Grab your sonic screwdriver and look out for Morlocks – this week the Oswestry Heritage Comics heads to history’s final frontier: the Future!
We always think of heritage as being about looking back – looking to the past, to the things from yesterday that have survived until today. But heritage is also about the future – because one day “today” will be “yesterday”. We’ve looked back hundreds, thousands – sometimes millions – of years into the past in these comics, and looked at things that have survived from those distant times to our present day, and what they now mean to us. But things which we now think of as “heritage” – as old and even ancient, like stone tools or hill forts – were once new. Once upon a time, stone axes were revolutionary technology, and changed the lives of people who used them even more profoundly than the internet has for us today. Once upon a time, hill forts were ordinary places as central to people’s lives as supermarkets, banks or football stadiums are for us today.
So part of thinking about heritage is thinking about what things from today might become the heritage of tomorrow; things we regard as revolutionary or commonplace today that will become mysterious and ancient to the people of tomorrow. This kind of heritage thought-experiment can be great fun – will our descendants have any idea what money, cars or mobile phones really meant to us? But it’s also a very serious way to try and understand what things like stone axes, hill forts or even railways meant to people when those things were new or commonplace. Thinking about the way our lives and our material culture might be understood (or misunderstood) in the future can show us how we might better understand (or be in danger of misunderstanding) the lives and material culture of the past. If only half of the things in your house survived into the future, would people really understand the way you lived in 2018? What if only one thing survived?
Next time you’re in a museum, have a look around you – not at the exhibits, but at the ordinary things which we all take for granted today: mobile phones, prams, sunglasses… What might those things look like in the Museum of Tomorrow?
