Pointing out there are other possibilities isn't a lack of respect. If you believe A or B could have happened, you see someone say B happened, it is fair to say that A might have happened as well, that doesn't mean you believe B couldn't have happened.

Of course nothing that's literally from the modern period is centuries old, but that's a tautology!

Why would anyone build something only to neglect it? If one of the requirements was "it shall work for 500 years and never be maintained", then I'm sure you could get plenty of things designed and built for that requirement. It's just that it's a lot more expensive and not particularly useful, so nobody bothers.

Off the top of my head:

1. Various aqueduct systems constructed by the Roman Empire are still in use today.

2. Persian qalats.

3. The Grand Canal in China.

4. Roman Roads

5. Hawaiian aquaculture systems

6. Aboriginal Australian fish traps

Monumental architecture (e.g. the Pyramids) would make the list substantially longer.

> Even if academia is swinging to a "too respectful" position

The issue isn’t that they are attributing accomplishments to these civilizations, but instead that they are attributing these accomplishments to a way of knowing that is purportedly superior to that of the Europeans, which is just farcical when you consider that every modern technology has either been invented or scaled based on European models of thinking (e.g. the scientific method, mass production, free market capitalism, etc.)

Like I said, this is mostly just a product of Mexican and American humanities departments being populated by people with an axe to grind; there aren’t any STEM graduates in South America concerned with the mystical knowledge that their ancestors are purported to have possessed.

There are a few examples that might fit, some earthworks, (tunnels, breakwaters, dams) and navigation markers come to mind (costal, but we also put retro reflectors on the moon).

Around me, The High Bridge between Bronx and Manhattan was built pre Civil War and abandoned for decades and still standing (and now is use again). The Hell Gate Bridge was built by the NY Central Railroad and will probably outlast the US.

Lots of 19th century infrastructure will be around for centuries, if you look at the the path of the Erie and Lackawanna railroad routes, many bridges and other infrastructure will be standing hundreds of years from now. Lots of interstate infrastructure will function for hundreds of years in rural areas with low traffic, well beyond their engineered lifespan.

Stone is the most durable material and structures are overbuilt. Steel is much cheaper but requires maintenance.

> Perhaps we can learn lessons from ancient cultures about how we might be able to efficiently manage our resources and achieve more with what is available. Is that so far fetched an idea?

I don’t mean to imply that European models get everything right, but I think it would be far-fetched to bet against these models; historically, they’ve worked, and they’ve worked far better than any other model. The author does have a paper she linked to (which I missed on my first reading), so she might have a more compelling case to make than I originally assumed.

The author describes herself in these terms:

> While I’m an archaeologist, I consider my research to be directed at the modern-day climate crisis. I investigate how resilient farming systems emerge and adapt to climate change and natural disasters. My fieldwork takes place on the north coast of Peru, where I study ancient irrigation in arid farming zones.

She doesn’t have any other social media profile so I don’t want to be overly cynical about her motives. Anyway, I think the climate angle is potentially huge in a lot of these fields.

There has been a trend in academia in the last few decades to focus on holistic analysis. This has led to a lot of academics trying to tie their research to disparate issues for both grant money and social status, but I also suspect that a lot of it is born of a genuine to come up with a grand unified theory of all the world’s problems. You see it with figures like Aldous Huxley around the mid-20th century (Huxley’s conclusion in his final novel, Island, is that “Nothing short of everything will do,”). The new wave that seems to have started in the 2010s has taken on a considerably more political bent (“Everything is political,” “Climate change is a product of white supremacy,” intersectional feminism, etc.).

These theories aren’t necessarily “wrong,” but the scholarship they produce is so bad that they are hard to take seriously.

https://www.proquest.com/ openview/768dad5fa2923211ed1128cfa33d5a29/1?cbl=18750&diss=y&pq-origsite=gscholar

(It does sound like a great idea for a layman-focused documentary, and I would be surprised if none exist yet.)

Quite a lot of the built environment is designed for 100+ year lifespans. When it isn’t there’s often very good reasons. It’s kind of amazing we get road bridges to last as long as they do when you consider the physical and chemical assault they’re constantly under all while trying to minimize weight and cost.