TRANSLATIONS - Technology Information

Emedia Professional, Dec, 1999 by Stephen F. Nathans

"The myths that have made us wonder are projections of a human imagination like our own and, if we look for the key inside ourselves and learn how to read them correctly, they will supply us with a record, inaccessible up to now, of the adventures of men like ourselves."

--Edmund Wilson To The Finland Station A Study in the Acting and Writing of History (1940)

my parents are American historians. As such, the family trips we took when I was a kid diverged somewhat from those of other middle-class North Carolinians. For my sister and me, the well-beaten path to Virginia's Busch Gardens detoured at Colonial Williamsburg; the road to mindless mirth at South Carolina's lush Hilton Head stopped short at Fort Sumter; the Catskills thruway veered off at FDR's birthplace in Hyde Park; and when we got most ambitious, the ski resort express to Vail and Aspen stopped dead in its tracks at the Anasazi cliff dwellings of Colorado's Mesa Verde.

But did all this mandated extracurricular learning leave me wishing I'd whiled away my summers tanning and toning on the Fantasy Island-like beaches of Kiawah Island? Judge for yourself: I've spent my last two vacations exploring cave dwellings at Qumran--one-time home of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Israel's West Bank--and in the similarly sacred tableland ruins of Mesa Verde. What drew me back to the land of the early history of my people, and the people of the early history of my land? Simple. There's something inescapably human about connecting to the past, and once you've found that connection, you'll never let it go.

But connections to the past are never made easily. Our own memories are mere shards of experience used to reconstruct the whole, and re-assembling a culture's past from the fragments that remain is even harder. Much debate has surrounded the obstacles to interpreting the Dead Sea Scrolls, from Bedouins who cut up the texts they found at Qumran to get more money for them, to a Catholic archaeological cabal that summarily suppressed scrolls casting doubts on the originality of Jesus Christ as he's depicted in the canonic gospels.

But what you never read about the significance of Qumran is the miracle that in our current cultural context we cannot only read the curious hieroglyphs (ancient Hebrew and Aramaic) that comprise the texts, but also understand them within a richly documented history of second-temple Judaism. (Which is all the more damning of the easy expediencies of our modern Judeo-Christian world--we've grown so fat on our historical creature comforts that we'd actually push such bounties aside.)

Consider the petroglyphs at Mesa Verde: also the history of a culture--like the five books of Moses or the Qumran scrolls--but rendered in a single panel of rock engravings and cast in a cultural code that stymied many attempts at a workable interpretation. They're not the only petroglyphs that remain, or even the most visually compelling, but they do tell a substantial story. Like the transcribings of the Essene Jews at Qumran, the rock art of the 11th and 12th century Anasazi cliff dwellers reflects migrations, hardships, and spiritual awakenings. What they lack is an unbroken cultural tradition, oral or written, to assure the proper interpretation of the history with which they have left us.

Therein lies the utter fragility of our ability to understand our past. As a Judeo-Christian culture we understand very well the conditions our cultural forbears faced in the land of Israel, and the meteorological and political forces that challenged their hold on their land. We have that understanding because the ancient texts survive, and we've been fortunate enough to preserve our ability to read them.

Thus, it's our history and our understanding of it that connects us with all the things we are that are not bound to the times and places in which we live. And as our history is ever more deeply embedded in hieroglyphs--and cast in media infinitely harder to decode than deep etchings in cliffside rocks--the more we find ourselves in danger of losing our connection to who we are, who we've been, and how we relate to our land and our God and our past.

One of the great things about studying and re-thinking the ancient and recent past is the perspective it gives us. A year ago, a U.S. News and World Report article cast aspersions on CD-Recordable technology, claiming that CD-R media would physically deteriorate in two to five years and thus render useless all the valuable information stored on it. All of us with profits and punditry at stake in CD-R rushed to refute the article, shrilly citing studies establishing CD-R's physical longevity at 50 to 100 years. Mine (published in May 1998) wasn't the shrillest jeremiad penned by CD-R's apologists, but I, like most of us, missed a salient point in the article. Namely, that the physical survival of the media would mean nothing if there were no drives or PCs left that could read the data they contain.

The Hopi elders who interpreted the Mesa Verde petroglyphs weren't miracle workers, whether culturally descended or not from the migrant Anasazi who had once inhabited their region. Their plausible interpretation of the panel's tersely rendered message stemmed from the fact that they had some context for it. The binary concision of a recorded or pressed CD is, if anything, an even more impressively economical code than that which the Anasazi left behind; but will any human ever be able to see it, much less read it from a disc, without the aid of the computer for which it was made?