What will the future find?

I was having a conversation the other day, which wandered onto fast food packaging, landfills, and archaeology—I know you're thrilled already, but bear with me for a moment— and I'd been watching Time Team.

Archaeology of the "Dark Ages" (5th to 10th centuries – Early Middle Ages) is notoriously difficult. Few written sources, wooden structures which leave little imprint, and a myriad of other factors which make reconstructing or finding out exactly what happened very difficult. If you go back more than a thousand years, beyond the Romans from two thousand years ago, you will enter the Iron, Bronze, and Stone Ages. Here people talk of the ancestors and try to give meaning to henges and standing stones and barrows, and those meanings change over time. Almost always guesswork (educated, to be sure) and subject to our own time's interpretation.

So what happens when, in two thousand years' time, the archaeologists examine our world and how we lived our lives? What will they find, and what interpretations will they offer? Assume, for a moment, that written records exist in fewer numbers, that they are looking only at the artefacts we leave behind?

And this is where fast food came into the conversation. A lot of what we throw away is packaging, and that may become the pottery much prized by today's archaeologists, the evidence of consumption, of change, to date each layer of earth they dig down through. The subtle changes in the Golden Arches over the years, the way Colonel Sanders' beard changes, the material the Burger King box is made from... each and every one useful for determining a precise date.

Worse still, perhaps they'll see this rubbish all clumped together in such an amount that they ascribe religious significance to it, much as we do to brooches, symbols, statues, and swords deposited in water (cue Excalibur rising from the water and that Monty Python deconstruction of the political system at the time).

Maybe they'll assume that all the ancient fast food restaurants were our temples where we made offerings of coins (when we used them – I rarely carry cash these days; who does?), spent our time in devotion, prayed to the saintly face of Colonel Sanders, gave homage to the King, or... to be fair... I am not sure how you interpret Ronald McDonald: a figure of justice for catching the Hamburglar, a god of fun and good times (Bacchus of our age?), or a figure of horror and fear (he is a clown after all, and there are few funny clowns). Maybe they'll link McDonald's to Stephen King's IT?

It is these thoughts which fill my waking hours and my conversations at times. I am not sure what that says about me, but I'll leave that to future archaeologists and historians to ponder upon.

Now, Big Mac or a Zinger Tower?