The technofossil : a memento mori

In the process of formally identifying a geological interval, it is crucial for stratigraphers to find the point at which strata reveal a significant, dramatic shift in the types of fossils and other geological markers being found. In the nomenclature of the discipline this point constitutes a "golden spike". For the geologists advancing the proposition that the Anthropocene might be formalized as the Earth's latest interval on the geologic time scale, this spike will be registered by the sudden appearance of a new sedimentary layer - one decisively marked by the presence of "technofossils". From the proliferation of deep perforations of the strata by mining to the wide distribution of rare elements (aluminum, titanium, uranium) and novel compounds (plastics), for the geologists advocating the notion of the Anthropocene, the deposits of human technology buried in the Earth's crust will not only be that species' geological legacy, but the mineral markers of its emergence as a major geo-force. No doubt the logos of the technofossil is important for geologists making the case for the Anthropocene's formalization as a geological interval; its pathos,however, is of equal import in building a public for it. In the hands of the Anthropocene's stratigraphers the prospective mineralization of human activity is also the species' anticipated memorialization: literally written in stone, the strata of the Anthropocene will be a memorial to human existence - to the era of its doing and undoing. In this, then, the technofossil is as much a memento mori as it is a heuristic for imagining a world after the human - a "world without us". It is this conjuncture that this paper explores.