What if a future culture found this?

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Once in a while when I look at certain pieces of modern architecture I wonder, if we had some type of either massive natural disaster like global reglaciation or, alternatively, some propaghanda driven man-made 'end times' nuclear free-for-all like a bunch of lemmings, where very few people survived and history managed to get lost, what would people make of it?

In this particular case I'm thinking of the Guardian of Traffic on the Lorain/Carnegie bridge in Cleveland, OH over the flats:



If an archaeological team from such a point, maybe four thousand years from now after we'd completely reinvented all the tech we'd lost, saw this - what would they assume about our culture? Sometimes it makes me wonder whether we should be particularly careful about what we put in stone and what we don't. Carving a good Long Island iced tea recipe, for example, might be a good start.

I think the human instinct for religion runs so deep that they would correctly take it as a protective deity. They then might incorrectly generalize the prevalent religion from that one example. If they also found the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore, they might really get some wrong ideas about the prevalent religion.

Us Americans do like our statues of protective deities. I really like that statue. The car being protectively held is lovely touch.

They would know that in our time there was a widely worshipped, and much feared god called "Ped Xing" because of the widespread millions of sheet metal signs emblazened with his named found across the land. Part of the same panthenon of gods that included the gods "keep right", and "EZ Pass Lane".

And the people carry little pamphlets with the face of a Holy Man on it, Benjamin Franklin. Some of the more devout ones had lots of them!

It's called neo-classical art. Those are sculptures and statues that try to replicate the art styles of classical Greece and Rome. Some of those statues actually do portray old Greek and Roman gods, even though people no longer believe in them. The Statue of Liberty, for example, is supposed to depict Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertas

So, if any future culture finds them and concludes that they are deities of some kind of polytheistic religion, they won't be completely wrong. Though they'd be incorrect if they assumed or concluded that the culture that built those statues still worshiped those deities and didn't know that they merely replicated the art style of a culture that existed thousands of years earlier.

I like the old car.

During the Tianemen Square Uprising the crowd marched around with a replica of the Statue of Liberty which they referred to - as the "Goddess of Liberty".

And though Americans dont literally pray to the statue of Liberty, nor believe she lives as an actual being on Mount Olympus or such. she does represent an abstract ideal/ideology that American society does claim to revere. A kind of secular religion. So future archeologists would be onto a kernal of truth if they decided that the Statue of Liberty was "a goddess".

But that scary looking "Traffic God" might well lead future archeologist astray into thinking we all trembled before him (when in fact few us even know of the landmark, much less revere it in anyway).

I believe in him though. If you park in a handicapped space he will smite you with a thunderbolt!

They would probably think that a large part of our civilization was ruled by a cruel and mad megalomaniac who had a liking for odd headbands and miniature cars.

Perhaps it feel like what it feels to us to see the Roman Colosseum.

An example of a structure used for entertainment ...

Depicted: Luxor Casino
[img][800:600]http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120624142247/winx/images/6/6e/Luxor-hotel-and-casino_las-vegas_nevada.jpg[/img]

Maybe they would think that we considered inventors to be the priests of God that brought us cars just the same way as Christian God gave us the Holy Bible? You know, an idea to create something = the voice of God.