ABSTRACT
Imagine: millennia hence, after our civilization has long been destroyed and sentient extraterrestrials arrive by happenstance on our planet, will we have left them adequate relics to explain our culture without us? It's a test you can run to zero the scales of your cultural research—the alien archaeology test, we might call it. Passing this test, even hypothetically, is a good sign of a healthy historical program on a particular subject. Likewise, failing it is a signal that we could do a better job of evaluating and explaining that subject.
