What Would We Draw?

My husband and I have a passion for photographing rock art.  Pictographs and Petroglyphs left behind by the ancient ones.  Many over 1000 years old.

Our last venture was to Bear Gulch in Montana where the site seems to be one where young men went before battle and etched and painted their visions into the limestone cliffs.  The problem is there is no dictionary to explain what they were trying to say.  It's a matter of deduction.

Tomorrow we depart on another of our ventures, this time to the sandstone canyons of Arizona and Utah.  I love to look for similarities among them for many different cultures were contributors.  Some are astrological and show the planting and harvesting cycles by where the sun hits a certain spot.  If it's a wall the places are marked.  It's really quite fascinating.

As we prepare to take off to the hinterlands I find myself wondering what we would carve into stone and just what would we be trying to say to those who follow hundreds of years from now.  Will those people see things the same as we do? Or would they look at our depiction of life as we know it and scratch their heads.

It's fun, in a way, to romanticize it all and think no matter how advanced our technology, it may not survive.  What is left would be our scratchings and would they be as big a mystery to them as the ancients' scratchings are to us?

Never mind that we're doing all we can presently to expunge our history for misguided political correctness.  Books may be banned or burned, robots may revising life as we know it and nothing to relate to who and what we are today may survive.

Yet those scratchings on walls of stone all around the world will survive.  Most will, anyway, because they are remote and difficult to find.  The hooligans who delight in destroying historical sites would never find all of them.  The stories will be there.  Perhaps between now and then a Rosetta Stone of sorts will be found to aid in translation.

What will those in the future think?  How could we humans of this era be so afraid of reality we've blinded ourselves to it. And in so doing brought civilization to its knees.

Of course if robots rule the world as some predict, it really won't matter will it.