How Long Until History Fades into Legend?

The point is not whether we could know what the ruins were used for, the point is than we would know than a civilization had been there.


Yes exactly, a civilization that carves rock or creates major structures will be visible and apparent. I also think the above point about the rate of technological change is a good one. Just because we live in societies that change quickly and are used to major change every few years does not mean that our ancestors had or even could deal with that rate of change. The expectation was that you lived exactly the way your parents and grandparents did and your children would live the same way. The idea of a fast developing civilization that was isolated hence "lost" misses the point of how slowly everything changed and how resistant to change most humans are.
 
TCHEK, has an interesting point.

One of the reasons for slow advancement of a "tribe"
maybe to Cultural Resistance to Significant Change.


This resistance maybe due to:

Superstition
Threat to an existing Caste or Order
The person championing are considered Low on the social totem pole.

I am sure others can name other causes of resitance to change.
I remember an old Sat Night Live Skit. A caveman had a very clever
Idea (Steve Martin) but the Tribal chief became jealous and Bashed his
skull in with at rock while the clever caveman slept. Bit of truth in that.

BUT the counter of this theory is that if a tribe is under
threat of extinction, it may make them more open to radical ideas.
 
Rakhasa, everything fades away in time. Even our greatest structures will eventually either collapse or erode away. The great pyramids could be buried in the sand, the Hoover Dam will eventually collapse after thousands of years. AND, consider this, even if you have a structure survives, if there is no written history to explain it, its true meaning will become lost.

Consider the Lincoln Memorial. We all know what it is because there are books on Lincoln and articles on the monument. However, if civilization falls and becomes illiterate and the books disintegrate, no one will know the meaning of the building. They will most likely think it was a temple for a bearded god. ;)

What will they think of Mount Rushmore? If I ever write something like this I was thinking of calling it Four Kings or something like that.
 
Or four gods, like the buda statues in asia.. God-kings? What king of ruins would be around Rushmore, anyway? It is near a city or in the wilderness?

For that mater, isnt there some sort of second Rushmore with a famous Native being built somewere on the States? Or I am misrememebring some movie?
 
Or four gods, like the buda statues in asia.. God-kings? What king of ruins would be around Rushmore, anyway? It is near a city or in the wilderness?

For that mater, isnt there some sort of second Rushmore with a famous Native being built somewere on the States? Or I am misrememebring some movie?

There is a Crazy Horse monument only a few miles away, but it's not complete and has continually run into funding problems. There's also a similar monument on Stone Mountain in Georgia comemorating Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. The presence of similar monument sites roughly 1500 miles apart might suggest to future archaeologists that a large, contiguous civilization with the ability to carve giant faces in the sides of mountains once occupied at least the eastern half of North America.

The Rushmore and Crazy Horse monuments are in wilderness areas, so there's not a lot of ruins around them to place them in context. At least not anything that would last more than a few centuries (highway and parking areas, interpretive center, gift shop, etc.) The nearest city is only about population 300, so it's doubtful there are a lot of really impressive long-lasting structures there: maybe a bank vault might survive several centuries, but even that's doubtful.

However, there is a chamber, part of a much larger 'Hall of Records' that was originally proposed but never completed, built 70 feet into the rock in the canyon behind the monument. It contains historical information on porcelain panels (full text of Declaration of Independence and Constitution, a history of the United States, and biographies of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and Roosevelt along with that of the architect). This would be an immensely important artifact for a future archaeologist to find.

It's interesting to note that the Mt. Rushmore monument was carved from a mountain that the Lakota Sioux regarded as a holy site: Paha Sepa, or the Six Grandfathers. So at some point in the future Rushmore might come full circle. ;) Some geologists have suggested that the mountain may persist in a form recognizeable as a carving for as long as eight million years.
 
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