A Civilization's Legacy

Stongehenge, in all its confusing glory!

On our way to Dorset on the southwest coast of England, we made the glorious pit stop of my life at Stonehenge. The monument which evolved between 3000 and 1600 BC is a baffling, but awe-inspiring collection of perfectly-tailored stones. But what exactly were they tailored for?

No one really knows. The ring of stones is aligned with the summer and winter solstices, so perhaps the whole monument is a grand sundial. Historians also believe that Stonehenge could have been the site of ancient worshipping practices or even a burial ground given the skeletons that have been found around the site. Maybe the prehistoric peoples knew that English author Thomas Hardy would need a place for his heroine to die in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and thought the Slaughter Stone would have just looked tacky on its own.

The Slaughter Stone

The complete mystery of Stonehenge scared me a little bit. How can such a majestic monument to Prehistoric culture exist in an easily accessible part of the world and no one knows why it’s there or how it got there? Most confusing is the circle of bluestones in the interior of the ring. The nearest rock of that type is approximately 250 miles away in Wales. Moving such stones would be a job today, but am I to believe that these ancient peoples put these things on ginormous rafts in the Atlantic and carted them off to what became England? Or maybe a nice glacier came along and left them there.

What will become of all the monuments of modern human civilization? I can hardly imagine the Empire State building withstanding rust and erosion for as long as Stonehenge has. Even the Taj Mahal needed restoration after a few centuries, so who’s to say that it can last for the next five thousand years?

But while these monuments are marvelous engineering and architectural feats that spell out the supremacies of various civilizations, they are more importantly a testament to the human mind that has the capacity to imagine such structures and conceive of ways to build them. That’s why I’m glad the more valuable accomplishments of humanity are contained in writings and texts.  The real accomplishment is all the knowledge!

The creepy, but nicely scientific butterfly specimens
illustrate warning coloration to predators

Once we left Dorset for London, we were invited to see pages and pages of Alfred Russel Wallace’s personal correspondence. For those who don’t know, Wallace was the guy who published the “survival of the fittest” evolutionary theory before Darwin did, but was gentlemanly enough to share the credit (though history has much forgotten about him). Even within the samples we saw, there was a wealth of information from experimental data, to anatomical sketches, and other annotated and preserved journals. It was awesome to see his own personal collection of butterfly specimens. Even though bugs freak me out, I can still appreciate a man’s dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.

Wallace's catalogs of data

Having seen the Wallace Correspondence Project’s archives and the museums that house it, I am confident that all of humanity’s legacy won’t just be a bunch of mysterious rocks and skeletons in the ground. Yet, I don’t know what will become of the digital culture we live in now. What’s the shelf life on an email? On some level, perhaps the more commonplace digital exchanges of today will last longer than the letters I’ve seen over the past weekend, but surely it’s not the same thing as deciphering Darwin’s frankly awful handwriting. I guess I’ll just have to hope that historians of a future age will know what my password is.

Still, our legacy is the texts—in whatever form that they might exist— that contain the progress of civilization into cities and coexisting nations, from minds bound by Scripture to freethinking skeptics. Maybe I’ll contribute the weensiest bit of knowledge to the entire human compendium one day, but until then I’m content to marvel at the findings of those who have come before me.