How long does stuff last after death/collapse of an empire?

[Wisdom Penalty]

Hi all -

I'm starting a new campaign wherein - surprise, surprise - some great, former civilization collapsed some time ago. The question I'm wrestling with is just how long ago it should have happened. I want some stuff around, but not everything.

How long does a body last? I'm assuming bones are the last to go. In a temperate environment, buried 6' under - how long until the bones are gone?

How would runes etched on stone, exposed to the elements, endure?

Those are just some sample questions. Are there any web sites out there that talk about the longevity of such things? Just broadbrush info.

I have read The World Without Us which was nice, but seemed to concentrate on more of mankind's "failures with environment" than giving good info on how long things last.

Any help is most appreciated.

Thanks,
The WP

 

[Doug McCrae]

This is something I've wondered about too. In Eberron there are supposed to be ruins from the Age of Demons that are at least a hundred thousand years old, possibly millions of years old, which I found a bit implausible.

 

[Merkuri]

Well, we can still find neanderthal bones, and estimates say they died out 30,000 years ago. I think neanderthal bones are usually between 130,000 and 30,000 years old. Does that help any? You can look up the neanderthal on Wikipedia to get more dates.

I would imagine the decay of such things would depend on the environment. If the buildings and people were in a very magic-rich place or had contact with a large amount of magic I would say that anything would be possible, and the remains would be able to last as long as you want them to.

 

[DrSkull]

I'm thinking about Roman remains I've seen, and here are a few points:

The Pantheon is in near pristine condition after nearly 2000 years, but it has been in constant use.

The Colosseum is still impressive, although a little worse for wear.

At Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia, there are building walls and roads in excellent condition.

I think that stone and brick buildings, left on their own, can last a very long time. I wouldn't be surprised at 5000 years, not too astounded at 10,000.

The key is whether they are left alone or not. The reason that the Colosseum does not look as good as the Pantheon is that the Pantheon was made into a chuirch. It's not that the church did tons of maintenance to it, but rather they prevented locals from prying off chunks of it to make new buildings or to render the limestone into fertilizer.

 

[Umbran]

That depends a lot on the nature of the collapse, and the climate of the lands in question.

Consider - the famous Colosseum, in Rome, began construction between 70 and 72 AD. And we can still recognize roads built in Britain by the Romans.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BC. The Sphinx is even older. So, major stone objects can persist for several thousand years.

Cave paintings from before human civilization still exist. So, in protected places, things can exist for ten thousand years or more.

Pick anything in between, and you're in the realm of plausibility. The more dry the place, the better things will last.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

On Earth, even with shoddy human construction, the answer is "a bloody long time". I'm pretty sure that if we vanished right now, many of the buildings in our cities would be standing in ten thousand years, perhaps much longer.

After a hundred thousand years, something would need to be somehow protected from the elements and made of a hard rock to be easily recognizable as a building, that's for sure. The problem is, of course, that we don't have anything that old, per se, apart from debris of our ancestors.

On the other hand, if it was made of incredibly hard material, there's no reason why something shouldn't still be there after millions of years. It's not like there are magic clean-up fairies beyond basic erosion (wind and water), land movement, and so on.

 

[Phlebas]

SInce a lot of the roman stuff in the uk was turned into new buildings a long time ago, its always quite impressive what you can find (eg roman walls in various cities (london, chester, york), old forts on the east coast with 2m plus walls still standing and chunks of arrow straight roads under modern tarmac). I've wandered round a fair few sites and although the preservation in the green and pleasant land is nowhere near what you'll get in italy / greece the fact remains that theres a fair bit of it lying around

whats more impressive is sites like stonehenge (>4000 years) and various other stone circles and henges all over 2000 years old and thats without any magical spells woven into it (jury's stil out on stonehenge )

in terms of bodies, there's bog bodies dug up in the low countries and uk (google lindow man) that are ~2000 years old

having said that the memory of things sometimes changes. roman ruins were reported as giant built by the medievalists and infamously the pyramids were thought to be granaries until the modern era

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

That depends a lot on the nature of the collapse, and the climate of the lands in question.

Consider - the famous Colosseum, in Rome, began construction between 70 and 72 AD. And we can still recognize roads built in Britain by the Romans.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BC. The Sphinx is even older. So, major stone objects can persist for several thousand years.

Cave paintings from before human civilization still exist. So, in protected places, things can exist for ten thousand years or more.

Pick anything in between, and you're in the realm of plausibility. The more dry the place, the better things will last.

The Parthenon in Athens was built in the 5th century BC, and survived in good condition up until it was (partly) blown up by accident in 1687 when the Venetians shelled it as it was being used by the Ottomans as a ammunition dump.

 

[Duvall]

It all depends on a) the types of materials that went into an items construction, b) how it is stored (buried, exposed, sealed in a cask, etc) and, c) the environment (desert, swamp, rainforest, etc).

The book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman gives a lot of information about how the contemporary human "footprint" on the world would survive without man to keep it maintained and in good order.

There's a decent timeline regarding the "fall" of New York which should help you here

 

[Wik]

Bodies depend entirely upon the method of death, and the climate. I wish I had my forensic anthropology notes on me. But, a few key points for bodies:

1) Where did it die? (inside or out? Near wind, or near ice?)
2) Can animals and bugs get to it?
3) How moist is the climate? (The wetter it is, the more bacteria)
4) How warm is the climate? (Warm and wet means faster decay; warm and dry means it dries out faster)

There is a lot that can affect the body's decomposition. Sometimes, even the act of putting ochre in the body as part of funerary rites can slow the rate of decomposition. The famous "Bog bodies" are another example of how human culture can stop the rate of decomposition.

Really, I think you're safe simply saying "these ruins are here" and being okay with that. There are buildings that have been found that date back four, five thousand years (the "City" in Israel that predates mesopotamia springs to mind; structures dating back almost ten thousand years have been found there!). And then there are bridges and buildings built in our own modern era that fail and decay within only a few decades.

As for bodies, you can roughly assume that bones will remain behind two, three hundred years later. And if it's dry, you can go back thousands of years with no problem.

Your players aren't gonna call "BS" on anything you say, in any case. There are enough exceptions out there that you have a lot of leeway.