What a load of crap

"Remember me, folks?"

This is an age of wonders. Great discoveries and technological triumphs are being made every day.

Yesterday, major further proof of the Big Bang theory was found.

Elsewhere, researchers are well on their way to developing bionic plants.

And, in Copenhagen, archaeologists discovered a bunch of barrels of shit.

Now, this last discovery strikes somewhat close to home. As some of you know, I am a sometime archaeologist. And, as any archaeologist worth their trowel can tell you, sometimes dung is literally better than gold.

See, when that discipline was in its early days, people were mainly interested in the impressive stuff that ancient peoples produced. Greek statues. The treasures of King Tutankhamen. That kind of thing.

But, as the science evolved (partly in response to the work of my homeboy, Lewis Henry Morgan, archaeologists became more interested in what they could learn from the everyday. Sure, the shiny things were cool and instructive (and still help drive traffic to museums, as well as general interest in the field), but to really learn about how ancient peoples did their various things, and why they did them in the ways that they did, you could often learn a lot more from the everyday. Shoes. Musical instruments. Living spaces.

Moreover, as gossip columnists were learning at probably about the same time, sometimes the most interesting things are the stuff people from the past didn't necessarily intend anyone to find. The discarded. The lost (like this old thing.) The prurient.

To this list add poop. It's valuable stuff to the archaeologist - the amount of information you can glean from it is astounding. You can, obviously, tell what the people who produced it were eating. This can provide insight not only into hunting/gathering and agricultural practices but also trade. You can also tell what diseases they might have had. Since feces contain contain dead cells, you can also get genetic material, which among the wealth of data that can give you, can help you figure out how many people might have inhabited a site, how they were related to each other... very useful! I can tell you, at one of the archaeology field schools I attended in college, a latrine pit in the deserted village was considered one of the major finds.

It;s not just human spoor that's educational. Droppings of even quite ancient animals can reveal a treasure trove of information.

But what's also worth knowing is that fecal matter is useful crap even when it's fresh, or nearly so. It can be used for fuel. Paper can be made from it. It's a medical treatment. (Don't try it at home.) There is even a coffee made from ca-ca. (You can try that at home, but I don't recommend you do, for various reasons.)

Back in the late '90s, the story of a painting by British artist Chris Ofili made the news. "The Holy Virgin Mary" incorporates, among other materials, elephant dung into a portrait of the mother of Jesus. Plenty of people, including then-mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani, were incensed, seeing the use of dung in portraying a religious icon as a grave offense. The thing they weren't getting was that in parts of Africa, elephant dung isn't seen as something noxious, but rather useful - almost sacred.

To close us out in this exercise in looking at poo anew, one of my favorite Zen parables:

A student asked his master, "Master, why does shit smell so bad?"

The master replied, "If you were a fly, it would smell like candy!"

I'm certainly not suggesting that you save your contributions in barrels (though, you know, whatever gets you through the day), only that, next time you go, give a thought to just what you're flushing away.