The Roman dodecahedron is an item that has turned up in a lot of sites where people do archaeology. While most items, given time, have their purpose easily or at least approximately deduced by researchers, the Roman dodecahedron’s purpose is largely baffling to even the most studied of archaeologists, who have no idea on where to start with it. This in turn would probably baffle the Romans, who would have seen it as a common household item, no different from a spoon or a comb.
Suppose a few thousand years from now, archaeologists were excavating our remains and had varying degrees of success deducing what different things were for. If you had to guess what common household item of ours would stump them the most, what item would you guess it would be?
Any electronic device with firmware in flash. The charges will have decayed a long time ago, leaving a paperweight.
Sufficiently diligent far-future archaeologists may dissect and catalogue the devices well enough to develop a taxonomy of components, having their own names for components, CPU architectures and such, but they’d then be left with something like “this was a programmed control device of the Xargx Valley type, variant 13, only with a screen, a speaker, two microphones and a motor actuator. We speculate it may have been a domestic appliance, a children’s toy or part of a transportation device. Alternatively, it may have had religious or ceremonial uses.”