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“Anna Forest the National Trust curator who is overseeing the work, said it was the first time anybody had searched under the floorboard in centuries.”
Having lived my whole life in the US, that’s an incredible sentence to read.
There's an old joke that in the US they think 100 years is a long time, and in Europe they think 100 years is a long way.
It's not at all uncommon to find people living in 300+ year old buildings -- buildings that are older than the country I live in. They're not historic monuments, but just structures built to last. (A combination of survivorship bias and a lack of engineering knowledge: if you don't have the expertise to optimize your structure, you have to over-build it or it will fall down.)
Interesting that the conditions under the floorboards were ideal for keeping the materials well conserved. I wonder whether we (I mean, our archaelogists) can estimate how many of our current objects disposed as "hidden remains" will be in good condition in 500 years.
Are people in 500 years going to find a 2000's flip-phone in good condition in a basement?
There are likely empty cigarette packages and beer cans inside the walls of many contemporary buildings. Gut rehabs of older homes often turn up interesting artifacts behind the plaster walls and in older buildings it wasn't uncommon to use newspapers and old clothing for insulation material. Our landfills will likely be the primary archaeological sites though. My dad often complains when my mom throws things out claiming that the archaeologists of the future will lose access which I often rebut by pointing out that she's merely sending it to the central archaeological repository.
Not to mention the various American houses with walls full of used razor blades: https://isarchitecture.com/seen-around-town-mid-century-blad...
We had a medicine cabinet with slots for dropping in razor blades in our house growing up. I don't think my dad disposed of used razor blades in it though.
Is that... an electrical line running right above the blades??
I was referring to the limestone substrate that "sucked the moist out of the objects" and helped preserve them. You're right about landfills - we have so many of those some are bound to be "preservation friendly"!