Questions tagged [archaeology]
For questions about excavation of past species and civilizations, on Earth or an alien world. Topics include the actual science of archeology, information gleaned from the fossil records, and longevity of civilization artifacts.
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How can explorers determine whether strings of alien text is meaningful or just nonsense?
A group of xenoarchaeologists is studying the remains of a bygone civilization with the aim of understanding its culture. So far, isolated artifacts have been found, such as metal plates with symbols ...
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Baal's advocate - plausible deniability for failed theophany
There's a mystical component to my world that I have been unable to resolve: Why might a divine being not reveal himself when it would otherwise be in his/his followers' best interests. My world has a ...
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Is it okay to use real-world literary figures? [closed]
In my world's lore and history, there a mythical figures and heroes in it. My world is not Earth, but rather a different world (think ATLA or skyrim kind of different). I was wondering if I am able to ...
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What sort of texts would survive in a sunken ruin?
Hundreds of years ago, the once-opulent city of not-Atlantis incurred the wrath of the gods and was cast to the bottom of the ocean. Now, our intrepid adventurers have been sent to the lost city of ...
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If dinosaurs had a civilization, how primitive must it have been to leave no trace in the present?
I am thinking of, yes, a simple story with intelligent dinosaurs, but I am not interested (And I sincerely prefer) that they are not sufficiently advanced in my history to be comparable to modern ...
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Ancient temple booby traps designed for dragons
I grew up watching the Indiana Jones and enjoying the creative death traps and Indy outsmarting them.
What what about dragons?
So this is for a potential novel dealing with a dragon civilization. The ...
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Safely preserving a manuscript for 700 years [closed]
The problem: My time travelling hero has travelled from the present, back to 14th century France (think 100 years war) to retrieve the mcguffin, a manuscript. He cannot take any physical objects back (...
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Plausibility of Materials Lasting Millions of Years
I've seen a lot of articles and even questions here which talk about how long modern human artifacts will last. Mostly it seems to boil down to modern materials not having great longevity, though ...
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Why haven’t scientists found evidence of humans interbreeding with aliens?
In my alternative universe, Atlantis was a real city that existed, although it wasn’t called Atlantis or founded by humans. Atlantis or rather, Dosham was a city on an isolated landmass in the ...
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A setting in which people have discovered all of science
So this is very loosely inspired by a theory I have about Star Wars as a setting, but it is not something they really discuss overtly even in the Extended Universe. One of the interesting things about ...
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How long would could a mars rover remain intact?
The year: Sometime a long time from now
The place: Mars
Little Bobby Colonist is going to play out in sand dunes beyond the edge of the domed city where he lives. Terraforming efforts over the last ...
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When will the last unambiguous evidence of mankind disappear?
Humanity just disappears tomorrow, let's say it is like the Thanos-snap but it kills everyone. How long until the last unambiguous evidence of our existence disappears? What was this last relic?
The ...
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Humans get knocked back into the stone age; would archeologists from 10,000 years in the future be able to tell that we existed?
I am inspired by Dr. Robert Schoc's hypothesis that the Great Pyramid and Sphinx date back to a lost civilization from 10,000 BCE.
The Question:
Suppose an asteroid/mega solar flare/etc. reduced ...
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Natural uncovering of desert ruins
My world has a semi-nomadic people that inhabit a vast sandy desert. Underneath this desert lie the ruins of an enormous metropolis -- a city that was abandoned tens of thousands of years ago.
In the ...
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How Long Would Artifacts Last Under the Moon's Surface?
How Long?
In the 1960s, unknown to most, the United States set up a secret base on the moon manned by an "extra" aboard each Apollo lander. NASA architects decided that the base must be built into ...
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How long could a well-built, well-preserved underground shelter last?
This isn’t a question about sustainability, but rather archaeology. Let’s assume you built a large underground complex, perhaps a bunker or a communal fallout shelter, in a geologically stable region ...
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In a cemetery, what evidence could be found that humans were intelligent and had technology?
So, a group of archeologists from the year 4978 have uncovered something strange. They’ve been searching for the missing link between them and their primordial ancestors, and they seem to have found ...
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What anomalies in the Fossil record would be left behind by humans?
Human society is effectively gone and a new, intelligent species of Chimpanzees has taken over the role as the dominant species on Earth. It has been 40,000 years since the humans fell, so we can ...
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What will remain from an eco-friendly civilization after 10,000 years?
Let us assume that about 10,000 years ago there was another human civilization, that was quite similar to humanity. Physically they are humans. The state of development of this civilization is quite ...
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Killing off Indiana Jones
Watching Indiana Jones movies for some time got me wondering how you can effectively kill the explorers to your temple after a long time.
How can I prevent explorers from stealing my artifacts for at ...
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How long would a body be preserved in a sealed coffin in space?
A spacefaring people buries their fallen heroes in space. The bodies are adorned in uniforms (fabric), equipped with the weapons they carried in life (mostly aluminium, steel or polymer, but ...
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Archeological evidence of nuclear warfare
I'm working on a story set roughly 2 million years in the future involving future archeologists discovering evidence of a nuclear war and ensuing winter wiping out humanity. What sort of clues would ...
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Signature of destruction - energy weapons
As an additional follow on from Destruction by design - how best to go about crafting a ruined landscape? I'm asking some questions about signature destructive patterns. This is the second one, the ...
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Signature of destruction - kinetic bombardment
Following on from Destruction by design - how best to go about crafting a ruined landscape? I'm asking questions about the signature destructive patterns of different weapons systems. This is the ...
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Signature of destruction - does tearing down a building leave noticeably different ruins to natural decline?
As a follow on from Destruction by design - how best to go about crafting a ruined landscape? I'll be asking two questions about signature destructive patterns, this is the first:
How, if at all, ...
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Destruction by design - how best to go about crafting a ruined landscape?
Ruins of many kinds are a staple of stories whether for games or tales of high adventure. My question is about the design process behind such structures: should one start with a city or building and ...
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Can a modern book that traveled back in time be proven to be older?
Imagine I travel back in time ~500 years, leave a modern ship/boat log book in a cave and the log book was discovered today. Since the book was discovered after it was possible to buy it off the shelf ...
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How fast can dungeons be covered and how low can they sink?
My plot is to have temples,castles and cities built on top of the remains of previous structures repeatedly to create a multi-level underground dungeon. My goal is to figure out how many levels this ...
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Is it possible for plate tectonics to have completely erased traces of an advanced civilization? [duplicate]
I'd like to know if it is possible for an advance civilization to have been on Earth for millions or even billions of years in the past. And that after dying or moving away, the remnants of their ...
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What prevents Dungeons from collapsing?
One of the ideas I've had for a story is to have million year old subterranean buildings/cities/temples which have younger architecture built on top of them, resulting in a "dungeon" which would be an ...
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Figuring out how a smart device works
You are an archaeologist in the year PQMX (some thousands years in the future from now), and while excavating the remains of a city which appears to belong to the mythical Western World, you have ...
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Hollow Earth, or mile deep network of caves/tunnels [closed]
Is the hollow Earth theory based on a sub-surface network of tunnels that link large caverns, or do they really believe there is a interior sun that lights a hollow core. This seems to have many ...
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Could an intelligent civilization have existed on Earth before humans? [duplicate]
And more importantly, how could we not know about it? I remember hearing that most of our man-made monuments and buildings will have completely collapsed in a few thousand years, so is it possible for ...
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How can I re-fit the Atlantis story to a location in the Caribbean?
Atlantis is mentioned in Plato's Timaeus and Critias dialogues.
I would like to know how I can set the story to a location in or around the Caribbean, during a time frame that would "fit" the story ...
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Could ancient Atlantean monuments have survived a flood cataclysm?
Lets assume that in antiquity an advanced civilisation like that of the Roman Empire existed on a sizeable island the size of Spain in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
This civilisation built large ...
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What is the best practice for (alien) archaeology?
We're a lovely, ethical, near-future population of Earthlings, and prepared to begin terraforming Mars (yes, I went there: set it aside).
We have just stumbled on remnants of an alien civilization ...
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