Archaeology is one of those peculiar sciences where progress can only be made by discovering things that are even more ancient and primitive than before.

Plus, under the current punitive time travel prevention laws, any discovery that relates to the past will result in a sentence of three years hard labour, i.e. digging large holes in the ground and breaking rocks with a hammer while other people stand over you and make sure you are doing it properly. Archaeology is exactly like that, only slower.

Archaeologists have long expounded their theories on time travel, explaining that in order to see, and more importantly understand, the ancient past all you had to do was dig a hole (the depth of which determined how far back in time you went) and pay attention to the pottery, nails, digital watches etc. you unearthed.

As a result of these excavations several fundamental archaeological truths were published in the back pages of musty, academic quarterlies. These were:

1. Broken handmade pottery is not as interesting as you might first imagine and, in fact, demonstrates that early races probably spent most of their time having fantastic arguments and throwing things at each other.
2. When ancient texts were occasionally discovered in sealed jars it became increasing apparent that they had about as much of an idea as to what was really going on in the universe as we do, i.e. very little.
3. The idea that the ancients had some secret technology that allowed them to construct vast structures and drag enormous stones across the landscape merely demonstrates our lack of imagination, thousands of slaves and traditional engineering skills on our part.
4. Any interpretation of the function and meaning of stone circles will be completely wrong. They only thing they seem to be good for are photo opportunities.

Despite this slightly defeatist view, archaeology has produced some astonishing finds.

Take Zoonrobati-pegalencra as an example. This is a world with three moons that are all much larger than the planet itself, giving it the most mathematically complex orbit (and best surfing) in the universe. During a small dig near the Collapsing Mountains of Goi (on the shores of the Halbstrom Sea) the team stumbled onto a huge metal chamber that had been buried under the rubble and sand of a millennia of earthquakes.

Clearing away the edges of the box revealed it was over 8 metres in all dimensions and made of a substance that defied gravitational waves. There was a door. This was only pried open after the news crews arrived and the documentary filmmakers had found the right place to stand to make them look windswept and interesting.

Roi Grellexari, the expedition leader, lit a torch and stepped in.

Inside the box was a large expanse of sand and rock, in which was another box exactly the same size as the original. And inside that box was another and another and so on.

The furore this produced, the endless speculation as to the meaning and function of this device, spurred a resurgence in archaeology. Millions of students, dissatisfied with their omnics degrees, switched disciplines and were soon out in the field getting arrested for illegal time travel.

Roi, a cunning old professor, knew exactly what the box was because he'd built it. He confided on his death-bed that he had constructed the device from an old anti-matter disposal unit coupled with a "fractal shunt" a gadget used in typography to make sure fonts scaled down infinitely and still looked cool when you zoomed in to read them.

When asked "Yes, all very clever, but what is it for?" he chucked and replied that he had created an Archaeologist Generator, a device so mysterious that it would inspire a whole generation of field researchers and so popular that it would force the repeal of all that bloody annoying time travel legislation.

It worked.

The Lost Transmissions Archive

Tim Stevenson

16.01.12 Front Page

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