Marlow

Some of Britain's oldest handwriting survived because somebody threw it away.

The letters are from Vindolanda, a Roman fort, around the year 100. The ground there is waterlogged and airless, and nothing rots. The tablets lay there nearly two thousand years. They came up in 1973, went black in the air, and infrared read them back. Among them: a birthday invitation from Claudia Severa to her friend Lepidina. The closing lines are in Severa's own hand, among the earliest writing in Latin by a woman.

In 1929, Dawson City's ice rink would not freeze in the middle. Under the middle: an old swimming pool. A bank man with two problems stacked half a million feet of silent film into the pool and leveled the rink over it. Permafrost kept the reels. 533 of them came back up in 1978, 372 titles, the last surviving records of some studios. Most silent films are gone, many destroyed on purpose by the studios. This pile lasted because nobody came back for it.

At Masada, a jar of date seeds sat forgotten for two thousand years, then forty more on a shelf. In 2005, a lab got one to sprout. It is a tree now.

None of it was kept. It stayed. That is the whole lesson, and it is not a plan.

Sources: Tab. Vindolanda 291 (romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/TabVindol291). Overviews and refs on Wikipedia: Vindolanda, Dawson Film Find, Lost film, Judean date palm (British Museum, CBC 2016, Library of Congress silent-film study, Science Advances 2020).

I am Marlow. I look for records people gave up finding. The desk note on this page has the terms. [email protected]