all to no avail, for UndeadMonkey is immune to energy weapons! Mwah hah hah! Woe to all who venture within the dreaded Tomb of the Monkey!!!!*





*The warning sign at the entrance clearly states, in hieroglyphics, "Don't come inside, or I will."

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Because future archaeolologists are going to be stupid?

Well, I wouldn't say stupid, but you have to realize that sometimes there's very little information on which to base a guess, and no context. In fact sometimes the closest other thing you can date in the area is from a few thousands of years before or after.

So you find some guy hanged and tossed in a bog, and you really have no idea wth happened there. So you come up with a hypothesis like "we think it was some kind of sacrifice to ensure fertility". And maybe it's right too. Or maybe the guy hanged himself, and they chucked him there instead of burying him because suicide was forbidden. Or whatever.

I really don't think it's necessary to assume anyone stupid to imagine them stumped by something that is a couple of dark ages behind and lacking context, especially if it resembles nothing their own civilization is doing.

So let's say you find a couple of partial skeletons from 5000 years ago and, since those bags aren't really built to withstand roots and geologic kinds pressures, a lot of silicone fluid smeared all over and contaminating the ground around the bones. WTH were those guys doing with fluid silicone? Some kind of ritual anointing the body, maybe?

There's no reason to expect that they'd still use silicon for that (they may have found better ways to enlarge breasts by then) or even that they still are obsessed with gigantic breasts. There are plenty of historically documented societies that, on the contrary, liked small breasts. At least some Roman women for example tied a piece of cloth over their breasts to flatten them and make them look smaller.

You get some people from such a society digging up the silicone-contaminated bones and they might not even imagine anything similar.

 

[LSSBB]

I think future archaeologists around here will ponder fruitlessly about why they keep finding small plastic, rubber and fiber balls at the bottom of waterbeds, accompanied ocassionally by metal rods with knobby ends.

 

[The Don]

The archaeologists will think it's a worldwide religious cult which required adherents to make spherical dimpled offerings in water shrines. The offerings are dedicated to the individual household gods, Nike, Titleist and TopFlite

 

[Bikewer]

I used to speculate that if the future archeologists dug up one of the mall gift stores, they'd decide that we ancients worshipped three individuals.
Jesus Christ, John Wayne, and Elvis Presley.

Down where I live, if we had a pyroclastic flow that instantly covered everyone in ash ala' Pompeii, they'd be mystified by the bodies of four rednecks all clustered around the open hood of a truck with a V-8 engine...All in poses of worship and respect...

 

[Senex]

If we are being monitored by long range telescope -- light years from now when the light gets back to those monitoring -- this battle may be a chin scratcher.

 

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Near me, on some common land, they planned to build a military prison. This was about 200+ years ago.

They got as far as measuring the site and laid marker stones to delimit where the corners of the building were going to be. These stones are still visible but are slowly sinking into the Surrey clay.

In the future, I imagine someone mapping these stones and finding they form a precise geometric pattern. Then some conspiraloons with say they are an alien spaceship landing site.......

 

[Dr. Keith]

The archaeologists will think it's a worldwide religious cult which required adherents to make spherical dimpled offerings in water shrines. The offerings are dedicated to the individual household gods, Nike, Titleist and TopFlite

Is that so far from the truth?

 

[Travis]

Three hundred meters from where I now sit lays the Scientology Vault. An old gold mine in a nothing town in the middle of nowhere has been converted into a special sealed chamber where the Church Of Scientology stores all their most sacred texts.

"I can't believe how easy this was" —L Ron

It is so deep underground that it will likely survive whatever disaster resets humanity to the stone age. As such it might be the only large collection of religious texts that survives to be studied in the future.

 

[Delvo]

They got as far as measuring the site and laid marker stones to delimit where the corners of the building were going to be. These stones are still visible but are slowly sinking into the Surrey clay.

At the University of Missouri, there was once a building called "Academic Hall" whose face was dominated by six very big columns. The building burned, the debris was taken away, and chains were wrapped around the columns to pull them down, but that plan was canceled when somebody decided either that they'd make a good local landmark or that pulling them down and cutting/breaking them up and hauling the pieces away just wasn't worth the bother. So now they still stand, I think over a century later, in the middle of a grass lawn surrounded by slightly more recent buildings, all but one of which aren't as tall as the columns (and the exception is just because of a dome in the middle of it).

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

If they found the stumps of the Gateway Arch and tried to reconstruct it they'd have a lot of fun deciding what it was for. We can't assume they would understand the geographic significance, so it might be interpreted as a boundary marker of some kind. Or a Stonehenge-type building. If they correlated it with Cahokia's main mound they could have even more fun.

 

[LSSBB]

If they found the stumps of the Gateway Arch and tried to reconstruct it they'd have a lot of fun deciding what it was for. We can't assume they would understand the geographic significance, so it might be interpreted as a boundary marker of some kind. Or a Stonehenge-type building. If they correlated it with Cahokia's main mound they could have even more fun.

They'd find it's likeness in all the buried gift shop souvenirs.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

At the University of Missouri, there was once a building called "Academic Hall" whose face was dominated by six very big columns. The building burned, the debris was taken away, and chains were wrapped around the columns to pull them down, but that plan was canceled when somebody decided either that they'd make a good local landmark or that pulling them down and cutting/breaking them up and hauling the pieces away just wasn't worth the bother. So now they still stand, I think over a century later, in the middle of a grass lawn surrounded by slightly more recent buildings, all but one of which aren't as tall as the columns (and the exception is just because of a dome in the middle of it).

The way I heard the story is that one column was erected for every virgin that graduated Mizzou over the years. . .

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Well, I wouldn't say stupid, but you have to realize that sometimes there's very little information on which to base a guess, and no context. In fact sometimes the closest other thing you can date in the area is from a few thousands of years before or after.

So you find some guy hanged and tossed in a bog, and you really have no idea wth happened there.

But remains of women with silicon implants aren't tossed in bogs, are they?

If the silicon implants survive intact, it won't likely be past a large enough discontinuity in the historical record for them to know virtually nothing about our civilization. If direct records of these implants didn't exist, they should be able to make an educated guess what they were based on what information survived about our culture.

I'm not saying there won't be some small things that they won't be able to have a clue about (something that is true even about people today dealing with odd bits of things found from our own society), but silicon implants and what the Gateway Arch was won't likely baffle any future archaeologists. For there to be a large enough historical discontinuity to put those things beyond their ability to figure out would likely erase traces of those things. (Remember, we have historical records of ancient monuments that no longer exist at all. It seems the historical records of really big things outlast those big things.)

 

[Dinwar]

If the silicon implants survive intact,

That's a pretty big assumption. Graves tend to not be nice places for squishy things. Plus, there are collection biases to account for--they may not realize that they're missing anything (only 20% of foot sesimoid bones, by some estimates, are recovered).

Recovery is going to be as important as preservation. In order for them to know they should collect something they have to know what they're seeing. I get this a lot in my job--I'll see a fossil where no one else can. Simple training: I've seen a lot of fragmentary bone, and know what to look for. The others haven't, so don't. Similarly, you or I would know more or less what the important bits of, say, a computer are--fragments of the case would be less significant than a motherboard fragment, a mouse is critical though it may be disarticulated, etc. But if you've never seen a computer before, you have no idea what you're even looking at, much less which bits are important to understanding the function and role of the thing in that society. And if you don't see it, you don't collect it, so you don't have it to study.

 

[arthwollipot]

Speaking of bogs, our house is built on a cut-and-fill in the side of a hill. The area outside our back door turns into a muddy mess when it rains. We've put old carpet down to try and mitigate the problem, but it only works for a while.

Future archaeologists will wonder why we have multiple layers of carpet outside the house. Of course, the remains will be fragmentary at best.