Our guest blogger today is Dr. Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman. She shares how curious and resourceful 10-14 year olds can be when trying to save humankind and the crucial role archaeologists played. Dr. Pavao-Zuckerman is Associate Curator of Zooarchaeology at Arizona State Museum and Associate Professor in the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology.

“Finally, an archaeologist.” Not a reaction that members of my chosen profession are generally accustomed to, particularly in the context of solving the future’s greatest mystery (although we solve mysteries of the past all the time!). But in May, Dr. Jim Watson and I participated as “expert consultants” to a group of over 6,700 middle schoolers nationwide who were working to solve the mystery of what happened in the future that destroyed humanity.

The students were playing an on-line interactive and collaborative game called Vanished, a joint effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Smithsonian Institution. Because Arizona State Museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate, we were asked to participate in one of the game’s on-line “forums”, answering players’ questions about archaeology. The gamers were “excavating” future archaeological sites to try and figure out why humankind collapsed around A.D. 3000. The kids remotely operated excavation rovers that reported back findings of artifacts, burials, and structures. As they excavated new evidence, the gamers would log in to the forum to ask our expert advice.

They had a lot of questions! They asked about dating, tool manufacture, preservation, ritual use of objects, human and animal bones, disasters, you name it. Many of the gamers wanted to know how archaeologists know the age of artifacts and sites. We taught them about absolute dating versus relative dating. Absolute dating (such as carbon dating) gives an actual age of the creation, or deposition of, artifacts and features, whereas relative dates tell us which artifacts, features, or sites are older or younger than others. Understanding the principle of stratigraphy (that objects buried deepest tend to be older than objects closer to the ground surface) was critical to their observations of changes in human conditions over time.

Another hot topic was how archaeologists know if people died from epidemic diseases or violence. While violence can certainly leave telltale evidence in broken bones, injuries from weapons, and other signs of trauma, evidence for death from epidemic disease is more circumstantial. Ironically, epidemic diseases that kill victims quickly tend to leave very little evidence on bones.  People sicken and die before the disease attacks their bones. But, during epidemics, bodies are often buried hastily in shallow multi-person graves without careful preparation and positioning of bodies. The remains of people who died from disease may also be treated differently from normal practice, such as burying bodies instead of cremating them (as was sadly the case after the recent tsunami in Japan).

Vanished was hugely successful, and ASM was proud to participate. Using the scientific method, the gamers applied what they learned from ASM and other Smithsonian experts, as well as observations from the world around them, to uncover clues, test hypotheses, and reach conclusions. In the end, not only did the gamers solve the mystery of what happened to the planet, they were able to send their knowledge into the future to change the course of events and save all humanity. The past saved the future!

Want to know what the students discovered? The Vanished videos, flash games, archived video conferences, and forum archives are available at the MIT Vanished website.