Future Archaeological Mystery

No. 3 in a Series of Inspiring Things

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the web?  It's like living in a library where you can browse around 24/7 in any category you want, including the latest news, and compile your own personal card catalog, also known as an RSS aggregator. Every writer knows that half the fun of starting a new book is doing the research. Or just doing research even when you're not starting a new book (also called procrastination). That's the joy of the Internet.

The latest thing that gave me pointy ears is this, courtesy of the Make: blog:—>

<—Here's a close-up. And here's what it is:

English sculptor  . . . . [Antony] Gormley has shipped out his Asian Field, an installation of 180,000 hand-sized clay figurines. Three hundred and fifty villagers in southern China individually crafted the figurines in just five days from more than 100 tonnes of red clay. Together, the figurines form a vast sea of bodies that dominates the huge upper space of Pier 2/3. Lumpy and almost featureless, they eerily stare out with blank holes for eyes. As Gormley says, "The art is not there to be looked at; it is looking at you."

If this isn't the biggest joke-on-archaeology-waiting-to-happen that you've ever seen, then you've never read Motel of the Mysteries. But the little guys are spooky, for sure, all 180,000 of them, and eerily reminiscent of their big terra cotta brothers in China. The little guys are reminiscent of votive figurines and I can just see some archaeologist digging them up from the site of their permanent installation or storage, wherever that might be (and if there is one), in a thousand years, turning one over in his hand and thinking, "Dude, this Post-Modernism stuff was really primitive!"

But it sure gives you a sense of scale, doesn't it? 180,000 of anything is too big a number to actually imagine successfully, like when news reports talk about 200,000 anti-war protesters on the Mall in Washington. Humans can usually only successfully visualize about 7 objects, without counting . There's another site that will give you some perspective on large numbers: the MegaPenny Project.

But mostly I like these little guys for their hoax potential. I always wonder how much we really know about long-gone civilizations, when all we have left of them is a little bit of their writing and some art and architecture and some graves. What can you do with that except conjecture (also know as guessing)? I mean, we keep revising our view of Victorian society all the time as new things come to light, and that wasn't even that long ago. Why? Because the little, everyday things get lost and because society's common cultural assumptions change. Look at our own: In 20 years, will anyone know what an 8-track is? Like all those cool, old, antique kitchen implements people buy without knowing their use.

We assume, because we're all human, that we shared the same emotions, the same sense of ourselves, but did we? How, for instance, do societies learn to stop oppressing their members and begin to grow beyond prejudice and work as cohesive wholes? We see it in various stages in the contemporary world (though no one can deny that prejudice and bigotry of all stripes is present in various guises everywhere), but what's the process? Is there a pivotal moment? Like the codification of the Magna Carta or, centuries later, the pondering by a few disgruntled men of the wording of the Declaration of Independence?

I find questions like that fascinating because they treat social organizations as a kind of megafauna, with minds of their own, a collective mind, perhaps with a group memory and collective unconscious. The idea that we are cells in a larger being is both fascinating and a little creepy. That's why I've always been drawn to the Gaia hypothesis (though consciousness is not something that Drs. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis ever suggested). So how big does a society have to be to become conscious? Dunno, though it seems to take a while and happen by fits and starts, many because there's always some rogue cell (like George Bush) who's more interested in power or money than in the good of the organism.

Now you're getting a glimpse of where a couple of photos will lead me. A little scary, isn't it?

Comments

[Emily]

On the process of stopping oppression, I am astounded by the hard work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

[Lee Kottner]

South Africa was one of the places I was thinking about, oddly enough, and you're right about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I was thinking also about the various nations of Europe forming and re-forming themselves through the centuries, finally ending up here, as the EU, which is not by any means a finished product, but a long way from the various warring or just competing city-states and principalities and kingdoms it once was.