Darrell Schweitzer
Excavating Ourselves: A Short History of Archeology-of-the-Present Books
The notion began around 1800, and specifically with Egyptology. That was the period in which, during Napoleon’s sudden and uninvited visit to Egypt, the Rosetta Stone was discovered, and Europeans soon saw prints in books and magazines (particularly in French) of archeologists crawling over the broken and fallen colossi of a vanished civilization as they struggled to decipher mysterious inscriptions and puzzled over the purpose of many of the objects they found. It is the imagery of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”
The notion, of course, is that one day in the far future such archeologists will be examining the ruins of our civilization, digging in the remains of New York or London and developing curiously faulty conceptions of what our epoch was like in all its grandeur.
Moralists are naturally drawn to this idea, as an illustration of the Biblical warning that all things of mankind are vanity and shall pass away. There is also the suggestion that maybe the past is less certain than we like to think, and much of what the archeologists tell us about remote eras is more the product of imagination than evidence, particularly in the standard default that explains anything you don’t understand as “for religious purposes.” (A quick aside on that: I read somewhere about a live-in history project in which people tried to recreate the lifestyle of prehistoric Britain. It was known that all the houses had a shallow pit of no apparent utility under the eaves by the front door. This was assumed to be of religious significance until the live-in experimenters discovered it was a handy place to keep the chickens out of the rain.)
Of course post-holocaust or post-civilization stories became commonplace. There’s Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), not to mention Richard Jeffries’s little-read but quite influential After London (1887), and even William Morris’s utopian News from Nowhere (1890). The post-holocaust, complete with somber reflections on the ruins of (usually) New York became a standard pulp trope, with George Allan England’s Darkness and Dawn (1914) being a notable early example from the Munsey magazines.
But none of these quite tell us what the archeologists found. This is the subject under discussion. It hearkens back to “Ozymandias” and those French Egyptologists. The earliest example I know of is J.A. Mitchell’s The Last American, first published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company in 1889 and reissued with revisions in a deluxe illustrated edition in 1902, with color pictures by F. W. Read and designs by Arthur Blashfield. You can find the 1889 text reprinted as an example of “primitive” sf in August Derleth’s Far Boundaries (1951), but the deluxe 1902 edition is the one you want. Now something of a crumbling, ancient artifact itself, the book more often than not turns up in rather poor condition because the heavy, glossy paper used for the illustrated plates and pages tends to pull the binding apart. (I will mention to my fellow biblio-archeologists that I have been able to successfully repair one with the patient use of Sobo, a flexible, acid-free glue you can get in fabric shops.)
You want the illustrations because they are sometimes more effective than the text. There is a wonderful drawing facing page 88 of “A Street Scene in Ancient Nhu-Yok.” We see a woman in a ballerina costume perched on tiptoe on the back of a galloping horse, a bearded, robed man with a halo carrying an umbrella, a man in a tuxedo wearing a feathered headdress, a classic Thanksgiving Pilgrim complete with musket, a naked Baby New Year in top hat, etc. The caption reassures us: “The costumes and manner of riding are taken from metal plates now in the museum at Tehran.”
Why Tehran? It seems that in the year (old style) 2951, a Persian expedition has rediscovered North America. The Persians themselves have just come out of a long dark age and are at a medieval level. These Persians are satirical figures with funny names like Hedful and Nofuhl. Their vessel, which looks like a medieval cog, is the Zhotuhb (“Slow Tub”) which took over a month to cross the Atlantic, guided by the steady hand of the excellent mariner Grip-Til-Lah. The head of the expedition and narrator of the story is a Persian admiral, Khan-Li, Prince of Dimph-Yoo-Chur. You get the idea.
The Persians land first in New York. They find the climate unbearably hot, except for one sudden and unequally unbearable cold snap. This sort of rapid climate change, we are told, ultimately extinguished all human life on the continent, although the ancient Mehrikans had become decadent well before then. Some of their history is known. The Republic was founded by George-wash-yn-tun. The Protestant population was massacred in 1927, whereupon the Murfy Dynasty ruled until 1940. (The text in the Derleth anthology gives these dates as 1907 and 1930.) In any case, the explorers find a coin depicting Dennis, the last of the Hy-Burnyan dictators dated 1957. By about 1990 the population was extinct.
Of the character if the ancient Mehrikans we are told:
Historians are astounded that a nation of an hundred million beings should vanish from the earth like mist and leave so little behind. But to those familiar with their lives and character, surprise is impossible. There was nothing to leave. The Mehrikans possessed neither literature, art, nor music of their own. Everything was borrowed. The very clothes they wore were copied with ludicrous precision from the models of other nations. They were a sharp, restless, quick-witted, greedy race, given body and soul to the gathering of riches. Their chiefest passion was to buy and sell. Even women, both of high and low degree, spent much of their time at bargains, crowding and jostling each other in vast marts of trade, for their attire was complicated, and demanded most of their time. (28–31)
The Persians have prejudices of their own, as they note with disapproval about ancient Mehrikan women:
They strode public streets with roving eyes and unblushing faces, holding free converse with men as with women, bold of speech and free of manner, coming and going as it pleased them best. They knew much of the world, managed their own affairs, and devised their own marriages, often changing their minds and marrying another than the betrothed. . . . Brought up like boys, with the same studies and mental development, the womanly part of their nature gradually vanished as their minds expanded. Vigor of intellect was the object of a woman’s education. (43–44)
But, greedy and vain though they may have been, the Mehrikans also had a heroic side, at least when it involved defending their interests. Eventually the powers of Europe sent a vast fleet against them, but the Mehrikans sank it in an astonishing upset of a battle which would of course recall to Mitchell’s readers Admiral Dewey’s victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War. (Indeed, the defeat of the Pan-European fleet is attributed by a Spanish admiral, Offulbad-shoota, to the work of the Devil.)
There are comic adventures, as one member of the crew encounters a nest of wasps inside the Statue of Liberty and another is chased out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel by a bear. There is one ghostly moment when a crewman dreams or has a vision of ancient figures at a formal party inside one of the hotels, is offered a drink, and is apparently left drunk from the powerful liquor. At another point the expedition finds the beautiful, perfectly preserved corpse of a woman in a sealed, luxurious apartment.
The Persians marvel over the lost technology of the Mehrikans. They cannot fathom the purpose of the “monuments” in the river, which the reader discerns are the remains of suspension bridges. They find a cigar-store Indian and assume it is an image of a god.
Then they venture south to ancient Washington DC and actually meet living Americans, the last three survivors of this otherwise lost race. Alas, after the Mehrikan has offered his Persian guests some more of that liquor the Persians clearly cannot handle, one of the Persians gets fresh with the young Mehrikan maiden. A brawl ensues, and several Persians and all of the Mehrikans are killed, the younger man, having proven quite a remarkable fighter despite his savage state and apparent physical degeneration, expiring under a statue of George-wash-yn-tun, which, at least in the dim light, seems to nod. Admiral Khan-Li can only order his men to collect more artifacts of scientific interest
and then depart. The skull of the last American is presented to the museum in Tehran.
This book was, by all indications, widely read in its time. Of course its time has passed, and we have a different perspective on it, even as the Persians do on the Mehrikans. We might find a hint of racism in its fears of an Irish takeover, and we are more approving of those intellectual, free-strolling women. But beneath the broad satire there is a sense of melancholy. Through both texts and pictures, we are given a vivid glimpse of our own civilization in ruins, picked over by scholars of the far future. Certainly Stephen Vincent Benet read The Last American, as he clearly replays parts of it in his story “By the Waters of Babylon” (1936), which at least used to be one of the classics of science fiction, for all it is less known these days. There is even a scene in which Benet’s post-holocaust savage, investigating the ruins of New York, finds a perfectly preserved corpse of an ancient “god” in a sealed, luxury apartment.
Next on the strictly archeological agenda is The Weans (1960) by Robert Nathan, the author of Portrait of Jennie. This had been published in a shorter form in Harper’s Magazine in 1956 as “Digging the Weans” and was even adapted very effectively on a record by the folksinger-actor Theodore Bikel. The full-length version is very much “nonfiction,” deliberately fusty, as if written by somewhat befuddled scholars of the far future. (Amusingly, Nathan himself posed for some of the photos of an elderly savant on the dig, in a pith helmet.)
This time the inquisitive explorers have come from Africa, from the civilized nations of Kenya and Uganda. The Great West or Salt Continent is completely uninhabited, we are told, but recently expeditions there have discovered traces of a lost people, who are known to scholarship as “Weans” because they called their land “Us.” In the southern part of the continent the term may have been “Weuns” or “Wealls.”
Very little is known of this lost people, although modern science has determined a few basics:
No Wean skeletons have survived, although a team of anthropologists . . . did discover several lumps of calcium in n.Yok which might possibly have been arthritic deposits. Nevertheless, the contemptuous claims by early Volgarian scholars that the Weans were, in effect, subhuman can now, in the light of recent findings, be summarily dismissed. (13)
The Weans dwelt in great cities, one of which, possibly the capital, was called “Pound Laundry” (or possibly “Washing-Ton” although what, if anything, was ever washed there is unknown). Scholars are left to puzzle over such mysterious artifacts as an I LIKE IKE button and a relief showing beatnik trumpeters. The theory that these ancient people were related to the Brythons is based on the observation that the Brythonic glyph “bathe” and the Wean “bath” are quite similar, but this “necessarily comes to grief when one examines the glyph for ‘that which rises’—the Brythonic ‘lift’ and the Wean ‘elevator’ having obviously no common root” (14).
There is less narrative here than in Mitchell, but the satire is sharp. Regarding the religion of the ancient Weans, which may have involved a divinity named Hedda or Lolly or Hatta, we are told:
Nonetheless, the Wean Divinity, in whatever form, remained a Wean, and spoke the Wean language.
Surrounded by infinite space, by endless galaxies, by stars and planets without number, these proud, simple-minded, and obstinate people continued to believe themselves the center of the universe and the particular concern of the Almighty. (22)
Nathan’s Africans, like Mitchell’s Persians, have their own prejudices. There is a footnote appended to the above which reads:
“God is a Zulu.”—Eretebbe.
As in The Last American, there is much criticism over the role of women in ancient Wean society. “Marriage,” we are told, was a relationship usually of short duration and advantageous to women, since in fragmentary writings relating to divorce “[there] is no evidence of the male Wean ever receiving anything in settlement” (37). That the wife got to keep the “jaguar” suggests, a footnote tells us, some link to ancient Aztec or Mayan civilization.
Wean literature, such as it survives, is wholly incomprehensible:
One of these scrolls appears to be an account of a god or hero named Finigan, or Finnegan; the size of the scroll and its rare state of preservation attest to its importance as a religious or historical document, but it is impossible to make out what happens to him. The second scroll is in what appears to be a metrical, or verse form known as a dylan: nothing can be gathered from it at all. (41–42)
Of course twenty-first-century scholars may puzzle a bit over Nathan’s text, though they are likely to conclude that 1960 is a little early for a reference to Bob Dylan, so this verse form alluded to must be that of Dylan Thomas. Likewise readers beyond a certain age may not fully understand the reference to the “hofa” (“a kind of boss”) who “having triumphed over those who [did] oppose him, did [bring] together in union all that moved” (29).
Even as The Last American is a product of the Gilded Age, revised to include allusions to the Spanish-American War, The Weans is a product of the 1950s and the Cold War, reflecting the anxieties of its time. It is known that the Weans were opposed by a nation known as More We (or possibly “More Us” or “Usser”), there is also the possibility, based on some very abstract, insect-like sculpture unearthed (and photographed; credit is given in the back of the book to Jean Paul Mauran), that they also fought wars against a totally vanished insect civilization. In any case, the Weans were probably destroyed in war. Nathan’s final paragraph still resonates:
[As] to the history of these almost unknown ancestors of ours, no more is known than is known of the Romans and, later, the Brythons: they established themselves in the land by killing off the native tribes already there, and built their empire by the sword; when the sword rusted, they perished. (55)
I think we’re due for another such “archeology” book soon, one in which the bewildered futurians unearth everything from goth jewelry to relics of the computer age. What would relics of the computer age be like, after our electronic data devices are all scrap and dust? Would someone theorize that the remains of smart phones indicate the very purpose for which humans evolved opposable thumbs, or would they dismiss these artifacts as incomprehensible “religious objects”?
Meanwhile, the most recent example I can find is The Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay (1979). This is more of a picture book than the other two, but it has much in common with both Mitchell’s and Nathan’s imaginings. In the year 4022, an amateur archeologist, Howard Carson, falls down a shaft and discovers a lost “tomb” on the uninhabited North American continent. This time we know exactly what happened to the lost civilization. In 1985, an accidental reduction in the third-class postage rates caused a fatal deluge of junk mail, under which the entire civilization smothered. Since then, scholars can only chip their way through layers of pollutantus literati and pollutantus gravitas in hope of finding relics of this lost people.
Carson’s find is extraordinary, an entire “motel” complex, with one still-intact, sealed chamber, which enables scientists to learn much about the mysterious burial rituals of the ancient Americans.
Macaulay emphasizes the archeological misinterpretation. The satirical parallels to King Tut are obvious. Howard Carson (i.e. Carter) even utters the famous phrase “wonderful things” to describe what he sees when the DO NOT DISTURB sign is removed from the ancient motel room doorknob and the door chain is cut.
Within the “tomb” are two skeletons, one on the bed, the other in the bathtub, but of course Carson does not see it that way. There follows much learned exposition with excellent drawings (apparently by Macaulay) on every other page describing the alleged burial rites. The television is the “great altar.” The toilet is the “sacred urn” into which, we are told, the chief priest would chant while mixing water from the sacred well with sheets of Sacred Parchment (toilet paper). The corpse in the “sarcophagus” (tub) wears a miraculously preserved “ceremonial burial cap” (shower cap). Plumbing fix
tures are interpreted as musical instruments. And so on. At the back of the book there is even a catalogue of reproductions of these artifacts that you can get in the museum shop. Then there is a note that, due to the sudden death of Howard Carson and some others and rumors of a curse on this “tomb,” the site was resealed in 4046.
The Motel of the Mysteries is probably the least serious of these three “archeological” texts, basically an elaborate joke about how antiquities can be misinterpreted. It has considerably less social satire than offered by either Mitchell or Nathan and makes less of an attempt to imagine what sort of future society would be making this discovery. If it has any other concern, it is not about the Irish taking over or the Cold War, but about the environment. We may not perish under a deluge of pollutantus literati, but we could still pollute ourselves into oblivion. This as much an anxiety of our time (or the 1970s) as Mitchell’s were of his.
Macaulay’s book does deliver the same message as the other two: the past is spied dimly through a murky glass, and our civilization, too, shall one day pass away. That is what all of these books have to tell us, that one day future archeologists will be poking among our ruins like those nineteenth-century French Egyptologists among the Pyramids. Can we reasonably expect to be understood by the future, much less to justify ourselves to it?
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