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?
Fidget spinner
Sim card extractors.
The 45 RPM adapter is this already, between generations.
Did the Romans have communal dumps like we do?
Some people are buried with their valuables. I’m certain there’s a dead body in every dump. They will look like royalty.
Imagine rolling into the ancient Egyptian afterlife with a billion tonnes of mouldering refuse. The pharaohs wouldn’t know what hit em
Nowadays, things are documented pretty well. As long as the documentation is available, I don’t think there’s anything that would be common but mysterious.
However, if data is lost, pretty much everything becomes a total mystery. Like, popsockets and phone cases for example. How would you figure those out in a thousand years if you haven’t read any blog posts, reviews or marketing material about any of this stuff. If you don’t know how expensive, fragile and useful phones are, and how would you figure it out that people are so worried about cracking the screen? Pretty much none of that data is on paper, so loosing that information can happen very easily.
Paperclips.
I read somewhere that stainless steel (like common household items, which also has some chromium in it) would outlive plastics, and could even survive in geological strata like fossils, escept they will last indefinitely. Recently, I saw some “premium toy site” sold “high quality stainless steel” butt plugs. Assuming it’s not being superfluous (one reviewer said “it’s nice and heavy,” and I don’t use butt plugs, but that’s a quality one wants?), this could confuse a lot of fossil hunters, especially 304 and 316 stainless, which has been known to last hundreds of years under the sea. 316 stainless steel, for example, is widely used in marine applications like boat hardware, underwater structures, and offshore platforms.
So you’re saying there’s a future where a wizard will cast mend buttcrack, and thus nobody will ever stuff things up their bums ever again?
It’s in Project 3025
I can imagine the typical household plumbis will vex future archaeologists
Right, obviously everyone knows what it’s for now, but it may be difficult to deduce in the future without context.
Newton Cradles.
My vote’s for either vacuum cleaner attachments or old batteries. I barely know the appropriate uses and contexts for all these vacuum cleaner attachments, some future guy with presumably no foreknowledge of our culture or lifestyle doesn’t stand a chance. And if we’re far enough in the future that no record of our way of life remains, I don’t care how much they keep going and going, those Energizers are gonna be dead, and these archaeologists are gonna all be scratching their heads trying to figure out why we have so many random metal cylinders in all different sizes that are, at best, completely inert, and at worst leaking caustic sludge.
Roman dodecahedra date from the 2nd to 4th centuries AD
Will plastic last that long? If not, the remains of electronics will be confusing.
Plastic crumbles to dust sooner or later. This means that most electronics are going to look pretty bizarre in a thousand years. Even common kitchen appliances use so much plastic, that they will look completely different. There are also a million ways you can make a kettle, so the remains of all of them won’t look very similar, especially when all you have left is the metal parts.
I don’t have any great answers, only jumping off points.
But maybe something religious that looks like a utility? Crosses wouldn’t work cause they are way too ubiquitous. Gotta be something weirdly distributed.
Or maybe some sort of holiday decoration? Holidays have so much wierd lore that just wouldn’t make sense outside current society. Not sure what exactly it would be tho but feels like fertile ground
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.”
A fake Christmas tree would be pretty confusing. Or even tree stands for a real tree. Even if you figure out it’s for a tree, what purpose could that tree serve?
Elf on a shelf?
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