A Flock of Turds: thoughts on archaeology

Dear Laurie, 

Doesn't it give you existential dread knowing your weird mugs will outlive our civilization and be dug up by confused future archeologists? 

Thanks, Mei 

Dear Mei,

I’ve never thought of my mugs as weird. 

I’m scared of sharks, not archaeologists. No one ever got their leg torn off by an archaeologist. Unless they were a mummy. So no, it doesn't give me any existential dread. If anything it gives me the giggles. The more I think about it the funnier it gets. I could spend the rest of my life creating bizarre rumours in clay. I’d be like a ceramic tabloid. Just imagine the fantastical stories I could make up and leave behind for some earnest archaeologist. But it's impossible to know where my pots will end up and what if anything they will share with the future. What a fabulous waste of time it would be to consider my legacy, my power to inform a conversation beyond the grave. I will be dead. Dead as a doorknob. Kaput. Worm poo and ash. So I’m not bothered. Death really frees you up from having to give a fuck. Legacy is a self congratulatory mirage with no practical return in our lifetime. It seems vainglorious to worry too much about how what I make today will inform tomorrow. The best legacies aren't written in the first person but by those who marveled at them. Worrying about posthumous accolades or condemnations is like planning an elaborate meal to eat the day after you die. 

Did you know that ceramic fragments are called sherds not shards? Sherd is such a humorous word. So dangerously close to shart, herd and nerd. A sherd sounds like a flock of turds or a burrowing Welsh rodent. It’s a fact that some of the oldest traces of humanity have been captured through ceramic sherds. The simple reason is that unlike metal and wood, ceramic material degrades much more slowly. Many of the established theories about human civilisations, behaviours and migration are built on the ceramic detritus of the past. As I write this on my laptop sipping tea I realise that it won’t be my mug that will produce the future’s sherds but my digital devices. Dead smart phones will unveil tiny clues to the past with a litany of discarded ceramic capacitors, inductors and transformers. Future archaeologists won’t be looking at cups but the ceramic components of iPads, X-Boxes and grannies' ceramic hips.

I wonder how much of our archaeological history we have misread and how many objects have been assigned the wrong story. Perhaps the Venus of Dolní wasn't a fertility goddess or child's toy but paleo pornography. Cave man candy.  A little pocket porn for those lonely nights around the campfire. I can totally imagine a crouching bunch of hairy men passing a voluptuous rock around a muddy thicket, giggling like schoolboys. Isn't it bizarre to know that everything ceramic is essentially just a man-made rock. We are an animal that makes rocks, a stone-making species. All ceramics are just like pebble dust fused into new forms, and we litter the world with them. That is pretty fucking weird Mei. I recant.

XL

Image* Venus of Dolní Věstonice (31,000 years old)