Digging for Bikram
What an excavated yoga mat says about the Covid Era.
Well, this is fascinating! In 2120 we archaeologists are finding more and more examples of these objects, as our topsoil recedes and the landfills where previous generations used to dump their waste are detoxified.
This item is of course a yoga mat, and carbon dating puts this example back to the year 2020, the start of the Great Lockdown. And what a tale it has to tell…
Bringing history to life
For the younger students among you, the Covid-19 pandemic is probably just another one of those dinner table subjects that elicits eye rolls and groans when grandparents suggest that kids ‘have it easy these days.’ Yet it’s a distant memory even for older generations, despite the repeated spikes in infection years after the virus first emerged in 2020 in what is now Original China.
Yoga became very popular during the first of the rolling annual lockdowns required to reduce the spread of the disease, as it allowed housebound home workers to keep mentally and physically fit. Lockdown yoga adopters would have followed the advice of perennially upbeat tutors – largely based on the west coast of modern-day New China – who provided lessons on the video platform YouTube (ironically, since banned for being a public health menace!)
Turning back to the item in question, an initial examination reveals a worn blue mat of the type of plastic that is now quite thankfully illegal, but which provided a firm base for exercise back in 2020. It would be unrolled each morning by its owner in an attempt to squeeze in some yoga at the start of the working day, before being rolled away again. (Imagine that: no robotic assistance; having to work; experiencing daylight! What a strange life these people must have lived!)
Note the two large worn areas towards the rear of the mat which indicate an over-reliance on what was known as the ‘extended child’s pose’ – suggesting this was the mat of a beginner, someone uncomfortable in the more demanding resting position apparently called ‘Down, Dog!’ The assumption that this mat was owned by a novice is also supported by a large number of sweat deposits and the presence of largely unwashed man-made clothing fibres.
At the same end of the mat, we find scratch marks, most probably feline in nature. Many of these domestic yoga mats are similarly marked. It is not known why these mats were of such interest to cats, a creature now afforded the status of deity in our society, of course. Was the mat scratching ritual these four-legged prophets performed a form of missionary activity? We may never know.
A matter of life and work
The centre of the mat is largely unblemished, and today’s progressive historians describe this typically empty area, an archaeological desert, as the ‘work-life tipping point’. This no man’s land points to the dual role this item played in a domestic setting that was undergoing massive change.
For despite the evidence of recreational use gleaned so far, as our study of the mat progresses it reveals signs of a very different function. As the visual examination of the object moves further forward, so the yoga mat begins to reveal signs of long hours of hard work, the claustrophobia of home life and the mental strain of remote working during lockdown.
Here, for example, is a melted spot of plastic roughly the size of a ‘laptop computer system’ (cerebral implants were only a twinkle in a Musk’s eye, back then.) This indicates the mat was used as much for work as for relaxation, and that the regular arrival of emails and calendar invites demanded immediate response and disrupted many a yoga routine.
At these outer extremities of the mat, it is also spattered with stains that testing reveals to be coffee — the natural stimulant popular at the time, and the commodity that led to the Flat White Rebellion that turned poorer producers of the coffee bean against the western world. This suggests a desperate attempt by our yoga-loving but exhausted ancestor to imbibe enough of the drug to maintain alertness before they began their metaphorical hunting and gathering that day.
Listening to the past
On the face of it, this mat is simply a length of worn plastic. But on closer examination, it reveals the pressures that Covidians faced in lockdown: their struggle to balance work and life, stress and relaxation, illness and health.
Little did these lockdown homeworkers know that their suffering would bring about the Work/Life Wars. Or that these struggles would in turn hasten the arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and usher in the universal wage, robots and automation. They would surely have envied the permanent vacation, chemically engineered bliss and bio-enhanced fitness we enjoy today.
As an archaeologist, I often ask myself: “If this object could speak, what would it say?”
In the case of this mat, I hear the word ‘Namaste!’, followed by the romantic ping of another email hitting an inbox — its evocation of a different time the analogue, no doubt, of the tapping of typewriter keys for our distant cousins the Covidians, and similarly suggestive of a more innocent time in history.
When your robogardener next unearths a mat in your back yard, perhaps you’ll hear the same, and smile? I hope so.
