If there was a commonly used item today that was going to be our equivalent to the Roman dodecahedron, what item do you most speculate it would be?
If there was a commonly used item today that was going to be our equivalent to the Roman dodecahedron, what item do you most speculate it would be?
The Roman dodecahedron is an item that has turned up in a lot of sites where people do archaeology. While most items, given time, have their purpose easily or at least approximately deduced by researchers, the Roman dodecahedron's purpose is largely baffling to even the most studied of archaeologists, who have no idea on where to start with it. This in turn would probably baffle the Romans, who would have seen it as a common household item, no different from a spoon or a comb.
Suppose a few thousand years from now, archaeologists were excavating our remains and had varying degrees of success deducing what different things were for. If you had to guess what common household item of ours would stump them the most, what item would you guess it would be?
Dog poop in plastic baggies.
Why would we collect dog poop in a container that doesn't decompose? Was it a religious thing? Did we expect to use it later?
The mystery remains!
Was it a religious thing? That had me in tears. Honestly, no more and no less strange than most religious traditions.
Maybe the miniature table thing that we put on pizzas to keep them from getting smushed.
Is that what they're for? I thought it was so you could hold the pizza down and grab a piece without touching any of the other pieces.
Back in the day, they'd put a ball of dough in the middle of the pizza to serve the same purpose
I guess they are very versatile
Such a waste of oil..
"Why did they make so many of these things all over the globe?"
Any electronic device with firmware in flash. The charges will have decayed a long time ago, leaving a paperweight.
Sufficiently diligent far-future archaeologists may dissect and catalogue the devices well enough to develop a taxonomy of components, having their own names for components, CPU architectures and such, but they’d then be left with something like “this was a programmed control device of the Xargx Valley type, variant 13, only with a screen, a speaker, two microphones and a motor actuator. We speculate it may have been a domestic appliance, a children’s toy or part of a transportation device. Alternatively, it may have had religious or ceremonial uses.”
USB ports, probably. We put that shit on everything. That and electrical plugs.
Nah there will be windows XP machines still in service propping up random industry infrastructure 1000 years from now, I guarantee it
My guess for the dodecahedra is that they're a tool to aid with cryptography. This video explains it well, but TL;DW you'd use the dodecahedron with two concentric circles full of letters, and rotate one to know which letter to replace with which. It's a slightly more advanced and secure version of Caesar's cypher, and I could easily see the Romans doing something like that.
On the other hand I wouldn't expect them to be used for knitting or jewellery, as simpler devices would do the same job.
...but to answer your question, I think that most decor items will give those archaeologists a hard time. Stuff like this:
I was almost going to say "yerba mate bombillas", but they'll likely detect saliva DNA in them and guess that they were used as straws:
Maybe it is a toy, or like a fidget spinner. Idn I stim a lot that looks like it would be awesome for stimming, first thought.
Seeing as younger generations have problems figuring out the kassette tape, I'd wager this list could get pretty long.
The sleeves from gastric bypass surgery. Lots of other medical devices have an obvious function, thinking of steel hip replacements or screws to bend badly broken bones. But the sleeve might perplex someone thousands of years from now.
This question is tough because I feel that our society has documented everything. Even the smallest item has articles written about it. But if a lot of that info was lost, things like bluetooth headphones might cause confusion. If technology doesn't endure, will future generations think everyone had them to limit surrounding noises when in reality we introduce sound wirelessly.
My guess: Minecraft toy pickaxe seemingly a tool with super weird shape.
Fidget spinners
Not a direct answer to your question, but the book Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay is about a group of future archaeologists excavating a ruin from 1985, and is definitely of some relevance here.