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Deep time

Notes on projects and ideas that operate on timescales of centuries and millennia: long-term archives, durable storage media, and how information survives — or fails to.

The oldest written artifacts and why they survived

The oldest written artifacts and why they survived

Alex Laverty · Updated July 15, 2026

The written artifacts historians value most survived by accident, on durable materials — clay, stone, and metal outlast parchment, paper, and every digital medium.

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Memory of Mankind

Memory of Mankind

Alex Laverty · Updated July 15, 2026

The Memory of Mankind project stores text and images on ceramic tablets in the Hallstatt salt mine in Austria, intended to remain readable for thousands of years.

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