Quotation from Dr Roach (on the discovery of the anthrolayers)
‘Early investigations uncovered a stratum of fossilised honeycombs. The congealed sweetness sealed in over the centuries oozed out and could be tasted fifty miles away’.
Curator
human, present
Early-Anthropocene
Dr Roach’s Golden Spike Tool Kit
Molesey Heath
End of Polypropylene Layer, excavated by Dr.Roach, 00034500 CE
This box contains archaeo-landfill soil samples and was used to train non-insect excavators in the identification of stratigraphic layers of the Anthropocene. It was compiled by a highly skilled cockroach archaeologist, who routinely employed burrowing molluscs on large-scale excavations, often under harsh conditions. In a blatant act of speciesism, molluscs have since been completely written out of the history of the salvage profession.
IMoB 33106.
Curator
human, present
0002020 CE
Geo-Archaeological Tool Kits
unknown location
future
'In fifty million years,’ he went on, ‘if cockroaches evolved to become palaeontologists and dug down looking for evidence of what was going on in the early twenty-first, they might find distinct signatures similar to this in relation to the nitrogen cycle. Not that they’d be able to see it by the naked eye, but they’d be able to read the chemical legacies’. So, no colours? I asked.
‘No’, he replied. ‘They’d need to undertake a chemical analysis, but they could also infer microbial changes through associations with other traces like the distribution of phosphorus or plastic pollution. It’d be like looking through a glass darkly.'
Chapter 8 “The Little God”
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier
