Will Future Civilizations Bother to Excavate Our Remains?

Full article in Palladium magazine.

All civilizations study the past and read the texts handed down by their ancestors. What’s much rarer is systematically analyzing ancient artifacts and sites to figure out what past societies were like. By default we assume that such a massive empirical-theoretical project is natural and obvious, and every sensible civilization would devote lots of resources to it. After all, our own civilization has done this under the banner of “archaeology” since well before we were born. In the course catalogue it’s listed between “accounting” and “astronomy,” and it’s easy to take that as a law of the universe. However, archaeology is historically very abnormal, possibly even unique to our civilization. It’s likely that future civilizations will revert to the mean and stop bothering with it.

Archaeology as we know it—a tradition of knowledge among a dedicated body of scholars in dialogue with each other and more or less synced on goals and methods—dates from roughly the 1700s. When Western archaeologists first scoured the world to survey ancient sites, very often they found the locals had been vaguely aware of the ancient ruins nearby, but never bothered to investigate more deeply than boys wandering through for a curious afternoon. Since then, archaeology has gone global. Western culture and methods have been widely imitated by other civilizations, often with funding and training from the West, and archaeology has been part of that package.

Aside from modern Western and Western-derived archaeologists, I know of only two other cases where there was a serious tradition of knowledge studying ancient sites or artifacts to try to understand the past. Both of these were aimed at relatively narrow reconstructions of religious practices, rather than trying to understand everything about past societies like our own archaeologists. I’m sure there were also scattered individuals who stared at an old Roman road or an overgrown Khmer temple and tried to imagine how the people had lived, but that’s very different from a successful tradition of knowledge.

Before the West, Mesopotamian civilization came closest to archaeology as we understand it under the Neo-Babylonians in the 6th century B.C. They excavated ancient Mesopotamian temples which had been ruined for over a thousand years and studied them in detail, trying to infer their floor plans and furnishings so they could reconstruct them exactly as they had been originally. Kings like Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus left inscriptions boasting that their temples were exact restorations of the ancient works, often on the same sites, and incorporating bricks and idols from the ancient temple. This almost certainly required methods which today’s archaeologists would recognize, such as identifying likely-looking mounds as buried megastructures, mobilizing laborers to excavate them, preserving ancient artifacts as they were dug up, and trying to piece the remains into a picture of what the ancients had been trying to do.

Famously, this project also produced the earliest known museum so far, which is best described in the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley’s book Excavations at Ur. On the compound containing the newly reconstructed Ziggurat of Ur, the king’s daughter Ennigaldi presided as high priestess. In one room near her temple’s school, Woolley unearthed a collection of several unrelated artifacts which were already ancient in Ennigaldi’s time, as well as a “museum label” which announced its text was copied “from bricks found in the ruins of Ur, which while searching for the ground-plan [of the temple] the Governor of Ur found, and I saw and wrote out for the marvel of beholders”. The bricks in royal constructions were stamped with the king’s name and other metadata, which has been a great help to both Neo-Babylonian and Western excavators. I’m sure the old kings would be pleased that their names are still preserved. The room also contained a few ancient artifacts unrelated to construction, like the head of a mace, so there was at least some attention to preserving antiques apart from just restoring the temples. We have so little data that we can’t say confidently what else they did or didn’t study, although it seems to me like the temple restoration project was probably the driving force, with a little bit of antiquarianism done opportunistically along the way as old sites were excavated.

This proto-archaeological tradition lasted for several generations, but seems to have ended during Ennigaldi’s lifetime. The Book of Daniel recounts the story of Ennigaldi’s brother, the crown prince Belshazzar, who received the prophecy of the “writing on the wall” foretelling the doom of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Belshazzar and his father Nabonidus were conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great. Naturally, the Persians did not continue the Neo-Babylonian effort to revive Babylonian religion as a centralizing imperial project, and the expensive temple constructions were stopped. Rather than impose their own foreign religion, the Persians let the different subject peoples practice their own religions, most famously letting the Jews return to Judah and thereby ending the Babylonian Captivity. I know of no evidence of any excavations continuing under the Persians.

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