Recording the future - archaeology and blockchain - Sara Polak

Transcript

[Music] Hello ladies and gentlemen. My name is Sara and today I want to talk to you about something that might not really seem at the first kind of like glance to have too much to do with web 3. And just to be completely honest with you, I understand web 3 very little. I'm a noob. I'm a normie. I'm someone from the outside. I'm an archaeologist. And that didn't really pay the rent. So I spent my entire life in tech. And one of the things that I've seen is that no matter what the tech is, whether it's AI or the metaverse or extended reality or blockchain, humans are still humans. And humans don't use that tech often to its full extent. And for for example, for me, archaeology is a place where we can

really use blockchain. And that also really reflects the philosophy that is behind blockchain. So let's dive into it. What's a record for? So record, that's our livelihood as archaeologists. What is it for? Why do we use it? It's a bit of a boring question, so I'll put a bit of a more lively question up on here. Why are we afraid of death? Basically, our lives, we spend a huge portion of our lives as a data collecting exercise. Whenever you read these things when, you know, people are, for example, in old people's homes or on their deathbeds and they're asked about their regrets, a lot of the time it kind of revolves around the fact that they were not really able to get what they consider to be their potential. and what

they have to give to the world that they didn't really manage to get it on paper or manage to get other people to hear it. Basically, that they didn't fulfill their potential that they know that they have, but they didn't manage to get it from the brain interface into ones and zeros or just written down. And that is fundamentally what we work with as archaeologists. We work with a huge data bias because historically the people that are able to get it down, that are able to write these things down are either pharaohs who build monumental architecture so that everyone remembers them or people that are obsessive, compulsive and write a lot and are also lucky that all their writings have been preserved like Plato. One of the reasons why philosophers are so obsessed by Plato and not for example Dioynes is because Plato actually wrote everything

down. Dioynes used to live naked in a barrel with a hen. um that's very difficult to kind of trace back archaeologically. So we're working with a very skewed database and therefore I think that blockchain is one of those things that might not it will help archaeologist of today but in a thousand years time 2,000 years time which are the kind of time spans that we should be think if we want to address global problems that's where blockchain can help and I'll show you how. Does anyone know what this is? I I don't blame you if you don't. It's the Lambo bone. It's roughly 30,000 years old and it's a mathematical relic. It's one of the first times archaeologically that we found that people were making lines. They were jotting things down.

Now, uh there's various interpretations of this. Of course, there's people who think it was someone owing someone some mammoth. So, you you write it down like if you order a beer and say you're going to pay for it later. It could be the tracking of a a woman's menstrual cycle. The the jury's out. But what it means that as long as we've had language, as long as we've had abstract thought, we wanted to hold each other accountable. And whether that's a bit of baboon tibia or whether that's something like a diary or a Mesopotamian clay tablet or taking a selfie, we're obsessed by taking these records. But the technology and the storage hasn't really matched that human enthusiasm and that need to basically store everything and capture as much of the world around us as possible because

we want to leave that mark on the world. We do want to be remembered but the way that we are remembered uh is a very different thing because obviously archaeologists of the future how are they going to understand you? How are they going to understand your legacy? They need data to be able to do that and that data is often as I already mentioned very skewed. And what that skew leads to is that we have a very warped idea of the past. Uh there's that kind of old adage that it's the victors who write history. And it is kind of true. Um and whoever says that history or archaeology is not important for the modern world is wrong. Uh I think that archaeology and anthropology obviously I have to say this because it's my livelihood. It's a bit of a rationalization of my own discipline,

but is absolutely crucial for us to understand our past and our our present in order to be able to shape the future. There was an interesting talk here yesterday about a blackout um and kind of simulating a civilizational collapse. The way that we understand civilizational collapse is the way that we understand civilizations from big blockbuster movies like how many of you saw Gladiator 2? Okay, good. It's only a few of you. the rest of you, please don't bother because the great white sharks in the coliseum, that was that was too much for me. But what I'm trying to say is that these kind of greats of the past, whether that's Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or uh the Roman Empire or the Mayer, we have this preconceived ideas of what they were, how the people

lived, how the people thought. And it's just not the case because as I said the archaeological data is often so biased that we say stories but we repeat these fables these fairy tales but then on the basis of those biased fairy tales we create the future and we create political policy and things like that and that's actually hugely problematic because if we are thinking about things like future of Ethereum future of the world future of our countries then we have to understand the past as closely as possible so that we don't kind of repeat those mistakes and that we don't uh that that we understand the past for what it was basically. And again, uh some of you might say, well, yeah, that's all very nice, but again, that's relevant to you cuz you studied it and history doesn't

really have an effect on the present or the future. Come on, calm down a little bit. Well, that's not the case. These are just a few examples of how history and the symbolism from history is all around us and we don't even realize. We're so desensitized to it. But I think that decoding historical symbolism around us and how it's often used uh as kind of like the rooting in history to give something relevance or to give give something truth or to that give something credence. That's the oldest trick in the book. So for example, I used to work in a startup. We did a digital the digital infrastructure on both sides of Brexit which was interesting in itself to teach politicians how to use technology but more on that another time. Um but it was interesting that one of the core and it

wasn't kind of connected to Brexit and people didn't realize the link but one of the core diplomatic aspects of Brexit was Theresa May who was prime minister in the UK at the time trying to convince Emanuel Makon who he also did the digital infrastructure for uh to bring the bio tapestry that was taken by William the Conqueror during the battle of Hastings in 1066 to bring back to London in almost uh 1,000 years and it was a huge thing you know the Daily Mail and all these tabloids It's kind of really coveted. But that's a huge thing. You're basically using a bit of archaeology as a bargaining chip in really like high stakes politics. And that happens all the time. Look at the European Union. It it's coincidentally realizing that a lot of people aren't

taking it too seriously. They're seeing it as a social experiment. They're seeing it as something that is kind of like the new world. Hello. That's that's my daughter. She might be an archaeologist as well one day. Or you choose your own path. That's totally up to you. But um uh but the EU um uh is actually using these historical symbols to give its relevance. So when it gives the youth prize, it has Charlemagne uh as as the core kind of representative of that youth prize because that's the last time that Europe was unified. And they're thinking, well, no one's really buying it now, so we have to go back 700 years to kind of, you know, really give this credence. It's exactly the same with Ursula Vonda Leiden who recently went to Azabaijan and Usbekiststan and

one of the official posts that they had on on Twitter was the EU is going back to its Silk Road trading partners. So history is all around us but not just in politics. We have this in um we have this in brands as well. So when Burberry was going down the going down the garbage tube basically because the uh because their brand has recently become kind of devolved and like people weren't taking it as seriously anymore. They went to the archives to get the original uh Burberry coats from the World War I trenches and that's is something that again gave their brand um kind of the seriousness that they were looking for.

Equally Ferrari. Ferrari was modeled on this uh on this braying stallion from the first world war. again kind of giving it the sense of nationalism, the sense of pride. So history is all around us. But how do we interpret it and how do we work with this history and where does blockchain come into this? So basically, cuz I'm an archaeologist, I'm going to show it as a as a cake, as a stratified thing. So you have data, whether that's a bit of bone, whether that's a bit of soil, whether that's a skull, you've got data. You can analyze that data. So artificial intelligence has been really helpful for us there. uh extended reality for kind of experiential archaeology to really try and understand things in context. But where does that data sit? I was recently

at a conference called the computer support of archaeology and I was given this question. Why bother with blockchain? We can have the state that runs our archaeological database. And it was so sad for me because it was the a fundamental misunderstanding of the the principle of storage. Yes, you can have the state run a database or you can have Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or one of those great kind of tech oligarchs running the database. But if you want to have a good representation of the past, you need to Is she all right? Yes. Okay. Bye. Um you need to have a uh you need to have a solid space that cannot be moved and tampered with to keep that data on. So the storage the the bit of sponge cake

that sits at the bottom of archaeology that's most important to us needs a reliable partner and I strongly believe that that partner is web 3. Now I have a friend uh who's going to have a workshop tomorrow as it would have and I keep telling him this and he says you don't need blockchain. Blockchain is just useless. It's just you know it's it's just this buzz word that everyone throws around and it's way too complicated for things like this. So I'm aware that it's a it's a buzz word that you know us normies don't necessarily understand and I'm very new to this space. So at the end I'm also asking for help. So if anyone wants to help us we'd be very very grateful. But I do sense that the fundamental philosophy of blockchain is something that really reflects the kind of archaeological knowledge and getting

data as we know it. Because if you look at the cycle of how archaeologists kind of acquire information and interpretation, you have some kind of understanding, you get new context, you have to revise that understanding, you write that down, then new parts kind of come in, then you have a new reunderstanding. And it's a cycle that keeps going. But unless that cycle is written somewhere that is very clear and the provenence of that cycle is clear, you're going to get very skewed stories and you're going to get a very skewed understanding of the past. So for me, having a immutable ledger, something that just once you write it, it's there forever, is the biggest help for us as archaeologists because it really helps us to hold these stories accountable.

And I've already said how important those stories are for the future of mankind, for the way that we understand ourselves as humans. So making sure that it's really black and white. Um how we came to understand certain things, how we came to track certain uh objects, how we came to develop certain theories, that is something that is very very important. Um and it really fits this cycle really well. Um so to give you concrete use cases where we have kind of kind of identified that blockchain can be helpful for archaeology. Um there's kind of seven of them here, but it's the providence tracking, data integrity, crowdfunding because something like uh academic grants is it's in a terrible state. It's something between a mafia

and a very slowly moving iceberg. So uh the funding of archaeology is in pretty dire straits. So uh have it be being able to kind of uh crowdfund it in a decentralized but trackable transparent way is something that's very important to us. uh digital archation, repatriation of objects, the tokenization of knowledge. Um but also there's different types of capital. So you have things like educational capital, social capital, cultural capital. So being able to tokenize all these things is really important for us because suddenly you're not just tracking money and like clear value, but you're tracking other aspects of the human experience and you're able to tokenize them again in a transparent way. Um and finally, you're creating a fundamental time capsule. I call this

the pomparization of data. So unless archaeologists get very lucky uh by someone else's tragedy, you know, like like like Pompei or unless you uh hit an elite that has kind of left behind a meticulous, usually very monumental archaeological record. Um you don't really get to know about the ordinary people, but the ordinary people are really what makes the story. You know, I don't mean to sound neo-Marxist here, but like if you're just understanding the tip of the iceberg, you're massively misinterpreting uh the past and then you're massively misinterpreting and mispreparing for the future as well. I've got a few concrete examples that I want to show you. Um before I dive into this one, I really want to encourage everyone to check out the stall of the House of Lovitz just

outside here. We um they do phenomenal things in the uh in the blockchain world in connecting blockchain and culture. So they're a huge inspiration for me. Um and I will be speaking on this stage afterwards. So please go see her talk and there will give a lot more context to that um because they're just fantastic. Um but uh it was also thanks to Lobkov's family that I got to meet uh this brilliant activist Chidi from Nigeria um who does loot art. One of the biggest kind of case studies for blockchain um in archaeology is repatriation of objects and the and the kind of provenence of objects. Um, and you might think, well, again, why does that matter? It matters a lot. You saw the case with Theresa May and Emanuel Makon here. In the case of the Ben &

Bronzes, for example, they are very, very hotly contested um uh by the uh by the people to want them back from the British Museum. The British Museum is essentially a vault of stolen things. But some of them weren't stolen like the Rosetta Stone. There was a there was a very clear contract that was written between the French and the Ottoman Empire and the Greeks and the Egyptians and the the providence of that is very very murky. So you basically have these activists who obviously can't steal the Rosetta Stone, but they go in there with something that you've all got in your pockets, which is LiDAR. And again, with the help of AI, they're able to recreate these 3D 3D objects. So basically digital form of looting, and they're able to create um NFTTS out of them that they can then give back to, for example,

Nigerian artists and kind of at least digitally repatriate these objects. Now again, you might wonder why is this such a big deal? And you might think that this is kind of an appendix of society. Yeah, you know, culture is great, but like I need to buy bread and pay my rent, so it's it's it's not that important. It really is. And it's the center of public debate because two years ago, the British Museum actually went through a massive scandal where out of all the collections as well, the guy that was the keeper of the of the Paththeon marble, the Pathonon marbles that are part of them are the Elgen marbles that Lord Elgen, he he bought them. Uh then then he kind of took them off the of the pathon on the Acropolis in Athens, brought them in boxes over to the British Museum and the Greeks are

pissed. They are not happy about it at all. And every year they send a delegation to the British Museum wanting them back. And as you would have it, this guy who was uh uh one of one of the keepers in the in the Greek collections was using the fact that the British Museum has about like three times as much as they're displaying, much more than that. They've got incellers underneath the British Museum and I was there once on a unpaid internship. I was taking notes and I was falling asleep because there was no oxygen. So I was sitting with one of the curators of the departments of ancient Egypt and Sudan and I was by pencil writing I think like 2,000 bits of pottery. It was great and it was not paid. So, you know, it was a

lot of fun for the summer. Um, but they were using the fact that they've got so much stuff and a lot of it is unmar in unmarked boxes that they'd occasionally go take something out of the unmarked box and they would sell it on eBay. So there was, for example, a ro um a helenistic um statue that was valued at about £50,000 and it was sold for £40 on eBay. And this is a curator doing this. Like I don't understand what has to go through that person's brain in order to be able to do that. But one of the things is like those things are now gone. those people have uh that bought them on eBay got them legally and that means that their hands are clean. They didn't know it came from the British Museum sellers. And to get those things back that haven't been studied, that

haven't been analyzed, that are going to help us understand the world of ancient Greece that our modern society is built on that is going to understand help us understand it better. They might be gone forever and they might be on some oligarch's yacht somewhere where he's using them to woo young women when he's on the Formula 1 in Monaco saying, "Hey, have you seen my statue?" Um, and that might be gone forever. Um, so for the academic and the scientific community, this is a tragedy, but it shows you how important tracking provenence and tracking these things are. Another example, it was a scandal here in the Czech National Museum. Uh, there was a collection of gems. Now a lot of those gems they also came during the Second World War uh whose owners were uh transported to to Avitz. So those gems

didn't really have a providence. There was no really no desire for them to have much of a providence because then they'd have to give them back to the families that survived. So we didn't really want to do that. So that you had this very kind of eclectic and very murky obtained uh gem collection and it was never cataloged. It was never really classified. And then after about 70 years, someone thought, should we maybe weigh them, take pictures of them? It'd be nice to have a catalog of the precious gems that we have. And they found out that about 70% of them were glass because someone stole them and replaced them with glass. Now, you have no way of knowing who did that. You're never going to track that person down.

Those things are gone. And you've basically been looking after a glass collection for the last 70 years. Um so these are things that are the national heritage our heritage often very personal heritage of families it's so easy for it just to disperse very quickly and this is one of the things that um uh that blockchain can do uh going on from kind of looking after the objects and looking after the collection and the transparency of how these were obtained there's the other part of this which is analyzing them and the academia behind them now how many of you have heard that like you know human sciences why should we even fund them useless. No, not too many of you. Okay, that's that's encouraging. Um, the amount of if I had a penny for every

time someone told me that my only career aim is to work at McDonald's if I decided to do archaeology, I've had a lot I would have a lot more pennies than I have from actually studying archaeology. But anyway, um this is a huge um uh uh kind of topic that is currently circulating in the Czech news. Dom is going to be here tomorrow. We're going to be uh having a discussion together. He's the father of LLMs like OpenAI, ChatGpt, all of these people that claim to have invented them. He's the one that's actually behind it, but he did it open source. He's very kind of non-egocentric. So, obviously uh he's not going to be mentioned by open AISO.

Thank you very much, Damage, for giving us the backbone of our technology. But he'll be here um uh tomorrow and you'll have a chance to interrogate him on this. But basically what this uh title of the media is saying and he recently quite sensationally quit the Czech academic scene because he wasn't able to get grants like the way that the EU and the way that Europe but the academic world in general kind of um treats uh academics it's very kind of publish or perish. It's you become a manager you don't you're not even an academic because you have to get these grants and it is a very toxic toxic place to be. So he left it and he started his own company and I don't blame him. But we actually came up against a very kind of similar problem uh with uh our uh an

expedition that we did in 2023 um uh for um into Guatemala where we discovered using AI and LAR and 3D topography. We discovered a Maya city in the jungle which is almost 3,000 years old. This is me from one of the graves. By the way, this is another thing, but that's another philosophical question. when does a a grave robber become an archaeologist? Like when is the cut off point? I I asked myself that a lot. Um but that was one of the graves that I found. I was very happy about this. Um it was it was a bit weird disturbing the guy after like 2,000 years, but nonetheless, it was an amazing discovery that we made. Um and this is what the city looked like. This is a 3D visualization. Um and I can honestly tell you that about 20% of this was

actually like discovering the city, which was great. We took our machetes, went into the jungle, spent spent seven weeks there. And the other 80% was uh dealing with sponsors, dealing with um even people like National Geographic wrote erroneous headlines, you know, because it's was the Czech National Geographic. So they said, "Yeah, the checks found this city." We didn't. There were three of us and most of the project is the Slovags that have been working on this for 15 years. And actually, if it wasn't for the local Guatemalans, we'd all be dead because they were the ones who were looking after us. the Guatemalan Maya archaeologists were the ones that really knew how to interpret a lot of these objects, but the media doesn't want to bother with facts for the sake of a story, right? So, basically the what we

were dealing with most of the time was getting uh people to pay uh for the expedition and for unexpected costs. Like for example, our um our truck that was moving the um the ceramics into our storage in Guatemala City was hijacked. like those those women that were in the truck almost got kidnapped. Guatemala is a quite a dangerous place. So, it was an extremely like rough thing where we had a lot of unexpected things happen to us, unexpected uh um expenses that we had and archaeologists are poor. So, we didn't just have the money to dish out and we were reliant on um a very kind of small funding pool from private investors. And now you would think that uh the solution if the grants don't work, oh, just get it from private

investors or private companies. But that comes with strings as well. You then have to, you know, go and present to them. You have to name things after them and things like that. So, it's actually often not a win to replace. And while we're very, very grateful for this particular sponsorship, it's not always like the simple answer, oh, just forget the state side of it and just go private because they're both quite big behemoths that like want you to pay your Jews. So the aspect of decentralized funding is something actually again that the house of operates really inspired me uh for is this kind of decentralized crowdfunding way of supporting an expedition. So to give you an example, adopt an archaeologist. Yeah. Buy us beans for 7 weeks so that we can survive. And beans

is literally pretty much all we ate. It wasn't fun in the tents. But um uh but you can do these things where you can uh pay for these uh pay for these underfunded subjects and you can also help therefore subjects like archaeology, anthropology regain their dignity because you're suddenly not running around begging for morsels of money but you're actually going and doing the important academic work without necessarily going through the sales cycle that none of us are good at. Um so that was the other use case that I thought uh was was fantastic in this regard. So, we've got repatriation, DSI, and decentralized crowdfunding. And the last one that I want to show you is uh we're putting together this app. Now, I've taught myself how to code UIX very badly as you can see, but my dream is to

have uh people basically interact with cultural institutions in a kind of easy, accessible, tokenized way. And so, for example, imagine that you go to a museum uh and you answer a quiz or you do a challenge or you do something cool that kind of proves that you've understood what is on the display and then you get a small reward for it, like a 20% discount in the shop. And imagine if you could do this across all the cultural sites across the world like this culture scout of you like running around and collecting badges and interacting with these institutions and then kind of comparing what you learned in the British Museum and how it's different the way that they present the Elgen marbles to how the Museum of the Acropolis presents that because they're two very different stories. So being able to really understand and tokenize

and gamify and like bring the the education of culture more to the people. Again, I think that the kind of learn to earn model is a fantastic way of doing that. So, we're at the very beginning with this and um but we think it's a very interesting way forward. However, as I mentioned, we're normies. So, there's two things that uh we come up against. The first one is regulations. We don't understand them. Uh KYC all these things like we want to there's an enthusiasm from our side, but we get bogged down into like what is legal and what is not fundamentally. The second thing that we get bogged down in uh is scams. Um so I I had this learn to earn idea and I was talking to this friend of mine from the crypto world and he said you're creating a meme coin. Someone's

going to do a pump and dump and you you're going to be the idiot and you're going to be the person who's going to be dragged through social media that you created like this fake archaeological coin that people were falling for and investing in. So uh we don't understand we cannot often differentiate and qualify what's a good approach and what's a bad approach. And there have been very bad examples of this in the past. So for example, Kapu. Kapu was a coin that uh the Kels used to mint uh as a kind of resistance movement towards the towards the Romans. Um this was a blockchain that was done in 2017. It's long dead. If you click on the link, it's a gambling website. So yeah, you can see which way it went. And there's the occasional article that pops up.

This is from 2024. It's got one citation. No one cares about blockchain in archaeology. So it's a very kind of green field. uh uh area that I think has a huge amount of potential for the reasons I said at the beginning but we basically need help. So I wanted to ask you as a call to action we need three things or like we kindly ask you and what we can give in in in return is this bridge to the normal world to the people who know nothing about web 3 but really like culture everyone always comes to me and says oh I always wanted to study you know archaeology when I was little but my mom was worried I'd not make enough money and I get that argument my mom was very supportive so I'm very lucky uh but we can kind of get that bridge to the

the the normal side the non web 3 side. But what we really would uh benefit from from you guys is three things. Um an easy UX and a web two interface so that we can connect these systems, museum systems that we can connect to web 3 relatively easily. Understanding what's solid and what's a scam. So being able to differentiate which path to take and which not to take. And also your patience and enthusiasm because I'm sure there's a lot of you out there that love archaeology but just never thought you could you could do it in the blockchain world. Well, now you can. And there's four concrete projects that I would love to point you in the direction of all of the one at the beginning is shell proof.

That's the learn to earn thing that I'm kind of uh working on with my partner and a couple of colleagues. So uh you can catch me afterwards. I can tell you more about that. I'm also pushing at uh Oxford uh which is my alma m. I I really want to get blockchain into the official archaeology curriculum. So again any help would be greatly appreciated uh from the community. We have an academic network which is called hen the humanities and engineering network where we want to bring together interdicciplinary projects jobs funding opportunities for interdicciplinary people. So again uh that's something that you can get kind of involved in if you're more on the DI side of things.

And lastly civilizational resilience which you can join straight away. We'll have a workshop here tomorrow. We'll be creating a card game board game together. Um, but fundamentally civilizational resilience really reflects why I think it's in all of our interests to have archaeology on blockchain and to to bridge those two worlds because if we want to be resilient for the future, if we want humanity, not just states or organizations or companies, but humanity to survive and our memories and our stories to survive, we need to be resilient and we need to build those principles of resilience from a very young age, but keep that throughout our lives. So, please join us. We're a very small group, but we're a very enthusiastic group. Um, and on that note, thank you very much. If you've got

any questions, I'm already out of time. I'll be running around. And thank you again and thank you for allowing me to speak here. And have a wonderful day. Thank you. [Music] [Applause]