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| Mommsen: history is a moral question. |
Louis Shalako
Archaeology
in the Anthropocene Epoch.
The great thing about archaeology in the Anthropocene Epoch
is that you really don’t have to dig down all that far.
I was digging a garden, some years ago, probably
digging down a foot or so into rich, black humus, and all of a sudden, I was
coming up with all kinds of marbles, and green plastic army men. The propeller
from a Cox 0.49 airplane engine. Bits of a plastic model car. That was out
behind my old man’s garage, on Bright St.; here in Sarnia.
Imagine digging down about forty years and finding
your own artifacts—pieces of your own life, buried there in the dirt. As
Mommsen said, ‘history is a moral
question’, but it is also a philosophical question…looking at my own past
life, so to speak.
I’m not too sure of how I got here, but this is where I came from.
The modern equivalent of the good old shell midden is
right outside our back door, in some cases.
Your typical thrift store, in any city or town in this
nation, is literally riddled with artifacts of a kind. Every one of those
artifacts has its own story, and collectively, they tell a bigger and more
complex story.
It is a very human story.
The Anthropocene is the story of what human beings
have done to this planet, outside of all other natural causes. Essentially, we
can’t really shift tectonic plates, but what we can do, is to cut down forests,
build great cities and pump out all kinds of products…including waste products.
We don’t have to wait five thousand years before going back in time and digging up our own time and place. It exists, right here and right now, and all we have to do is to look about us—at the world we have created.
This is the world we are living in, right now.
Five thousand years from now, they will live in a
different world. Five thousand years from now, they will dig down, and discover
that the entire world was wrapped in a sheet of plastic a hundred metres deep,
too.
You can build a pretty good picture of a society by
sifting through their trash bins…
In any ditch, you will find pop cans and beer bottles,
broken baby carriages and sacks of clothing, auto parts and the skeletons of
roadkill. This gives us a pretty good picture of the life of the day, which
includes proper drainage of farmland, high-speed roads and vehicles, and an
established infrastructure—all very obvious, and so no one observes it. No one really analyzes it from the archaeological, the
cultural point of view. You could trace an entire ancient road system, just by
following the trail of crap in the ditches.
This is, clearly, an abundant society, also, a
wasteful one. Great resources are being squandered, and it’s like no one has a
second thought.
This is a wealthy society indeed, and a well-fed one,
considering the human race has gained, in the collective sense, several inches
in average height, and a good hundred pounds in terms of the average weight
over the last century. This is an evolutionary response to a social change, (and
chemical changes in the food we eat), in the sense that the world is growing
more food, more efficiently—all those hands, all those workers, and rather
contradicting of Malthusian economics. But of course we have so much better
technology now. The oxen and the plough have been replaced by the combine and
the skilled modern farmer. Immigration, has replaced the higher birth-rates,
that in the past would have naturally grown or at least replaced, the national populations. Lower birthrates are a feature,
and not a bug, of technologically-advanced civilizations. Nowadays, four out of
five births reach five years of age, which is a complete reversal of medieval
populations, and as long as more babies survive, there is less need to produce
more.
Kids are expensive,
as any parent can tell you.
We don’t actually have to dig down in the here and now,
in order to realize that archaeologists of the future will be digging up
skeletons with breast and bum implants, or teeth that sit on metal posts, or
had electronic tickers for the heart, or a chip in the brain, or that men will
be buried in their toupees, or that a skeleton might have three steel pins in
an ankle. It does say quite a bit about the medical science of our day.
 |
| Still searching for the Ark of the Covenant. |
We might even feel a little sorry, for the
archaeologist who digs into some old mound and finds nothing but tires, tires,
millions of tires, ladies and gentlemen. Tires waiting for recycling, and in
too many cases, that will never happen.
They might even think of us as Mound Builders, which
is apt enough.
The real irony is that these are not centres of
worship, but symbols of desecration.
It doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to
realize that archaeologists, historians, scientists of the future won’t have
too much trouble figuring out what we have done with our atmosphere, our soils,
our water, our climate—and why. This includes our social structures and
institutions that have enabled such obscenity, for surely that is what it is.
We have the best educated and the best-informed
society in all of history. We have all of the information that we require, in
order to make good decisions. And never, in all of history, have we been so
wilfully blind, and to show such little wisdom in the care and maintenance of
what is rightfully to be held in trust for all of humanity.
We hold this Earth in trust for future generations.
We should try and remember this of all things.
END
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Thank you for reading.
