A Thousand Years From Now

Posted on | August 26, 2010 | View Comments

Australian Aboriginal Rock Painting with Human Figures and Animals

Archeology of the Future

I sure didn’t think this would be the topic of my first post after the resurrection of my blog, but it’s pretty typical for me.  I am a bit of a freak and this is but a demonstration of how I think; what goes on in my head.

I needed to get back to it and this is one of those things that’s just stuck in my head.  A little Twitter chat with @LavonneEllis brought it back to the front of my mind and compelled me to put this thought to digital paper.  (Context to follow.)

I love anthropology.  If my university had a good graduate program in the field I might have gone for a second master’s degree.  I also like archeology.  I watch all the archeological programs on the History Channel and Discovery about Egypt, Israel, Greece, etc.  They tell you about the location, the timeline, the history, the climate, etc.  Then they bring in the anthropologists and forensic scientists from various areas of study.  They look at the tools, jewelry, cookware, weaponry and the human bones.

They can determine all kinds of stuff from looking at bones.  They can know about their diet, whether the person was from the labor or elite sector of society. You’ve seen these programs.  It’s really quite amazing what they can learn from a tooth.

So I often sit and wonder.  A thousand (or a million – you get my point – don’t take this as a literal 1,000, okay?) years from now, what will people think when they are unearthing our cities, graveyards, and landscapes?

First of all, they most likely won’t have much in the way of written materials to guide them. Our data is increasingly being stored electronically and much of that will not be readable.  Can you imagine a piece of software that would have 1,000 years backward compatibility? I mean, it’s pretty hard to get anything off of a Betamax tape now and that technology isn’t even a half-century old.  We are fortunate to have stories scribed in caves, on copper, stones, papyrus, and paper.  Our successors will not be so fortunate.

Now the context of the little chat I was having with @LavonneEllis was about plastic surgery.  How I find it to be totally vain and pointless.  People that have that shit done just look totally ridiculous.  I call them plastic people.  They truly are plastic, inside and out.

Now on to the thought that I find a little twisted but cracks me up.  So, I imagine that I am an archeologist or an anthropologist a thousand years from now.  I’m part of a team on a dig in California, which has arisen after falling into the ocean hundreds of years ago.  We stumble upon a human burial site.

Score!  What an archeological find!  We start unearthing coffins and exploring burial chambers.  We find some really weird ass shit.  We open a coffin and it’s obviously the body of an adult woman.  But what are these plastic bags filled with hazardous gel laying on top of her ribs?  We examine another coffin and this one appears to have plastic bags where their ass checks would have been.  We find the remains of a man who has some kind of pumping device in his pelvis.  And we are left thinking, what kind of funky shit were these people into?

So, am I the only one that thinks in this weird twisted way? And if you stop and think about it, what other weird ass shit will they find a thousand years from now?

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Category: Human Behavior, Life in America
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Comments

  • http://completeflake.com/ LaVonne Ellis

    So true! I often wonder what creatures on another planet would think if they come across our TV signals light years away. Boggles the mind.

  • http://www.diaryofanamerican.com Caileagh

    That’s a good one. I’ve thought of what people who lived and died before 1950 would think of television but not ETs. I like the way you think. Thanks for the comment :-)

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