Future archaeology

[k_a_nitz]

 "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

My parents just dropped off some old possessions of mine. Included amongst them was an old cheap camera (the sort that took film) - worthless and essentially useless now. But it got me thinking about the change from printed photos to digital and the impact this could have on future archaeologists.

Let's say in some distant future time when our times are ancient history, archaeologists are looking at the relics. Let's also assume that computer technology is lost. For the period up to about 2000 they have faded photos and negatives and cameras. Then personal photos seems to disappear quite suddenly from the records. Magazines and books still have photos in them, but photos of family life, snapshots etc, largely disappear with the exception of the odd ink-jet printed photo or those print-on-demand photo albums. So the archaeologist will see a change from chemically produced photos, which most families have access to, to only photos in publications or the odd surviving ink-jetted photo which on closer examination would look like a sophisticated pointillist painting.

If we then look at other tangible things that have shifted or are shifting to the digital, the first one that comes to my mind is money. A shift in some countries to no longer having checks and significantly reducing the use of cash in favour of ATM cards and credit cards will mean that with the loss of digital records (especially with a lot of accounts now only being filed digitally) there will be a marked reduction in evidence of a money system. It will look like a drop off in the use of money and a contemporaneous increase in the number of plastic cards that do not seem to have any indication of value on them (but do have expiry dates).



Without knowing about computer storage, what would the archaeologist conclude about our state of technology? And our economic system and situation? If they know about computers only from a random sample of printed publications that survive, what would they think?

Which then leads to the thought: what knowledge might we be missing about past civilisations because of ephemeral technologies?

Comments

[sdi]

I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing, myself. On the one hand, yes, we can't even read media from twenty or thirty years ago anymore, due to technology failures (how many ZIP drives still exist in working order?), IP law, etc.

But there's something worse than that, I think. Sappho's poetry, for example, was already lost in ancient times simply because people didn't want to learn Aeolic—Attic had had more prestige since classical times, and within a few centuries almost nobody made the effort. Things survive because people pay attention to them and care about them: even the Sphinx and Giza pyramids have been renovated throughout history, and most things are far less durable than solid limestone.

So I think there are two things that are both needed in order for cultural works to survive for future archaeologists: it needs to be technologically feasible (written text, easy; classical music, difficult; video games, impossible) and it needs to be something that people care about (in general, and in the present moment). I think that makes the barrier to survival much higher, since so many people are so focused on just functioning or so distracted by the latest fashion/outrage right now that there's not much room for much beyond that. (Certainly, I get very strange looks when I'm in the park reading the Iliad or whatever.)

I think that kind of thing happens in the life cycle of every civilization—certainly we have records of it in Rome and Greece, etc. So I suppose there's a lot of knowledge we can't conceive of without knowing what people cared about back then, and frankly other civilizations are so alien, I don't think we can even imagine it.

[k_a_nitz]

Great point, and it's anyone's guess what people will care about in future centuries. It also brings to mind the fact that much of what was retrieved from ancient Greece was secondhand through the Arab scholars, so it may be that things are preserved through other cultures finding value in it.

[boccaderlupo]

Agree on that. What has survived is not only durable, but has been filtered by the sustaining intervals.

Makes me think how we (evidently) have no written records of the music of the classical world. We know it existed, but little else, so far as I understand things.