2,000 years later.. still here...
In 1977, I was one of thousands of young backpackers in Jerusalem.
One day, while wandering around East Jerusalem, I walked into The Albright Institute for Archaeology at 26 Saladin Street.
I had no business going in there. I was not an archaeologist. I was just hot and bored and curious.
As I wandered in the nearly empty building, I was approached by a woman.
"Are you an archaeologist?" she asked. I think she was just saying, in the nicest way possible, 'what the hell do you think you are doing trespassing here on private property?'
I paused, caught. "No," I responded. "I am a photographer."
I felt I needed some kind of identity, and I did have a camera.
Her name was Dr. Sharon Herbert, and she was indeed an archaeologist. She was, in fact, the head of the Kelsey Museum at the University of Michigan, and she was heading up a dig in Israel.
She paused and took a beat. This was not the answer she had been expecting.
"My photographer has just quit," she said. "Would you be interested in becoming the photographer for my excavation?"
I was.
And so I became the official dig photographer for the dig at Tel Anafa, in northern Israel,
I had never been on a dig before and knew nothing about archaeology.
On one of the first days on the site, Dr. Herbert handed me a broken piece of pottery, a pot sherd that the team had lifted from the ground. Ancient Greek, she said.
As I turned it over in my hands, I noticed some letters scratched onto it. These are called ostricon - writing on pottery. This was, in effect, a message from someone that was more than 2,000 years old. Still here. Still readable.
I was hooked.
In 1986, The BBC set out on an interesting project. To demonstrate the cutting edge of technology, they created a copy of the Domesday Book on an optical disc. The Domesday Book was and is the register of all the lands and properties in England, commissioned in 1086 by the new conquerors, the Normans, to get a grasp of what they owned. It was written by hand in ink on parchment. 1986 was the 900th anniversary of The Domesday Book, and The BBC project was supposed to preserve The Domesday Book for 1,000 years for future generations - at a cost of £2.5 million.
Today, the optical discs that hold The Domesday Book still exist. Except no one can read them. There are no longer any Optical Disc readers.
You can still read The Domesday book in the original parchment, of course. And you can still read the ostracon on the Greek pottery at the Kelsey Museum in Michigan.
I am writing this not on a piece of pottery, nor on a piece of parchment. Nor am I engraving this in stone. Instead, I am writing it on a piece of software that will probably not exist in another 20 years, on an operating system that will probably be dysfunctional in 5 years, and I am not really even writing it. I am just creating strings of code that will vanish with ease.
In the past few years, our entire world of collective creativity has moved from the physical world - paper, photographs, celluloid - to the digital world - long strings of zeroes and ones. And as the technology changes, and it does faster and faster, that world becomes increasingly irretrievable only a decade hence, let alone 2,000 years later.
All the wedding videos of my past marriage were shot on Hi8 video. (As I divorced - and later remarried - I don't much care that all of that is now irretrievable, but it's a sign of a problem).
The problem is that despite our prodigious output of content - more photographs are taken every 2 minutes than were taken in the entire 19th Century - almost all of it, if not all of it, is likely to simply vanish. Ironically, the few printed photographs from the 19th Century are far more likely to survive into the 22nd Century than all the billions of images we upload to Instagram.
Digging up the past was and remains fascinating. But that is because our ancestors left a physical record behind. My fear is that 2,000 years from now, future archaeologists will wonder why civilization ceased to exist, apparently, early in the 21st Century.
"What happened to them?" they will ask.