Satire | Archaeology

You Can Have Her Pots and Pans, But Don’t Dig Up Grandma!

It’s not a question of when your grave will be robbed but by whom

Digging for the material remains of the dead is as old as the first grave. A couple of hundred years ago, grave digging and tomb raiding became an intellectual pursuit dubbed archaeology — sorta’ like a sandbox for adults. Without much care for where they go, archaeologists just want to find out where everyone else has been.

Under the banner of the need-to-know what spoons and forks were like 2000 years ago, diggers continue to excavate the earth and sea floors with reckless abandon. Pickaxes have been replaced by bulldozers, trenchers, hydraulic dredgers, and ground-penetrating radar so ransackers can dig like muthas!

Accounts of wars, ancient metropolises, and natural disasters lead diggers to fertile fields of bones and valuables. Gravy train locals are obvious — say a 4000-year-old skyscraping pyramid.

Archaeologists claim it is unethical to dig up burial sites except to seek new knowledge. However, the exception is the rule. Recently, a so-called expert argued that concerns raised by Native Americans about the handling of tribal remains were based on mythology, superstition, and pseudoreligion!

The only difference between sacrilege and archaeology is the time between death and dig. You’re a crook if you raid Pharaoh's tomb during the lives of his heirs. You’re an archaeologist if you pick his bones clean 1000 years later. Time is relative!

Howard Carter, the famed archaeologist who disturbed King Tut’s tomb in 1922, boosted valuables before the vault was officially opened.

Finders keepers losers weepers?

Whether by sale or donation, dem bones and dat stuff, will put piles of cash or valuable grants into the pockets of someone or some institution.

The syllogism — If digging, then scholarship — is a callous excuse for exhuming the dead, taking their stuff from the country of origin, and displaying it in some rich dude’s crib or a snobby-ass museum.

Debates rage over whether priceless artifacts should be repatriated. Hmm, I wonder why?

Whatever the justification, diggers dig for seriously old, once mourned, dead people to find their stuff and trample their sacred ground.

Archaeology 101 — Introduction to Desecration — Pompeii

With the force of 100,000 atomic bombs, Mt. Vesuvius ‘sploded in 79 A.D. Pliny the Younger witnessed the eruption and wrote letters describing the horrific event that smoked so many, including his uncle, Pliny the Elder. His contemporaneous account led to centuries of soul-snatching and loot gathering.

Quasi-formal excavation commenced in the mid-1700s when Charles of Bourbon, King of Naples, went on a tear for treasure. Over decades, pirates and archaeologists joined in. Respect for the dead and civility were superseded by the thirst for loot, much of which landed in the hands of Royals and antiquity dealers.

Addressing the contorted skeletal remains and the bodies of the dead, calcified by ash and preserved in their state of anguish, was a mid-nineteenth-century endeavor. The expressions of horror and pain were resurrected and re-entombed in plaster casts under the nobility of achievement. These trapped souls are now proudly displayed as the fruit of the archaeologists’ labor. Way to go diggers!

Today, thieves continue to dig for valuables alongside archaeologists doing the same to inform history.

There’s so much more to find sayeth experts who recently unearthed two skeletons of people believed to be fleeing the eruption.

You get two kinds of dead people in Pompeii — the ones who died pre the eruption, and were buried in the cemetery, and those who were killed during the course of the eruption, said Dr. John Pearce, senior lecturer in archaeology at King’s College London.

No shit!

Yo, it ain’t a stretch to conclude that the sacred notion of one resting in peace has been subsumed by an archaeological human sideshow.

Pay your money and step right up!

Hey kids, we’re going to Pompeii, the place wiped out by a giant volcano 2000 years ago.

Mom, we made a volcano for our 4th-grade science project. We want pizza instead!

No, this is real archaeology where they dig up dead people and their stuff to tell us what they ate and what kind of kitchen utensils they used back in the day.

Like candy corn and chopsticks?

Shut up, Timmy!

Kids, check out the twisted bones and preserved bodies of these dead people screaming as they were suffocated by ashes and boiled by gas.

Mom, they look like the same dead people in Night of the Comet.

Good thing we go to Catholic School and know Jesus escaped and just left his clothes.

Kinda’ like Houdini.

Shut up, Lucy!

Mom, my ice cream cone is melting.

Shut up, Reggie!

Kids, look at the remnants of the food they ate — beans, pork, fish, figs, plums, nuts, and olives.

We eat the same crap, Mom! They could’ve used a McDonald’s on the way out of Dodge, right?

Shut up Agnes!

Mom, it’s been an hour and we’re tired of this dead stuff. It’s a real Debbie Downer.

Can we get pizza now? Naples has the best!

Archaeology 201 — Advanced Tomb Raiding — Cleopatra and Alexander the Great

In many cultures and religions grave digging is taboo lest it disturb the afterlife.

Certain Native American tribes believe moving a person’s remains can unsettle their spirit. Rabbis disapprove of the disinterment of Jews, with rare exceptions for things like reburial in Israel. Islam discourages opening, handling, or reusing graves until there are no traces of the original corpse left. Many Christians believe if someone’s body is disturbed or destroyed, it cannot be resurrected.

Nevertheless, archaeologists are racing to find the tombs of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. I guess it’s important to see if Cleo’s skull confirms she was a babe and Marky Mark an adulterer.

Archaeologist Kalliopi Papakosta has focused 20 years on a mission to discover the tomb of Alexander the Great, one of the world’s greatest archaeological mysteries.

What the hell is the mystery? Plutarch carefully chronicled Alexander’s life and death 2000 years ago. The singular goal of this mysterious mission is to dig him up -period!

It’s what diggers do. Just ask the Sumerians, Babylonians, Maya, Romans, Egyptians, Khmer, Native Americans, et al.

Discovery Channel 101 — Amateur Archaeology

Dude, all we do is surf tasty waves all day. I need something more, kinda’ like Lady Gaga.

Dude, I just watched some dudes dig up rich dead people to find gold and jewels on the Discovery channel.

Jimmy Buffett was loaded when he croaked!

No, I’m talkin’ seriously old dudes. There’s banks of sunken gold off the coast of Mexico that some rich Spanish dude stole from some Aztec dude with a frothy cool name.

Dude, we own every break in Mexico. Gnarly waves and gold. I got a supremo snorkel and bitchen fins!

Maybe we can borrow a boat from the bearded guy who vacuums up shit piles of oro in Alaska?

Then we can get gold grillz!

Our moms are going to be so proud we became archaeologists.

Mars — 3034 C.E. — Latest Digs From Planet Earth

Martian archaeologists dug up the ruins of the ancient City of New York finding mountains of useless gold, primitive weapons up the ass, petrified pepperoni pizza, and tons of dead people buried in rusted taxis and tiny cubicles. They mapped the Trail of Sand, an exodus of old people to a place called West Palm Beach. They returned with a huge cache of microplastics found in decomposed bones and bodies. They intend to produce permanent containers to forever preserve all our Martian crap.

Also found were the remains of the Angelinos, a people living on a giant ice island off the west coast of North America. Bodies were buried in shorts, flip-flops, and hooded sweatshirts. They too found shit piles of primitive weapons, which might have led to the tribe’s extinction. Also discovered were millions of acres of prehistoric kale, a useless green plant.

In digging up the Lost City of London, they learned local tribes perished from bad food and bad teeth — just like what’s happening in our New London City suburbs.

Thieving Martians barely escaped a rain of hellfire in the ruins of some place called Peoria. They found Grandma’s grave and pots and pans. Though we Martians now cook with our minds, these artifacts are priceless. The crooks will likely sell them on the intergalactic black market for heaps of oxygen. Also taken was Grandma’s titanium hip, a well-preserved example of primitive medicine.

One wonders how earthlings survived with so much garbage in their bodies? We are so lucky to simply speak body parts into existence.

They’ll never dig us up!

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