Take THAT Future Archaeologists!

[adsii1970]

Bury a fossilized dinosaur bone, a dog collar with leash, an old cell phone, and a Roman short sword in a peat bog...

[Green Baron]

Really, that is not a problem. You dig out neandertal stone tools, tooth paste and ww2 ammo from the same layer. It is not too difficult (in most cases absolutely no problem) to distinguish between a clean and undisturbed finding and a mixed, dumped, dug, washed, relocated, overturned, flowed out or whatever mess. 19th century archeology: judging a layer by its content is a valid method for dating, but, of course, if no border to another layer (a discordance, hole, ditch, trench, tree root, animal burrow ...) can be found then of course the age of the layer is determined by the youngest "ingredient", which in this case would be the cell phone ...

Not regarding any physical/chemical dating methods.

:-)

Edit: the dinosaur bone, if not totally fossilized, would not survive in a peat bog. Sour environment -> bones are gone. But the leash, if from leather, survives a long time ;-)

 

Edited November 20, 2016 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

Take neander's bones and infiltrate a lot of uranium atoms by electrophoresis. Let'em wonder if neanders got nuke exchange.

Edited November 21, 2016 by kerbiloid

[NSEP]

Im sure archeologists are intelligent enough to realize that we where going to mess with them. If we could somehow mess with carbon and stuff, we could confuse them with carbon dating.

[Darael]

1 minute ago, NSEP said:

Im sure archeologists are intelligent enough to realize that we where going to mess with them. If we could somehow mess with carbon and stuff, we could confuse them with carbon dating.

It really depends how far in the future these archaeologists are.  In a hundred years, sure, they'll recognise we were probably messing with them.  How about a couple of millennia? At that point, they may very well assume we didn't think of that, just as most archaeologists today tend to assume their finds are either genuine or very recent fabrications, rather than faked up to mess with them on the low end of the archaeological timescale but more than a couple of decades before.

[kerbiloid]

While we are talking, they are doing.

Spoiler

 

[Green Baron]

4 hours ago, Darael said:

It really depends how far in the future these archaeologists are.  In a hundred years, sure, they'll recognise we were probably messing with them.  How about a couple of millennia? At that point, they may very well assume we didn't think of that, just as most archaeologists today tend to assume their finds are either genuine or very recent fabrications, rather than faked up to mess with them on the low end of the archaeological timescale but more than a couple of decades before.

Well, it would be funny, but honestly, it only works with a certain imagination of archaeologic work ;-) No archaeologist judges a find without it's context, in fact a find without it's context maybe pretty nice for a catalogue but rather useless for archaeology. Examples ?

Context: mixed up layer -> find nice but useless (neandertal tool and wwII ammo side by side)

Context: bought from a fence -> find nice, scientific use questionable (disc of Nebra)

Context: found lying on the surface (can happen in a desert) -> find nice, without comparable specimen useless (neolithic style stone tools)

Everything a future archaeologist will find is quite automatically from the first example since we just love to dig these days. So trying to mix up the mixed up even more won't help that much if you want to fool somebody.

 

btw.: if you mean radiometric carbon dating that got a little more complicated since we mess with nuclear stuff and since the change in composition of reservoirs (CO2 from ice melting and ocean warming, more lighter isotopes in the air, less in the water blabla). They'll probably find another method for dating carbon stuff then. Also, even under the best circumstances, radiometric carbon dating only works 60ky backwards ...

 

[Sharpy]

On 4.11.2016 at 2:58 AM, Jonfliesgoats said:

I always thought it would be cool to bury inaccurate time capsules, lead plates and clay tablets of us doing ridiculous things.  I think it would be funny to mess with archaeologists a few thousand years from now.  Then I realize I'd just be giggling to myself stamping dumb things into wet clay, giggling as I deposit my inaccurate clay tablets in desert caves, etc.

Does anyone else think about screwing with archaeologists in future millennia?  At what point does a prank turn into concept art and vice versa?

Currently this won't work. Too much data is being recorded and hoarded, knowledge became too valuable to be easily lost.

But I believe the Voynich Manuscript is exactly this.