All civilizations study the past and read the texts handed down by their ancestors. What’s much rarer is systematically analyzing ancient artifacts and sites to figure out what past societies were like. By default we assume that such a massive empirical-theoretical project is natural and obvious, and every sensible civilization would devote lots of resources to it. After all, our own civilization has done this under the banner of “archaeology” since well before we were born. In the course catalogue it’s listed between “accounting” and “astronomy,” and it’s easy to take that as a law of the universe. However, archaeology is historically very abnormal, possibly even unique to our civilization. It’s likely that future civilizations will revert to the mean and stop bothering with it.

Archaeology as we know it—a tradition of knowledge among a dedicated body of scholars in dialogue with each other and more or less synced on goals and methods—dates from roughly the 1700s. When Western archaeologists first scoured the world to survey ancient sites, very often they found the locals had been vaguely aware of the ancient ruins nearby, but never bothered to investigate more deeply than boys wandering through for a curious afternoon. Since then, archaeology has gone global. Western culture and methods have been widely imitated by other civilizations, often with funding and training from the West, and archaeology has been part of that package.

Aside from modern Western and Western-derived archaeologists, I know of only two other cases where there was a serious tradition of knowledge studying ancient sites or artifacts to try to understand the past. Both of these were aimed at relatively narrow reconstructions of religious practices, rather than trying to understand everything about past societies like our own archaeologists. I’m sure there were also scattered individuals who stared at an old Roman road or an overgrown Khmer temple and tried to imagine how the people had lived, but that’s very different from a successful tradition of knowledge.

Rites of the Ancients

Before the West, Mesopotamian civilization came closest to archaeology as we understand it under the Neo-Babylonians in the 6th century B.C. They excavated ancient Mesopotamian temples which had been ruined for over a thousand years and studied them in detail, trying to infer their floor plans and furnishings so they could reconstruct them exactly as they had been originally. Kings like Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus left inscriptions boasting that their temples were exact restorations of the ancient works, often on the same sites, and incorporating bricks and idols from the ancient temple. This almost certainly required methods which today’s archaeologists would recognize, such as identifying likely-looking mounds as buried megastructures, mobilizing laborers to excavate them, preserving ancient artifacts as they were dug up, and trying to piece the remains into a picture of what the ancients had been trying to do.

Famously, this project also produced the earliest known museum so far, which is best described in the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley’s book Excavations at Ur. On the compound containing the newly reconstructed Ziggurat of Ur, the king’s daughter Ennigaldi presided as high priestess. In one room near her temple’s school, Woolley unearthed a collection of several unrelated artifacts which were already ancient in Ennigaldi’s time, as well as a “museum label” which announced its text was copied “from bricks found in the ruins of Ur, which while searching for the ground-plan [of the temple] the Governor of Ur found, and I saw and wrote out for the marvel of beholders”. The bricks in royal constructions were stamped with the king’s name and other metadata, which has been a great help to both Neo-Babylonian and Western excavators. I’m sure the old kings would be pleased that their names are still preserved. The room also contained a few ancient artifacts unrelated to construction, like the head of a mace, so there was at least some attention to preserving antiques apart from just restoring the temples. We have so little data that we can’t say confidently what else they did or didn’t study, although it seems to me like the temple restoration project was probably the driving force, with a little bit of antiquarianism done opportunistically along the way as old sites were excavated.

This proto-archaeological tradition lasted for several generations, but seems to have ended during Ennigaldi’s lifetime. The Book of Daniel recounts the story of Ennigaldi’s brother, the crown prince Belshazzar, who received the prophecy of the “writing on the wall” foretelling the doom of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Belshazzar and his father Nabonidus were conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great. Naturally, the Persians did not continue the Neo-Babylonian effort to revive Babylonian religion as a centralizing imperial project, and the expensive temple constructions were stopped. Rather than impose their own foreign religion, the Persians let the different subject peoples practice their own religions, most famously letting the Jews return to Judah and thereby ending the Babylonian Captivity. I know of no evidence of any excavations continuing under the Persians.

The next case I’m aware of was 1500 years later, in China under the Song Dynasty. No civilization in recorded history has studied ancient texts as devotedly as Medieval Chinese Civilization. In addition, some scholars closely studied ancient artifacts, mostly bronze vessels over a thousand years old used for the rites and rituals which were central to Ancient Chinese Civilization, and stone stelae which were centuries old. A few antiquarians assembled substantial collections, and some emperors maintained larger collections still. Their studies focused mostly on the inscriptions left in these artifacts, and they published rubbings and catalogues. This work was used to reverse-engineer the ancient rituals and revive them at the imperial court, complete with reconstructed ancient-style bronze vessels and bells. Popular art drew inspiration from the revived ancient styles as well.

Li Ji, who brought Western archaeology to China in the early 20th century, critiqued the Song antiquarians as limited and unscientific by comparison with modern methods, narrowly focused on inscriptions and elaborate art objects. The Song antiquarian tradition eventually died out, perhaps because of the Jurchen and Mongol conquests. The Jurchen invasion destroyed the collection and research notes of Zhao Mingcheng and Li Qingzhao, at the very least.

There may have been other archaeological traditions which have since been lost. If the Carthaginians or the Shang had anything like this, we probably wouldn’t know about it. Within our surviving records, however, these two are the only precursors similar to the Western tradition. This grew out of the Renaissance, when European scholars revived the widespread study of ancient Roman and Greek texts. A handful also devoted themselves to collecting and cataloguing the artifacts, and sometimes digging up ruins in search of more. These early modern antiquarians were initially scattered, preparadigmatic individuals, more in dialogue with the numerous scholars studying the old texts than with each other. The field gradually cohered over the centuries, informed by the development of Western science and empiricism. While there is no sharp dividing line, it’s probably fair to say that archaeology had emerged as a distinct field with its own methods and goals by the late 1700s.

European antiquarians were first interested in Greek and Roman artifacts, as an extension of Renaissance scholars studying Greek and Roman texts. Later on this interest grew to include non-Classical sites and artifacts in their home countries, such as Stonehenge. Then as Western powers dominated the world and sent political and ideological expeditions to distant lands, archaeologists went to sites mentioned in canonical texts like the Bible and the Iliad which had passed into the territory of other civilizations. From there it was a small step to extend archaeology to the entire world.

Why Our Archaeology Won’t Endure

While archaeology is now practiced around the world, we shouldn’t overstate our society’s dedication to it. Serious archaeological work occurs only where it is politically and ideologically convenient. When the government approves of the work, such as the British Museum’s excavations buttressing the prestige of the empire, or recent Turkish backing for the Göbekli Tepe excavations to boost tourism revenue, a great deal is possible. But without the active support or at least the tacit permission of the state, archaeology remains small-scale and marginal, if not suppressed. This is most obvious under governments which actively destroy past artifacts for ideological reasons, such as the Taliban, the Islamic State, or Australia.

In Italy, stifling “legal mechanisms are straightforwardly to blame for throttling archeological discovery”, to the extent that “Many artifacts end up on the black market … or are even simply destroyed or hidden away.” Less dramatically, when a friend of mine led an expedition to find ancient sites in the Amazon, his partner at a Brazilian university advised him not to get the government involved, because they don’t like finds which could interfere with resource extraction. In the United States, the ​​Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act gives federally recognized Native American tribes substantial power to veto or censor archaeological investigations, which is often used to block research that holds the possibility of contradicting a tribe’s mythology or complicating their claim to land.

Further east, excavations of Mississippi Mound Builder sites are only occasionally suppressed by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who have been granted de facto jurisdiction as one of the few surviving tribes from the region; nevertheless these excavations remain small-scale and niche, in large part because the possibility of finding more evidence that there were once sophisticated native civilizations in North America would be very inconvenient for the civic mythology of both European-descended and Native-descended Americans. The largest investigations of these enormous and poorly-understood mounds were conducted during the Great Depression, when the Works Progress Administration was looking for any excuse to mobilize workers and would gladly hire two hundred men to excavate and catalogue a single site, whereas an excavation today will consist of maybe half a dozen graduate students.

Now that archaeology has been codified and established widely, even if imperfectly, will it persist forever? I doubt it. When a civilization adopts an unusual practice which does not confer a large, immediate material advantage, then that practice can persist for a long time, sometimes until the civilization itself collapses. It usually doesn’t persist into future civilizations, however. The Ancient Chinese rites were lost with the fall of Ancient Chinese Civilization, which is why Medieval Chinese antiquarians and Modern Chinese archaeologists are forced to guess about those rites based on partial descriptions in texts and the artifacts which happened to survive. Archaeology is much less central to our society than Ancient Chinese rites were to theirs. A closer comparison to archaeology’s importance might be Medieval Western anchorites, a religious practice that was extremely important to its practitioners and housed for centuries within the dominant intellectual institution, the Catholic Church, but was essentially abandoned by the modern era.

Among bookish people, a common joke is to talk about present society in the tones of a distant, far-future archaeologist looking back on our own society’s remains. I first encountered this as a lesson in my middle school history classes. The idea appeared at least as early as 1952, in Clifford Simak’s Hugo Award-winning novel City, and was popular on Tumblr back when I hung around in the 2010s. I’m sure this isn’t meant to be taken too literally. Even if it’s funny to describe a drive-through restaurant in the ritualistic tones of academese, that doesn’t mean serious thinkers really believe future archaeologists will continue using our exact academic forms of speech. Nevertheless it seems to me that most people making this joke are accepting the core claim, that future scholars will study our civilization’s remains with all the methods we use to study our forebears. That’s a strong claim, in need of a strong justification.

Human civilizations have varied tremendously, and will continue changing for as long as anything vaguely recognizable as human remains alive. Our own civilization is not the final form of Man sitting at the End of History. There are many examples of practices that used to be much more common than archaeology, and were much more load-bearing to the civilizations which practiced them, but have entirely died out. Over the next millennia, the successors to our civilization will abandon many things which we take for granted, for both good reasons and bad.

For example, human sacrifice used to be ubiquitous. If you tried to tell a city-dweller that maybe one day people would just stop, they’d look at you like you’d grown a second head. Then, over the course of the first millennium B.C., human sacrifice was abandoned by every major Old World civilization. Animal sacrifice persisted for longer, but is also basically gone. How many Roman priests ever considered that might happen?

Of course, human civilization is not infinitely malleable. At the extreme, if humans are still around in two thousand years, then it seems extremely likely that there will still be hierarchies and private property and ideologies, and things more or less like government and money, as we have observed in every known civilization. For practices which are relatively unusual, where we have many examples of civilizations expanding and enduring without them, we cannot assume they will persist without a very strong reason.

Some newer practices, such as industrial mass production, provide such overwhelming and immediate advantages that they will probably persist in some form, unless and until they are supplanted by something even more powerful. An older example is minted coins of precious metal. These were invented in the 7th century B.C., and replaced commodities valued by weight as the main form of money. This endured for over two thousand years; by now, perhaps coined money has permanently been obsoleted by fiat money, or perhaps our experiment with fiat money will eventually be remembered as a temporary and aberrant detour which ultimately returned to minted coins, like Medieval China’s centuries-long use of fiat money that was aborted by the Ming dynasty. It is too soon to tell. But however that shakes out, trading barley and loose silver by weight will not become the dominant form of money again.

Some people tell me that archaeology is like industrial production or better forms of money, and it will persist because it provides material advantages. Unfortunately, archaeology does not come close to meeting this bar. The material technology we gain is mostly a matter of curiosities, since our own technology has advanced far beyond past civilizations, just as our successors will very likely have better technology than we do. It is possible, and in fact fairly common, to reverse-engineer social technology from the distant past and use it as inspiration for creating new functional institutions. However, every case I know of this happening drew almost entirely from studying ancient texts, and little or nothing from archaeology.

Different Civilizations Pursue Different Projects

Archaeology is mostly done out of spiritual motivations, fueled by the drive to understand Man’s place in the universe and by the quest for Truth for its own sake. We do not study the Antikythera mechanism in order to use its once-advanced technology ourselves; we study it because we want to understand where we came from, with the framing and values which our scientific-materialist ideology puts on that question. As a believer in this ideology, I try to answer these questions for their own sake, but the material benefits are distant and intangible, more akin to how anchoritism supported Medieval Western ideology. Ideologies provide direction, cohesion, and spiritual power, and are not to be taken lightly even if all this is hard to quantify. However, practices which support one ideology will not necessarily support a later one. A Phoenician might argue that infant sacrifice would persist indefinitely because it supports the social structure, and this was true of his society, but it is not true of ours. In addition to the ideological motivation, archaeology can be a field for impressive achievement which demonstrates a state’s capacity, much like the Pyramids of Giza or the Apollo Moon landings. The form a state chooses for its demonstrative achievements is an expression of its ideology. Even today, when archaeology conflicts with state ideology, it is often suppressed.

Some people tell me that archaeology will persist because the basic idea of closely studying ancient artifacts is simple, and now that it’s been figured out, people are not going to forget. There are ideas which are very simple and very obviously useful, and so were quickly adopted once articulated and never lost after that, but nevertheless were not developed until late in human history. Examples include phonetic alphabets, the numeral zero, calendars with numbered years, and Cartesian coordinates.

However, while the basic idea of studying artifacts is simple, doing so productively is difficult and complex. The methods of excavating sites and structures, recording finds in a way that others can understand, preserving and storing artifacts, detecting fakes, dating sites and artifacts, and inferring the shape of past societies from the artifacts recovered are all difficult to do well. Developing these methods took generations of refinement. This is not a simple idea which can be adopted by anyone who hears the concept explained clearly. This is a live tradition of knowledge, handed down through immense effort to teach the next generation. Individual scholars in isolation, without an entire field to draw on, have historically achieved pretty limited results, as we saw with the Song and Renaissance antiquarians.

Back in Babylon, the basic idea of restoring the temples was apparently remembered long after the practice ceased, but that wasn’t enough to revive it. When Alexander the Great conquered the city after two centuries of Persian rule, Arrian tells us that he intended to rebuild the main temple, and Diodorus Siculus tells us that this was a suggestion from the Babylonian priests. However, the project failed and the temple was not rebuilt. The execution of a difficult project requires far more than just the idea.

Like any tradition of knowledge, archaeology can and eventually will die out. What we learned to do once, we can learn to do again, and in many fields such as astronomy or portraiture, we see traditions of knowledge get lost and rederived many times throughout history. If future civilizations care as much as we do, they will be able to figure out archaeological methods at least as good as ours. But if they don’t care enough to devote a great many full-time specialists then the mere idea of studying old artifacts won’t get them very far.

This cycle has already happened at least once. The Neo-Babylonian proto-archaeological tradition died, and for eons we know of nothing else that came close, even though their successors remembered the idea for a while. Time passed, Rome rose and fell, the Medieval Europeans built their castles and cathedrals, in Early Modern times they settled the New World—and only then, 2300 years after it was lost, was archaeology independently reinvented. If and when it is lost again, archaeology will probably be rederived, if you don’t mind waiting a millennium or three. By then, most of the artifacts that could be used to reconstruct our own society will be lost, and only a few isolated shards will remain. The future traditions will have very different goals and ends from our archaeologists, and think of their work very differently, but probably the systematic analysis of ancient artifacts will eventually be redeveloped to a high level—and then lost again, and so forth. In any given future year there probably won’t be a live archaeological tradition.

Some people tell me that archaeology will persist because now we are rich enough to fund projects like this, whereas before industrial technology, societies could not afford to do so. Greater wealth will make it somewhat easier, and better technology will continue widening the scope of what’s possible to recover, but I think this will have only a small effect on how much people care to apply their wealth and technology to this particular task. There are lots of things that people can do with their wealth, and for universal desires like food or clothes, it’s pretty safe to assume that people will produce more as they get richer. For more specific or more esoteric things which other civilizations care less about, this assumption does not hold. We can assume that richer civilizations will generally produce more entertainment, but we can’t assume that richer civilizations will produce more superhero movies, for the same reason that a 19th-century American would be incorrect in assuming that a richer civilization would memorize more poems. Up through the early 20th century it was common for governments or even wealthy individuals to produce beautiful buildings and public spaces for the public. Today, this practice—which is less fundamental than food but more fundamental than archaeology—is mostly extinct, even though we are far richer than in the days of Georges-Eugène Haussmann or Andrew Carnegie.

Nebuchadnezzar was rich enough to investigate and reconstruct ancient temples all the way back in the Iron Age. Alexander was rich enough to continue the work, although he failed for other reasons. Any other king capable of mobilizing scholars and laborers had the wealth to study ancient sites, if they cared to. Our greater wealth means our study of ancient artifacts occurs on a much larger scale, employing far more people than Nebuchadnezzar could, but this is not the reason we care enough to actually do it. The Song dynasty was also much richer than Nebuchadnezzar, and their society was more scholastic in general, yet their study of ancient artifacts in particular seems somewhat behind the Neo-Babylonians’.

The Aztecs were a very poor civilization with extremely primitive technology, even lacking metalworking and the wheel. They nevertheless maintained some very expensive practices, including mass human sacrifice, constructing monumental pyramids, and keeping a massive royal zoo. The Aztecs were conquered by the Spanish, who imposed a new civilization that was much richer and far more technologically advanced, yet they discontinued all of these practices until Mexico became independent in the early 19th century. A zoo was eventually reestablished in 1924, not because Mexicans became richer and naturally conceived a desire to spend their wealth on exotic animals, but because public zoos had recently become a cultural marker of city pride and sophistication as an outgrowth of Western scientific-materialist zoology. To this day human sacrifice and monumental construction have not been reestablished, even though modern Mexican society is incalculably richer than the Aztecs. The Great Pyramid of Cholula, which predates the Aztecs and was already abandoned when the Spanish arrived, is much larger than any monument built in Mexico with industrial technology. It will probably outlast all monuments ever built by industrial civilizations anywhere on Earth.

Over the very long run, archaeology will probably follow a trajectory similar to the building of monumental pyramids. Different civilizations, widely separated in time and space, independently decided that building pyramids was very important and established sophisticated engineering practices for the purpose. Most civilizations did not, and find the whole thing baffling and foreign, even if they can see some exotic romance in it. When a pyramid-building civilization collapses, its successor usually does not continue the practice. This is true even if the successor civilization, like our own, is far richer. The systematic study of ancient artifacts is much rarer historically than the construction of monumental pyramids. This will probably remain true in the distant future.