Artifact: The Rolodex

[Warpy]

3. one thing that has a good chance of persisting for a millennium or so

is the balck Bakelite rotary telephone body, at least in shattered form. I can well imagine future archaeologists or just landfill treasure hunters reassembling them and trying to guess their function. The large number of them at a certain layer will give rise to all sorts of theories. Since archaeologists tend to see most things as either willies or religion and the phone bodies won't look like willies and the dial hole is too large to be of much use to them, I suppose they'll try to reconstruct the religion of the 1910s-1960s from these plentiful but incomprehensible artifacts.

Well, unless Fatso and Putin decide to blow us up, instead

(I never minded the Rolodex, it just sort of sat there inoffensively, but remember what replaced it? It was a hunk of flotsam you wore on one wrist called the Filofax and was bulging with notes and numbers and reminders if you were trying to give the impression that you were in demand, somehow. I suppose being chained to cell phones that offer the same function is an improvement, but just. And ohmygawd, they're sill tring to seel filofaxes.)