The 31st-Century Archaeologist, diggin’ up your bones, diggin’ up your house

Consider this scenario:

It is the year 3015. You just graduated from Princeton University, a school that hasn’t turned out very many notable figures in the last 200 years, but still holds prestige as one of the oldest universities in the world, so you feel pretty proud of that. You graduated with a “Masterful” degree in Archaeology with a specialization in the Early Technological Age; that is, the 20^th-23^rd centuries.

You find this era in history one of the most exciting, because so many landmarks were achieved: the first development of relativity and quantum theories, the first extra-atmospheric travel (you took a field trip to Jupiter for your senior class in high school), some leaps in civil rights—some of them forward, and some backwards. The 21^st century saw the rise of the concept and valuing of “diversity—“ but it’s easy to see looking back that only certain voices were allowed to define what types of diversity were acceptable. The 22^nd century saw a surge of Christianity in the eastern hemisphere, as well as a tidal wave of philanthropic work that saw the whole world connected through the infantile versions of the Intercube—it was called the internet back then. *sigh* It makes you nostalgic just to think of it.

Sometimes you open access to the archaic web, just for kicks, and start scrolling through 1000-year-old websites, data, song-bits, videos. They are a bit boring compared to the immersive videos you play today—ones that you load into the media room and can walk through, interact with. But these grainy, tiny videos have their charm as well.

Okay. Back to the 21^st century.

What do you think a 31^st-century archaeologist would study? A large part of me hopes that somehow things like Twilight and Micki Ninaj… Er… Nicki Minaj, are lost forever, wiped away from the interwebs and never to be recovered in the future.

One can dream, can’t one?

I was wondering yesterday, listening to a song that borrowed a phrase and a score of melody from another song, whether historians would pick up on song influences throughout our contemporary history. I wonder if future historians will write journal articles like “The significance of Amazing Grace and Its Cultural Percolation,” or, “How Early 21^st Century Dance Forms Motivated Production of the Artificial Sacrum and Posterior Vertebrae in Later Years.”

One can hope that they won’t pick up on certain things—things like YOLO, the cringe-worthy 21 Jump-Street movie series; or the fact that the 276 girls kidnapped by the Boko Haram have dropped off the internet, national coverage, and off anyone’s agenda—without them being returned to their homes. It is so sad that their reclamation, their return, their social campaign that stretched worldwide was no less of a fad than planking or Harlem Shake.

What do you want to be remembered for?