The Roman dodecahedron is an item that has turned up in a lot of sites where people do archaeology. While most items, given time, have their purpose easily or at least approximately deduced by researchers, the Roman dodecahedron’s purpose is largely baffling to even the most studied of archaeologists, who have no idea on where to start with it. This in turn would probably baffle the Romans, who would have seen it as a common household item, no different from a spoon or a comb.
Suppose a few thousand years from now, archaeologists were excavating our remains and had varying degrees of success deducing what different things were for. If you had to guess what common household item of ours would stump them the most, what item would you guess it would be?
Fidget spinners
Dog poop in plastic baggies.
Why would we collect dog poop in a container that doesn’t decompose? Was it a religious thing? Did we expect to use it later?
The mystery remains!
Was it a religious thing? That had me in tears. Honestly, no more and no less strange than most religious traditions.
Maybe the miniature table thing that we put on pizzas to keep them from getting smushed.
Is that what they’re for? I thought it was so you could hold the pizza down and grab a piece without touching any of the other pieces.
Back in the day, they’d put a ball of dough in the middle of the pizza to serve the same purpose
I guess they are very versatile
Such a waste of oil…
“Why did they make so many of these things all over the globe?”
Any electronic device with firmware in flash. The charges will have decayed a long time ago, leaving a paperweight.
Sufficiently diligent far-future archaeologists may dissect and catalogue the devices well enough to develop a taxonomy of components, having their own names for components, CPU architectures and such, but they’d then be left with something like “this was a programmed control device of the Xargx Valley type, variant 13, only with a screen, a speaker, two microphones and a motor actuator. We speculate it may have been a domestic appliance, a children’s toy or part of a transportation device. Alternatively, it may have had religious or ceremonial uses.”
Not a direct answer to your question, but the book Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay is about a group of future archaeologists excavating a ruin from 1985, and is definitely of some relevance here.
USB ports, probably. We put that shit on everything. That and electrical plugs.
Nah there will be windows XP machines still in service propping up random industry infrastructure 1000 years from now, I guarantee it
My guess for the dodecahedra is that they’re a tool to aid with cryptography. This video explains it well, but TL;DW you’d use the dodecahedron with two concentric circles full of letters, and rotate one to know which letter to replace with which. It’s a slightly more advanced and secure version of Caesar’s cypher, and I could easily see the Romans doing something like that.
On the other hand I wouldn’t expect them to be used for knitting or jewellery, as simpler devices would do the same job.
…but to answer your question, I think that most decor items will give those archaeologists a hard time. Stuff like this:
I was almost going to say “yerba mate bombillas”, but they’ll likely detect saliva DNA in them and guess that they were used as straws:
Maybe it is a toy, or like a fidget spinner. Idn I stim a lot that looks like it would be awesome for stimming, first thought.
Another running theory is knitting.
I think it’s unlikely to be a knitting tool, as you could achieve the same with a simpler tool.
For example, I’ve seen people saying it’s for wool gloves. But a bar with five holes and some knobs would do the trick, no need for an intricate form like a dodeca.
Respectfully, do you knit?
I don’t knit. I’m saying this based on multiple factors:
1. Videos of people who knit trying to use a dodecahedron. Like this one or this one. They use the holes, they use the knobs, but the core shape of the tool itself is practically irrelevant, and if anything it gets in the way. Also note the end result, it’s way crappier than a good knitter could do by hand. (I might not knit but I do see people knitting all the time.)
2. The existence of a similar icosahedron. It could be used just fine for cyphers, but not for knitting - note how the holes are too small. (Also, you wouldn’t need so many faces.)
3. The Romans assigned manual labour - like knitting - to slaves. And slaves aren’t exactly the sort of person a Roman would waste precious bronze with, specially not for a tool with an excessively specific purpose, like this one.
4. Wool production in Rome was mostly around Gallia Cisalpina:
And yet those dodecahedra were mostly found around Germania, Belgica, Lugdunensis, some even in Britannia:
If anything the distribution hints more something military.
… I suddenly want one of those statues but with a cats head instead.
My guess: Minecraft toy pickaxe seemingly a tool with super weird shape.
The sleeves from gastric bypass surgery. Lots of other medical devices have an obvious function, thinking of steel hip replacements or screws to bend badly broken bones. But the sleeve might perplex someone thousands of years from now.
This question is tough because I feel that our society has documented everything. Even the smallest item has articles written about it. But if a lot of that info was lost, things like bluetooth headphones might cause confusion. If technology doesn’t endure, will future generations think everyone had them to limit surrounding noises when in reality we introduce sound wirelessly.
Wouldn’t gastric sleeves be pretty quickly identified as being a medical device? Find a few in coffins and the theory pops right out. The beauty of the Roman 12gon is that it’s ubiquitous, complicated, but not documented and not clear even what category of things they were used for. Like a rubix cube.
Seeing as younger generations have problems figuring out the kassette tape, I’d wager this list could get pretty long.
Some kind of dice, gambling or game piece. Maybe there were other parts made from wood or pottery which fit Into the holes, maybe interchangeable. That would explain the stuck out parts, the dice could roll without marking the surface of the attached parts.
