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Out of The Myths of Time
Another Man's Trash

by Lord Darius "look what I found" von Tannenburg

"Darn it" I said. "No" she replied. "I have a good paying job and I don't have to do that anymore!" Then my beautiful and loving, intelligent, caring and (till this moment) quite reasonable wife, went and gave this formerly financially challenged man near heart failure. She threw away a pair of what I thought to be perfectly salvageable socks. Horrors!!!

When I was growing up in Kansas times were occasionally very trying. I won't bore you with details beyond the fact that one-room school houses and sod homes are not just plot devices on TV. To this day a thing must be beyond all hope of repair before I Let it go. You can guess how my lady views some of the items in the pack-rats collection. I also have a good paying job. But old habits die hard. This minor moment of mundanity reminded me of something and someone I saw at the last GWW. A merchant was selling reproductions and original Medieval belt buckles, pins, spurs, knives and many other things, including buttons. All authentic antiques. I wondered at how he could bear to part with them, or afford to sell the things at what seemed like really low prices. The mystery of this was abated when the man explained his source.

It seems that all across Europe people are finding huge repositories of these amazing finds. Plates, bowls, silver spoons and on and on. Most of these original artifacts are in poor condition, but, they can tell us so much about those who came before. But where are people getting these things to sell to American merchants? Surely they are not tomb robbers like in the Indiana Jones movies. Not to worry. Remember that I said most of these objects, at least the originals (the reproductions are first rate), were in poor condition. Time in the ground is not the main reason. The locations of the repositories is the reason for their dilapidated condition. These amateur archaeologists are digging in the area formerly known as the trash heap a.k.a. the Medieval landfill. What was once someone else's garbage has become a treasure trove of ancient artifacts so plentiful that there exists an excess that can be sold to members of the public who would like to own a piece of history. I have even seen in magazines where one might order 5,000 year old sand stone oil lamps and bags of old roman coins. Some were stamped out in such quantities that even today they are not valued above a few cents. At least those coins held their value. What will American coins go for in two thousand years hence? For that matter, what will all the other things we routinely toss out say about us in the far future? Will they speak of a wealthy people given to excess who could afford to easily replace common every day items at will? Or will all our old things take the opportunity to get some measure of revenge for their having been callously tossed aside.

My lady's old socks are a disposable item these days. But what if civilization should fall and rise again? Will some future historian digging in an old landfill take note of the fine weave of the material and deduce that the item was discarded after developing a small hole. Whoever the original owners were they must have been fantastically wealthy (I wish). To have such fine things made for them and to be able to dispose and replace these things so readily, the original owners must have had many slaves working constantly to produce the items (I am not responsible for the goings on in third world countries - or am I? Food for thought, but I digress). Like detectives going through a suspects trash, future historians will sift through our landfills to learn about us. I wonder what they will find and conclude. Thanks to the Victorians and other nostalgia buffs that followed, the thought might be that the Medieval era continued in isolated pockets far beyond the 1600s. This culture even reached into the new world as far as California. I have already heard stories of pieces of armor being sold in "Antique" shops as genuine relics. I never realized period armories used closed cell foam.

The point of all this is that today we make judgments about the past based on what they left behind. Everytime we throw something out we are leaving clues that will be found in the future. Knowing this we might chose to edit the story that will be told about us. What does your trash say about you? What would you have it say? We all get to make that decision when we buy things, things that will eventually wear out and have to be thrown away. By making good choices we can tell people in the future what we thought of ourselves and the world around us.

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OUT OF THE MYTHS OF TIME articles. Copyright 2004 Albert R. Endsley.

Darius von Tannenberg has granted permission for all of his articles that were previously on the Dreiburgen web site to continue to appear on the site, 9 Oct 2006.

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