When the Maldives sink beneath the ocean floor, as a result of climate change, they will become a lost civilization. Over time their remains will decay and disappear, gradually becoming lost to the remaining civilizations above water. Over time, the curve of this decay function will intersect with a historical recovery function. Underwater civilizations decay over time, but, eventually, there is an interest in recovering their remains. Over time the present becomes the past and is lost. But then, the past again becomes the present and its remains grow.
Over the last several centuries, there has been an exponential explosion of artifacts from the past. Not only have there been more and more discoveries; they have been more and more productive in terms of the artifact yield.
How should we account for this process? On the one hand, there is simple path dependence. One discovery leads to another. Each set of historical treasures yields new clues, leading to the next find. At the same time, new technology allows archaeologists to find new assets and milk them more efficiently.
The pile of artifacts from the past has been growing before our eyes. These artifacts are the concrete physical remnants of prior civilizations. They embody a profound historical facticity that is a material foundation of historical knowledge.
The artifacts are elemental pieces in the puzzle of ancient societies. Archaeologists fit tiny physical fragments into larger mosaics. The mosaics become the floors of ancient apartments. The apartments become terraced houses. The houses cluster with other structures in ancient cities.
On this complex foundation are extrapolated the patterns of long past societies. Their politics, economics, social organization, culture, science and technology are teased partly from the clues that these and other artifacts provide.
The artifacts not only answer old questions and provide clues for further exploration and interpretation. They also raise new questions.
The population explosion of artifacts obviously enriches our historical understanding. Many known sites remain to be excavated. New sites remain to be discovered. Each new treasure presents new clues and whets appetites for more. Though deep water presents severe obstacles to exploration, land ultimately covers its treasures more densely and opaquely than the sea. The ocean is more transparent than land and promises ultimately to yield a greater percentage of its treasures.
At the same time, there remain limits to growth. Obviously the population of archaeologists and their budgets are not unlimited. They must compete with other social projects for scarce resources. Though there is still plenty of room for continuing growth in archaeology for a long time, at some point, the exponential increase of archaeological discoveries will level off and decline. The ultimate constraint, the final boundary of archaeology, remains the total treasure of history itself.
Assuming total transparency, what will we know if and when all the sites have been found and excavated? Of course, we will have a much more complete record of the material bases of historical society. At this hypothetical endpoint, all the pieces of the historiical jigsaw puzzle will be available to us.
These pieces are valuable in their own right, simply as remnants of the lost past. Yet they are far from being all the pieces to fill out the complete picture of the puzzle. They provide partial clues to obscure patterns of larger relations within and between local societies and the wider world. The small but growing population of artifacts helps us a bit to decipher the much larger puzzle of meaning–where we came from, who we are, and where we are going.
Francis A. Beer 