Teaching Thursday: 10,000 Years

To be honest, I spend some time over the last two days thinking about writing something on an amazing dissertation that I just finished reading and a interesting forum on posthumanism in the CAJ and maybe some half-baked musings on the character and agency of archaeological publishing. I’ll probably still write about that, but not today.

Instead, I think I’ll share a little assignment that I used in my History 105: World Civilizations I class last night. It was inspired by my reading of Rosemary Joyce’s latest book, The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us about Securing the World’s Most Hazardous Material (2020). As I’ve blogged about, she looks at the efforts of two expert committees to create markers designed to prevent intrusions into nuclear waste storage facilities. The federal government tasked these committees with creating markers that would last 10,000 years. This stimulated these committees to consider various ancient monuments and objects that have lasted for thousands of years and considered their materiality, how they communicated, and how their age created value and significance to the contemporary world.

Here’s the prompt for the first day assignment. The students considered these questions as groups and wrote their responses as groups:

One of the challenges facing historians is that how people understood themselves in the past is very different from how people understand themselves in the present. Our concepts of time, space, and causality, for example, have changed as the rate of technological change has accelerated, our world has globalized, and the complexities of climate change, pandemics, and politics has made it difficult to understand why things happened and who or what is responsible.

We then introduced a little exercise to think about different time scales and change, let’s compose a series of 50-word descriptions that inform future generations of what we are doing here in this time and place.

Compose four messages for the future that describes what was happening in this room. Message one is to a group 10 years in the future. Message two is to a group 100 years in the future. Message three is a group 1000 years in the future. Message four is to a group 10,000 years in the future.

Think about how you locate what you’re doing in a way that will be understood in the future. What kind of context do you need to include? How will you locate this place geographically, chronologically, and functionally?

In a brief essay (<300 words) describe the challenges that your group faced when composing these messages and explain the decisions that you made about how to communicate over time.

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Without sounding too self-congratulatory (I mean, it is my blog after all), the results of this exercise far exceeded my expectations. In fact, my expectations were that the various groups would mostly get acquainted with one another and brainstorm.

Instead, the groups really thought about this project in ways remarkably close to how Joyce’s explored the work of these committees in her book. For example, one group grappled with what material could last 10,000 years? Another group discussed intensely what languages any monument or marker should use that would be understood 1000 or 10,000 years in the future. Other groups explored the limits of human memory and commemorative practices at 10 and at 100 years. 

Perhaps the most innovative approach the problem came from a group that imagined the development of a religious cult around the site of our classroom and this cult and relics from the building persisted even after life on earth ended 10,000 years in the future.