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?
Nowadays, things are documented pretty well. As long as the documentation is available, I don’t think there’s anything that would be common but mysterious.
However, if data is lost, pretty much everything becomes a total mystery. Like, popsockets and phone cases for example. How would you figure those out in a thousand years if you haven’t read any blog posts, reviews or marketing material about any of this stuff. If you don’t know how expensive, fragile and useful phones are, and how would you figure it out that people are so worried about cracking the screen? Pretty much none of that data is on paper, so loosing that information can happen very easily.