"This hardly counts as archeology," I mumbled, settling down to another day's dig. "It's more like grabbing crayfish in a jar."
"Oh, mercy mercy, I've got an embarrassment of riches, woe is me," replied Elsa. She held up an interesting trinket to the lamp, made some notes, then moved to the next thing.
The Freshkill dig was certainly an embarrassment of riches. A hundred meters down, but then fifty solid meters of human artifacts. Everything they ever did was written here, plain as day, you just had to look. Candy wrappers. Decayed wood and food. VCRs. History books! Now, where is the hunt and mystery of archeology when they print out exactly what happened?
"D'ya ever get the feeling we're fools, here?"
"I see one now," said Elsa.
Humans. You got a visceral feel for them, going through their stuff like this. Fat flabby aqua monkeys. Big loud fat-fingered overly social buffoons. Supernaturally intelligent, yet still gullible braggarts. Their intelligence was uneven. You got the impression you couldn't stand quietly around them for more than a few hours without accidentally robbing them blind.
But then, who are we?
"I mean, we read, because the human books taught us how to read. We have computers, because the humans books showed us how. We don't have self-repairing killer drones, because that's how the humans got themselves killed off, so, well duh, we didn't copy that one."
"We wear lipstick and pointy shoes out of human worship," said Elsa. We don't. It's ridiculous to even picture us in lipstick and shoes. I shouldn't be worrying about us aping them, she was saying, because in so many ways we clearly don't. Some of their foodstuffs, for example, were incredibly gross. Though their corn had proven good for grasshopper farming.
"Yet ... here we are," I said. I whisked away a layer of decayed organic material and uncovered a dozen of plastic pebbles, in a variety of exact geometric shapes, with numbers etched on their sides. The biggest one had 60 sides. I took a picture. "Ten thousand years ago we were shrewd farmers and merchants, but we couldn't read even though human books showed us it was possible. Now, we can read easily. Because we BRED ourselves to be able to. And we can do math. Sort of. Same thing. And don't get me started on those bloodyminded factions that LIKE imitating the human culture. They're shaping us from beyond the grave. But we have to keep studying them, because the human secrets are what is keeping our nation ahead of the others."
"Rocky, you KNOW you're right. We don't know where they are leading us. There's no way to know, other than to follow along. But we have no choice. So don't worry about it. Just do the job in front of you."
Brushing away more peat, I uncovered another plastic figurine. Instant recognition. I dropped it in shock, all my hairs bristling. "How uncanny," I said. Elsa smelled my unease and looked over.
I picked it up again. It portrayed a small mammal. Our own species. Monkeyfied, standing upright in a human jumpsuit, carrying a huge gun, baring its teeth. The base was labelled "Rocket Raccoon." I had a sinking feeling that I knew what turn our culture would be taking next.
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "Your species is coming to discover that you're not the first race to inhabit the planet you're on. You're archeologist and come across a depiction of a small gun-toting mammal in a jumpsuit. You jump as you drop the object out of your paw and your ringed tail twitches 'How uncanny' "