I seem to have opened a can of worms & disappeared
My original starting point was a comment in Virginia Lee-Alice Zimmerman's
PhD dissertation on links between early geology & archaeology and literature
(U. Virginia, 2001); she talked about how Victorians felt a sense of
existentialist angst when they realised the world was several billion years
old, not just a few thousand, and that their own civilization would someday
be reduced to rubble, just like the Romans (as evidenced by Pompeii)
This all runs counter to the "narrative" of progress taught in most of the
histories of archaeology I've been reading, so... found it worthwhile
digging around a bit, to see what the Victorians themselves had to say on
the matter
So apparently there was a movement afoot to deliberately design ruins, or
decide on what sorts of things should deliberately be saved for those future
archaeologists who might one day excavate Piccadilly...
Among other things, this seems to have sparked a literary mini-genre and,
possibly, the whole idea of time capsules
I was interested in the comments yesterday/Sunday about what should have
been in a time capsule from 1968: I would think that most of the historic
milestones would already be available elsewhere; what archaeologists are
usually interested in are the "small things forgotten" that don't get
mentioned in the grand, Rankean/Whig histories...
And the POV of kids actually living through those times would, I think,
ultimately be more interesting than... more copies of the NYT, or LBJ's
memoirs, or...

-----Original Message-----
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Matchen,
Paul
Sent: December 12, 2006 05:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: time capsules

Ron,
 
I appreciate your comments and also welcome others into this discussion.  I
read Geoff's email referring to the19th century rules, too and would be
interested to know what they are.