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Artefacts of the Future
Jul. 29th, 2020 03:59 pmI'm starting to wonder how all the Covid-19 safety measures now in place would be interpreted by archaeologists hundreds or even thousands of years hence. What would they make of the little footprints and directional arrows on the floors of businesses and workplaces, the litter of used masks and PPE, the plexiglass shields and individual face shields, the public signs indicating all the buildings and park facilities that are closed and urging people to maintain a distance of two metres, six feet or whatever the case may have been in various jurisdictions and in various languages. What sort of fossils will they find?
Already there are (to me) relatively modern articles of civilization that scarcely exist any more except in museums: iron lungs, film-based cameras that use anything other than 35 mm film, 8-track tapes and reel-to-reels and the devices that were used to play them - even an old-fashioned telephone or a wind-up analog watch or clock!
Our attitudes towards artefacts, both recent and ancient, seems to have changed too over the course of my lifetime. We have that ecological trio: reduce, re-use, recycle and I think we've seen a fair degree of uptake on the first and third of those. But reusing and as-is re-purposing? Maybe not so much. Is it just coincidence that it feels right to use a hyphen (a more archaic-seeming punctuation mark) when I write "re-use" or "re-purpose"? I think not.
As my generation gets into downsizing, we are realizing that is little market - even if we just want to give them away to a good home - for the treasures of yesteryear. I think it was last summer or perhaps the fall that one house in our neighbourhood put a perfectly good piano on their front lawn with a large sign on it that read "FREE". It was quite some time before it was gone and to this day, I don't know if they got anyone to take it or just gave up (and either brought it back inside or had someone haul it away to the dump).
There's a glut of surplus clothing out there too - goodwill shops will usually take them although it seems only a small percentage of that gets re-sold or re-used. Ditto for books (especially textbooks, old dictionaries or encyclopedias) and magazines. The paper is recyclable so they can go in the blue box - but it seems a shame. And giveaway weekends and special waste depots have simply not happened during the pandemic.
Ah, the ecology of a pandemic or perhaps just of our modern age. All rather sad, but there you have it!
Already there are (to me) relatively modern articles of civilization that scarcely exist any more except in museums: iron lungs, film-based cameras that use anything other than 35 mm film, 8-track tapes and reel-to-reels and the devices that were used to play them - even an old-fashioned telephone or a wind-up analog watch or clock!
Our attitudes towards artefacts, both recent and ancient, seems to have changed too over the course of my lifetime. We have that ecological trio: reduce, re-use, recycle and I think we've seen a fair degree of uptake on the first and third of those. But reusing and as-is re-purposing? Maybe not so much. Is it just coincidence that it feels right to use a hyphen (a more archaic-seeming punctuation mark) when I write "re-use" or "re-purpose"? I think not.
As my generation gets into downsizing, we are realizing that is little market - even if we just want to give them away to a good home - for the treasures of yesteryear. I think it was last summer or perhaps the fall that one house in our neighbourhood put a perfectly good piano on their front lawn with a large sign on it that read "FREE". It was quite some time before it was gone and to this day, I don't know if they got anyone to take it or just gave up (and either brought it back inside or had someone haul it away to the dump).
There's a glut of surplus clothing out there too - goodwill shops will usually take them although it seems only a small percentage of that gets re-sold or re-used. Ditto for books (especially textbooks, old dictionaries or encyclopedias) and magazines. The paper is recyclable so they can go in the blue box - but it seems a shame. And giveaway weekends and special waste depots have simply not happened during the pandemic.
Ah, the ecology of a pandemic or perhaps just of our modern age. All rather sad, but there you have it!
