If you want to build to last, build with stone.
My findings include artifacts that are carved from stone and shell along with relics fired from clay with items that date back 10,000+ years per sources. Off topic and therefore not previously stated I only mentioned pre modern man artifacts given the discussion however I have located so much more. I live in the Eastern coastal mid Atlantic region of the United States of America which has a very long and documented history of human occupation, aka people losing things.
For those reading this that have wanted to find such an artifact I can assure that such things are everywhere however one just needs to invest the time to look and comprehend one's surroundings. Just as the article concludes "There’s more out there to be found, but they have to be looked for".
Thank you so much for the update and for saving my miserable life!
No life is miserable if one is motivated and capable of positivity but it is 2022 which is presenting more and more challenges to be that positive.
Stay Healthy!
but whenever I hear that sentiment I am usually reminded of this quote from Judge Holden in Blood Meridian:
"What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building — these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us."
For what it's worth, I live in the four corners area of the US and regularly see stone buildings that are hundreds of years old out in the desert, and the structure I live in is made of wood.
You probably know this as well, but for those that don't, the Anasazi are typically called "Ancestral puebloans" in modern literature because it's been well established that they didn't actually go anywhere, they're pretty direct ancestors of the modern puebloan nations (among others).
That said, I am a little up the hill where it's wetter (and will hopefully remain so). If we stopped upkeep on the place I live, I am not confident that obvious traces of it would outlast the cliff dwellings at, say, Mesa Verde.