This Analog Life

This is marginalia on the back of a 17th century letter found under a pile of adobe bricks in a collapsed church near Trujillo, Peru in 2008. It’s the only known example of a now-extinct indigenous language: a column of numbers facing their equivalents in Spanish.

Imagine the only surviving record of everything you could imagine saying, every word that you’d whispered to a lover, every story your parents told you before they died, the names of fruits & stars, profanities, the small talk you make early in the morning about the weather, the things you regret saying when you’re drunk — imagine the only evidence that any of that ever existed being something you scribbled thoughtlessly on the back of a piece of paper you found, rooting around at a desk for something to write on. The traces we leave.

Image via infoneer-pulse.

(via tiffehr)