How To Study America's Past Culture

Imagine America in the year 2128. Things look quite different; for starters, there aren’t any Americans left. Flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, wars, and blizzards have destroyed many American cities and its landscape, forcing those alive to flee to Europe. America is now without humans, and nature has taken over, with weeds growing in city streets and wild animals roaming the subways. Anthropologists from Europe are curious to see what has changed in America and to study its past culture, but unfortunately they have no accessible documents, and the recently rediscovered “Internet” has been long dead. The anthropologists would have to embark on an archaeological journey throughout America to search for the story of America’s past.

would just some of the few cities that future anthropologists would find. The cities of the 21st century might be in ruins, torn down by natural disasters, looted in chaos, and anthropologists might find evidence of mass migration in cities. Anthropologists would likely find parts of Texas, New York, Florida, and California flooded, and cities such as Miami and Houston would be real-life versions of Atlantis. The anthropologists would find huge buildings with unworking elevators, where they would find evidence of financial transactions and rooms where there are racks and torn clothes on the floor. When traveling through cities, they would notice that some parts of the cities were cleaner and more distinguished than others, while other sections of the cities looked run-down. The anthropologists could conclude that the poor and the rich often lived in different parts of cities, but in the end, both the poor and the rich had to flee the cities due to various reasons. Social anthropologists analyzing our remains would question the ties between the economic divide and the social divide between the rich, the middle class, and the