INTRODUCTION: THE PRESENT AS FUTURE RESIDUE

It is sobering to consider the present from the vantage point of a would-be archaeologist in the future. What an archaeologist would “unearth” at some such imaginary time is the residue of our daily lives and a stratigraphic record of our collective successes and failures. Adopting this vantage point alters our conception of the present and the memorable past, for by jumping into the future we are prompted to lift our gaze from the rush of daily events to ask ourselves: What, of all this that surrounds us, will endure? What will register itself in the sands and sediments of time?

While most of our familiar surroundings and habitual activities will disappear without a trace in geologic time, there are clearly several realms of human activity – to which we may not give much explicit attention in our everyday lives – that will nonetheless leave indelible and puzzling patterns for future archaeologists to contemplate. Most notably, in many areas throughout the tropics – in the regions now known loosely as the “third world” – future archaeologists will have to account for a thin, almost indistinguishable stratum in the soil profile corresponding perhaps to something as brief as one hundred to five hundred years in time depth, depending upon its location.

This archaeological stratum will be very revealing indeed. Upon laboratory analysis it will no doubt show evidence of substantial shifts in the floral and faunal populations, an efflorescence of new cultigens, a remarkable invasion of exogenous material culture, and a considerable upsurge in rates of soil erosion and sedimentation.