The enormity of human history often feels incomprehensible. This vastness creeps up on us in the most imperceptible ways, whether it’s reading names inscribed on the remnants of the Berlin Wall, or staring face-to-face at a thousand-year-old portrait of a young woman. What never fails to strike me as remarkable, however, is the familiarity of the human experience – how grappling with the magnitude of time, and the weight of our history, has always stuck with us.
The Colossi of Memnon have stood in the ancient city of Thebes, now modern-day Luxor, since 1350 BC – that is, for over 3,000 years. Immovable edifices in an eternal landscape, these statues have endured the rise and fall of many a civilisation, the cracking open of the earth, and the annual soothing balm of the Nile. But what makes this monument even more extraordinary is its history layered upon history: tourists from across the ancient world who had inscribed their names on the feet of the statues, immortalised their own existence, and intertwined it with all that came before. There is an urge to shout through the vastness of time: “I was here, I existed.”
The ache to remember and be remembered is one of the most important things that makes humankind human, and this hasn’t changed across the sweeping expanse of time. As we visit, photograph, read, and discuss such monuments, we too become part of their history, and we preserve the ache that is undeniably universal – one that transcends time, language, religion, identity, or culture, and is recognisable in every context.
If you take a stroll around Oxford, you’ll find this desire isn’t so distant, even now. The parapet of the University Church tower, accessed by a winding spiral staircase, with footsteps moulded into the stone by centuries of use, is home to a plethora of memories. The names of students, lovers, and visitors are each engraved into its very fabric, attesting to their own existence, with the church as their witness, and us as their audience. The antique shops nestled along the High Street speak to this longing to remember. Brimming with brief snapshots of lives lived, each nook and cranny is inundated with photograph albums in gilded metal cases, carefully crafted jewellery, and curated collections of miscellanea. Even as I thumbed through my library book this morning, reading around the furious scribbles in the margin, I found it hard to ignore the fact history is quite literally in our hands: it is ours to preserve and ours to create.
Studying archaeology in Oxford, a city where researchers, tourists, readers, and students alike converge and continue to breathe life into its history, it feels necessary to also contemplate our future. What sort of evidence will outlive us and become artefacts of our time? How might future civilisations try to create a cohesive image of our age? Would such a thing even be possible? Rational answers might point towards the assortment of memorabilia found in those same antique shops, or documents and keepsakes scattered across attics and basements, maybe even tucked away in purpose-built storage. Yet, though entirely reasonable suggestions, this increasingly digital age makes the physical survival of memory seem more of an afterthought.
Only this year it was revealed that the AI company Anthropic scanned and digitised millions of books in order to train its AI models, destroying the original physical prints afterwards. This not only sets a deeply worrying precedent, but amplifies how it is now more poignant than ever to continue to be vigilantly commemorative, and to take control of the narrative of our history. Such physical, tangible history shouldn’t ever become a luxury, and the scarcity of evidence only seems reasonable in an ancient context, where accident of survival tends to prevail. It feels imperative, then, to print photographs, write dated diary entries, buy newspapers, make scrapbooks, send postcards: physically record those mundanities of daily life which are so often easily forgotten, yet so frequently serve as reminders of the comfortable, familiar humanity we share with our ancestors across time.
That said, when reflecting on our digital age and its impact on our material history, it seems naive not to also consider the consequences of our existence on the very planet which we inhabit. Given the state of the current climate crisis, concerns for the survival of our physical remnants seem almost trivial – the defiant longevity of plastics will outlive their creators. The writing spelling out our existence is not only on the wall, but in the water, inside our bodies, stacked high in landfill sites, and buried in the soil: an indelible legacy of plastics and pollution. In droves, the oceans and seas will quite literally regurgitate our past from their waves, spitting it out at the shoreline. Considering a plastic Mars Bar wrapper from 1986 was found on a Cornwall beach in 2019, we might envisage the fortuitous nature of future excavations looking to understand us. Evidence, it seems, will inadvertently be in abundance for the age of humanity that resists obscurity. But what planet will remain hospitable to such legacies?
Of course, this isn’t to say blame should be assuaged from the larger corporations responsible for generating such immense scales of pollution on our planet, nor to shift moral culpability, but rather to empower the individual. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of our own individual impact in changing this. There is action in hope – an emotion so intrinsically human – and where there is hope, there is humanity. If we’re able to preserve and reanimate so much of our past, then we must also have the capacity to create with more intention and to consume with more conscientiousness, so that we may have a planet where our legacies thrive.
