Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

The challenges faced by the panels were formidable. How to devise a warning system that could survive – both structurally and semantically – even catastrophic phases of planetary future. How to communicate with unknown beings-to-be across chasms of time to the effect that they must not intrude into these burial chambers, thus violating the waste’s quarantine? Several proposals developed by the panels involved forms of what is now known as hostile architecture, but which they referred to as ‘passive institutional controls’. They suggested constructing above ground at the burial site a ‘Landscape of Thorns’ (fifty-foot-high concrete pillars with jutting spikes that impeded access and suggested ‘danger to the body’), a ‘Black Hole’ (a mass of black granite or concrete that absorbed solar energy to become impassably hot) and ‘Forbidding Blocks’ (the bulks of which might intimidate a visitor into turning back). The panel members realized, however, that such aggressive structures might act as enticements rather than cautions, suggesting ‘Here be treasure’ rather than ‘Here be dragons’. Prince Charming hacked his way through the briars and thorns to wake Sleeping Beauty. Howard Carter excavated Tutankhamun’s tomb despite the multiple obstructions placed in the way of access, and the warnings given in languages other than his own. Other proposals from the panels involved versions of a transcendental signifier. Human faces could be carved into stone: pictograms or petroglyphs conve...