One day, when all us living today are long gone and the world has advanced and evolved to a state
we would find completely unrecognizable, what will far future generations know about us in
the 21st century? Even if we’re able to dodge all existential threats to our civilization
and evolve into a Star Trek level of prosperity, how will archaeologists and historians hundreds
or thousands of years in the future piece together the history of… the present?
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[Break intro with first discovery clip (Playmobil viking?)]
The people we now call the Vikings dominated the north of Europe for over 300 years,
and have one of the most impressive legacies on the continent. Expanding from their native
homelands in Scandinavia, they raided towns and monasteries, founded new cities, discovered new
lands, and became the first Europeans to land on and settle parts of North America. However,
the conception many of us might have today depict violent, bloodthirsty, ultra-tough warriors with
horned helmets. This was through no fault of their own, but rather the fact that the people they
often attacked were also the people who would have written about them most, describing the heathenous
brutes raiding and pillaging their towns and monasteries. Not until the 1890s did academic
scholars outside Scandinavia start to rethink this conception, one that still persists in pop-culture
to this day. The horned helmet myth likely started in 1876 with costume designer Carl Emil Doepler,
who created horned helmets for the first Bayreuth Festival production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring
des Nibelungen (okay I think that’s enough flexing my German for now). Wagner’s plays led a sort
of romanticized revival of Viking history and traditions in pop-culture, even though there is
no evidence whatsoever that anyone in the Viking Age used horned helmets. Ceremonial horned helmets
were found in Bronze Age Scandinavian ruins, and on coats of arms in the High Middle Ages,
but it’s more likely Doepler just thought they looked cool as part of a costume.
What I’m getting at here is that a large part of our mistakes and misconceptions about the past
(sometimes not even the very distant past) come from deeply biased accounts which are often
expanded upon by pop-culture, which as we all know has always been dedicated purely to scientific and
historical accuracy above all else. [Shovel digging]
One civilization in particular that has attracted loads of interest from historians
and conspiracy theorists pretending to be historians alike would be that of Ancient Egypt.
Think of some of the most well known artifacts and structures from Ancient Egypt,
the pyramids, the treasures of the pharaohs, the artwork on tomb walls, all stuff relating to death
and the afterlife. This might give the impression of the Egyptians being “obsessed with death”, but
the reason the tombs of the pharaohs in particular last so long as to serve as a window to this
ancient past is precisely because they were meant to be left alone, forever (which is generally
how long death lasts). The pyramids served this purpose too, but were just more showy about it.
On the surface, Egyptian cities and temples and monuments were subject to weather patterns,
migrations, vandalism, being conquered by a crap-ton of different empires, and of course…
people still using and modifying them. We have a habit of dividing history
into neat little boxes and chapters, when in reality it’s all a constant continuous flow.
Egypt didn’t disappear and get replaced with a newer version of itself overnight,
but underwent a vast evolution as it was conquered by the Persians, Macedonians,
Romans, Islamic Caliphates, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, and finally became independent,
but deep underground the ancient tombs lay undisturbed from all the ruckus above, almost like
accidental time capsules. [Find piece of trash]
What this is all pointing to is that while our non-ruined cities will continue to change and
evolve, what might be best preserved are the things we just leave and forget about.
Today’s tragic shipwreck is tomorrow’s archaeological breakthrough
(maybe don’t quote me on that). Thus, one perhaps surprisingly accurate time capsule
of a civilization would be its trash. Lost treasures of once great kings are cool and all,
but if you want to truly understand a civilization and how its people lived, you can look no further
than their trash heaps, or middens as they’re more respectfully known. Studying the contents
of these middens can help us better understand daily life in long lost cultures, especially the
parts they wouldn’t have been so enthusiastic about writing down. Obviously human waste can
reveal a lot about people’s diets, but so can things like empty amphorae revealing how much the
Romans loved olive oil, or chicken bones found in Israel showing evidence of cutting knives,
and things like the 2,000-year old “junk” papyri found in Oxyrhynchus in Egypt (sometimes described
as “the Library of Alexandria in a landfill”) can show us the parts outside of people’s stomachs.
No surprise our 21st century civilization disposes of a lot of plastics, glass, paper,
food packaging, computer waste, and other waste products, which will show future archaeologists
bits and pieces of our society that they might not find in formal historical records.
That‘s not a valid excuse to not reduce how much you throw away though, these future archaeologists
still need a liveable Earth to inhabit (even if we do successfully expand into the stars).
[Break through final layer and discover “ancient” basement.
Walk around dark basement for a few seconds, then turn to camera]
We learn about the present and the future by understanding the past, and understanding how
we study the past today can help our descendants better learn from us in the present. One favorite
book of mine, especially considering the subject at hand, is Motel of the Mysteries. It is set
in the year 4022, when amateur archaeologist Howard Carson falls into a long buried tomb.
In this tomb he finds a treasure trove of artifacts unveiling the secrets of the once
great land of Usa. With the site dating all the way back to 1985, Carson is able to uncover
ancient artifacts such as the sacred urn, the sacred collar and jewelry, and two human bodies,
one of which lies in a porcelain sarcophagus and the other on a kind of ceremonial bed.
However you, dear viewer from before Y4K know just how comically wrong this toilet humor really is.
We have plenty of stories and records and artifacts from ancient civilizations,
but we still have a lot of gaps in perfectly understanding these cultures.
Egyptian for instance used to be a widely spoken language, but we needed a special
stone tablet to decipher their script. Is this how we’re going to be remembered? Probably not,
but our technological records aren’t necessarily going to help that much.
As technology improves, we all are archiving our lives with more and more detail. 200 years ago
only the most important in society were remembered in more than just the memory of their children,
nowadays I can take a look at the breakfast someone I’ve never met had in 2003.
But records can break down, and even if we made sure to keep our records stable and our
descendants know how to speak our languages, technology can become obsolete, unreadable.
It’s great if you have an actual vinyl record of what happened,
but there’s no record player app on an iPhone. It’s also entirely possible that our digital
records are preserved into the far future for our descendants to learn about us, possibly via the
internet, but that still doesn’t mean they’ll get everything right about us. For instance,
we have heaps of written records from Ancient Egypt, but if we think the Egyptians were obsessed
with death in part because their tombs have served as the best time capsules of their culture, what’s
keeping future humans from assuming that we were obsessed with
satellites and nuclear power? In 2,000 years London may look as different from modern London
as modern London looks from Roman London (if it isn’t abandoned entirely), all the
while the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland will (hopefully) remain long forgotten.
The reason we have these such misconceptions about our ancestors is often because of a lack of
written records, either from being destroyed, or languages being forgotten, or even, as Vsauce has
pointed out, apathy. And even if we manage to preserve everything about us and we’re able to
keep the internet and digital archives up to date and safe from solar flares or malicious regimes,
future archaeologists are still going to be forced to make a lot of guesswork.
On timescales of thousands of years, there are just too many variables to address.
In Motel of the Mysteries, North America is destroyed and buried in a catastrophe, so
the flow of information from 20th century… Usa isn’t continuous.
I could keep theorizing about this stuff for hours (and by all means feel free to discuss
any points I didn’t bring up in the comments, or you know the KhAnubis Discord server), but this
is really all just guesswork based on how well we know the civilizations that are ancient to us,
and they didn‘t have the internet, in fact many were just getting the hang of this
writing thing (by the way, Socrates if you‘re watching, holy crap you could not
have been more wrong about writing). To know how we’ll be remembered in future generations,
we might as well just predict the future and how everything goes. Though I have always found it
kind of funny to imagine archaeologists in the distant future studying ancient archaeologists.
[AD] Where am I?
Why, you’re in space!
Wait what’s with all the squares around me… oh I get it now!
Now if you want to make your mark on the digital archives that far future generations might look
through to study our culture, what better a way than making a website? I mean surely cachemonet
isn’t going to be forgotten any time soon. [cachemonet intensifies]
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