1985 — A
Southwestern College Classroom
The professor
stood with his back to the blackboard, speaking to two dozen assembled students
who were struggling to stay awake.
“In archaeology,
it is important to remember that the artifacts that we dig up are essentially
worthless. Usually, these objects were
trash when the people who made them threw them away. Take a clay pot, for example. We usually find broken pots or just the small
shards of pots for the simple reason that the pot was used until it broke.”
Pausing for
emphasis, the professor pushed himself away from the blackboard and took a step
towards the class. “Archaeologists are
quite literally, trash collectors,” he said.
The gathered
students were obviously both skeptical and a little surprised. The image of an archaeologist as a trash
collector was not at all consistent with the Indiana Jones movies.
“Quite often,” the
professor continued, “the more productive places to dig are trash middens. When we did research at the sites of old
frontier military forts, we discovered the most productive sites were the old
latrines, which the soldiers also used to dispose of trash.”
“What did you find
there?” asked a student.
“The most common
discovery, other than the obvious, was a small whiskey bottle. There were few places where a common soldier
could secretly drink in solitude. What
the soldiers threw away, tells us a lot about life in the fort.”
“Remember,” the
professor continued. “Once an item is
recovered, where it was found and what was next to it often provide more
information than the item itself.”
“Artifacts out of
context have little value. The object by
itself is useless, but the information it can tell us about the culture that
produced it is priceless. An artifact
becomes useless once we have extracted
the data from it and we have learned everything we can from it.”
“What do we do
with the artifact once we have studied it?” asked one of the student.
“After a detailed
report about the dig has been written up, both the artifact and the report are
carefully stored away. Years from now,
other researchers can use the data for their own study.”
2018 — A
Southwestern College
The van pulled up
to one of the storage facilities clustered at the end of the campus near the
football field. While the campus was
huge, most of the important buildings—classrooms, libraries, and the vast
collection of administration buildings—were clustered blocks away, in the
center of the university grounds.
The two men got
out of the van, one opening the rear doors of the van while the other unlocked
and raised the large garage door.
Inside, there were tightly packed rows of shelving, each bulging with
cardboard boxes and paper bags. One of
the two men walked into the large warehouse, looking incredulously at the
overflowing shelves.
“What the hell is
this?” he asked.
“This is all the
shit the archaeologists have been digging up out in the desert. They have three more storage bays just like
this one and they fill one up every four or five years.”
“Looks like the
rats have got to a lot of these. It’s
all spilling out onto the floor and some of the shelving in the back has
collapsed. You can’t even read the
labels on the boxes anymore.”
“It doesn’t
matter,” the other man said while brushing away a spider web. “No one from the department has been in any
of the warehouses since I have worked here.
I doubt if they know where these warehouses are.”
“Do they even know
what’s in here? Is there an inventory?”
The other man pointed
towards a large pile of moldy notebooks on one of the shelves. “I doubt it:
that’s where all the notes and reports are kept, but after the roof
leaked, we shoveled a lot of that crap out.”
The two men
unloaded the van, putting new boxes and bags wherever they found room. Finished, they closed the garage door and
locked it. It would be a year before
anyone else bothered to reopen the door
to add more boxes and bags to the collection.
3018 — A
Southwestern Desert
“Professor!”
called one of the students kneeling in a shallow ditch. “Can you come look at this?”
An older man
walked over to the trench, one of several at the site, where his students were
carefully excavating in the desert sand.
“What have you
found?” he asked.
“I was using my
brush to clear away the loose sand like you showed us and I found this,” she
said, pointing into the bottom of the ditch where she had been working. “There’s a whole pile of pot shards, but they
are all different colors and designs.”
“That’s typical of
these sacred sites. The people who lived
here placed a variety of offerings at sites like this, apparently as part of
religious ceremonies. This is one of
several shrines where the people left offerings. Over time, as the sand shifted, the remains
mixed together.”
The professor
stood and pointed to the large, crumbling concrete ruins at the top of the hill
nearby. “We usually find similar shrines
located around such temples. The people
would drop off their offerings here, before continuing on to the temple, which
could hold as many as forty-thousand people, where they would sit in a large
oval around a holy rectangle we believe was occupied by their priests.”
“What was so
important about the temple?”
“They probably
used them for some form of ritual human sacrifices, but we’re not sure,”
answered the professor. “We know they
must have been important because wherever we find such temples, they are always
the largest and most expensive building in the community. Usually, the ruins of such temples are the best-preserved
buildings, so they was obviously the centers of community life. We are still studying and researching the
remains to try to figure out exactly what they were used for.”
“It’s a real shame
they didn’t leave anything written down, explaining what they were used for,”
answered the student.
“Yes, it is. But, by studying these artifacts, we hope to
understand their culture. That’s why you
should be sure to carefully label the paper bag for those pot shards—we wouldn’t
want to lose the data.”
