The Archaeology of Plastic Age Amerhica: A Government Report Submitted November 28, 2606
Open Access
- Author:
- Martin, Kelly Lane
- Area of Honors:
- Anthropology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- David Lee Webster, Thesis Supervisor
David Lee Webster, Thesis Supervisor
Timothy Michael Ryan, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- thought experiment
dystopia
archaeology
anthropology
United States of America - Abstract:
- My thesis is a mixture of anthropology and creative writing, an anthropological account of what people five hundred years in the future would find if they had nothing but the archaeological record of the current United States from which to learn. In the following thesis, my future archaeologist attempts to reconstruct American life, exploring everything from military activity, to political organization, to social institutions – sometimes accurately and sometimes not. The introductory chapter is a very basic description of what life is like in this future society, when all the living signs of the America we know today have ceased to exist, along with almost all written documents. The persona of the future archaeologist begins in Chapter 1 and continues throughout the rest of the text. The text which the future archaeologist is writing is a report for her government. A subcommittee therein commissions this work in order to create a centralized body of knowledge about the “Amerhican Empire.” The texts itself represents the culmination of about twenty years of archaeology. While the author is the head of the project, other experts in archaeology and other relevant fields make contributions to the report as well. Some of their analyses yield remarkably accurate results, and others are intentionally very wrong. My initial goal for the thesis was to create a creative, original and entertaining product. As my research progressed, however, it became more of a commentary not only on how we construct theories about the future and but also how we interpret the people of the past.