The Roman dodecahedron is an item that has turned up in a lot of sites where people do archaeology. While most items, given time, have their purpose easily or at least approximately deduced by researchers, the Roman dodecahedron’s purpose is largely baffling to even the most studied of archaeologists, who have no idea on where to start with it. This in turn would probably baffle the Romans, who would have seen it as a common household item, no different from a spoon or a comb.
Suppose a few thousand years from now, archaeologists were excavating our remains and had varying degrees of success deducing what different things were for. If you had to guess what common household item of ours would stump them the most, what item would you guess it would be?
Horseshoes would probably be pretty confusing, actually. Figuring out sans context that this weird metal crescent was supposed to be nailed onto an animal’s hoof would be a feat on its own, but add on people hanging them up as decoration out of superstition or just, like, throwing them, especially in places where there aren’t any damn horses, that’s really gonna muddy the waters.
That’s a really nice one, but they would, eventually, find a horse fossil with a horseshoe on.
“If these devices were, as previously believed, implements in some sort of ancient ‘throwing game’, I can only assume this to be the result of a misguided attempt to play the sport on horseback or, heaven forbid, to teach the horse to play the game itself. Truly, our ancestors were a primitive people.”