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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

It’s quite possible that one day future technology can beat this by feat by 4500 years. That’s when old kingdom Egypt adopted the potter’s wheel and started mass producing religious figures, like little cat figurines. To get more efficient in mass production, they started using reeds to shape clay on the potter wheel to etch features in a way that might reproduce sound waves in the air at the time it was crafted, and maybe, just maybe survived the kiln.

So sitting on the shelves of our museums might be little recordings of a few minutes conversation between workers in an early 25th century BCE Egyptian sweatshop. I would love to someday hear those words!

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Sadly the last time I looked into this (though, I suppose I looked at roman pottery) I came to the conclusion that a) this is unlikely to have accidentally occurred and b) their machining would have been unlikely to be up to reliably (re)producing instruments that were able to do this intentionally. Recording voice takes responsiveness to forces a tiny fraction of a percent of, say, a foot pedal controlling part of a lathe.

I'm not saying it's impossible but such a feat intentionally constructed surely would itself be worth recording.

EDIT: clarified tense

Maybe. Yet similar logic could be used to say that papyrus scrolls burned to a crisp would be unreadable. Yet here we are: https://www.neh.gov/news/students-decipher-2000-year-old-her...

I went with Egyptian rather than other ancient pottery cultures (there are many to pick from!) because of the mass production of identical figurines through repeated processes (allowing for differential comparison), and the use of reed tools.

The foot-pedal signal would clearly dominate if you just played back a recovered signal from the reed on clay. As would also the heartbeat of the worker holding the reed. And of course all of the signal would be distorted by the drying process of the kiln.

But from an information-theoretic standpoint, the information (might!) still be there, and decipherable if it can be scanned at high enough resolution and enough compute thrown at it, and these other sources of noise filtered / separated out. I hold out hope that this will one day be possible.

> Yet similar logic could be used to say that papyrus scrolls burned to a crisp would be unreadable.

We also know what papyrus scrolls look like, know what they were used for, and have a lot of examples of writing from that time period and place we can use to actively search for more, similar data. If you think about the mechanical process that must take place and the materials that they had at hand to record audio the chances of this happening accidentally in a way we could know how to read or look there without having witnessed the production of the audio to begin with are just staggeringly low.

But, of course, I would love for this to be possible too, and I also imagine there's some really interesting stuff out there if one knows just where to look and how to read it. I had considered glass before as it's perturbed by the air as it's blown and holds its form well very quickly as it cools. But I wouldn't know the first thing of how to read that, and blown glass is much more delicate and rarely survives.

> without having witnessed the production of the audio

We know how they made pottery. We could recreate the process ourselves and look for that signal first (which we know is there because we put it there), before doing any invasive sampling of ancient artifacts.

This has been suggested before, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics#Discredited_t...

Thanks for tracking down a Wikipedia article that has citations. It didn’t originate with me and I didn’t intend to give that impression!

I’m quite disappointed with that article though. It has the heading of “discredited theories” and then lots a bunch of articles proposing the idea and demonstrating that it could in principle work, even in crude setups. Then at the very end cites a Mythbusters episode for debunking it.

My, Wikipedia has fallen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoarchaeology

Is it pseudoarchaeology or just unlikely?

If people abandon skepticism and the scientific method, I'd call it pseudoarchaeology. But from what I've seen it just sounds like an "out there" idea that isn't strictly impossible; like string theory.

It's like panspermia: an idea that is not pursued by the scientific establishment not because it is impossible, or even unlikely, but because it is (1) outside the Overton window; and (2) inconvenient if true. No conspiracy, just human nature.

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