Early Article: Will Future Civilizations Bother to Excavate Our Remains?

The practice of archaeology is almost unique to our contemporary Western civilization rather than universal, and it is unlikely to be continued by future civilizations.

Trnava University/Archaeology student training.

This article by Ben Landau-Taylor will be published on Palladium Magazine on July 11, 2025.

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.