WTW location for context
///measurements.unto.patient
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
155 points (97.5% liked)
Ask Lemmy
38751 readers
2137 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think I found the cassette player, although it dates it to the 80s... Although it could of been an old object dumped alongside more contemporary ones, as the cassette doesn't appear to be as aged as other objects...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/405015397001
Logo on the Wilson football dates from 1994-present, so oldest possible age of pile is ~1994, although I think it is younger.
Design on the Bud Light can is circa 2004, but I feel like someone could of dropped that separate from the pile.
This game is really fun, we should start a subreddit.
If you really like this, it’s not that far off from how archeologists date stuff. Though they collect a lot more datapoints, have more context, and use more references.
great point, I used to find trash piles like this in the woods around where I lived, and even as a child I always wondered about who put them there, what their life was like, and what people would think about the piles I left behind, how I could leave clearer messages for them so they were not confused.
You may like archeology. My wife is an archeologist and she says that a lot of it is using science and history to make sense of people’s trash.
The thing to remember is our post-industrial conceptualization of trash is a little different than the past. For example, broken projectile points and their flakes are essentially just really old trash that was dropped when it broke or wasn’t useful anymore.
Someone dumping some shit might well have had some of the objects much longer than some of the others. And if anything, a person is less likely to be dumping new objects, except for disposable things like beer cans.
concur, dumping pile was probably in use during a range of time, curious what might be under there if OP starts poking around with a shovel, was mostly trying to narrow down an oldest object and then work from there.
That's certainly possible too, but what I was getting at was that even a bunch of things dumped at once probably aren't going to all be the same age.
Agreed, but what I am getting at is trying to determine an absolute earliest possible start date. The pile cannot be older than the oldest object in it, so regardless of any other factors, you can at least determine X is the earliest possible start date, then you can use other details to reconstruct other pieces of data (aka the other objects in the pile)
obviously there will be a range of ages, but I'm just following the thread of the oldest object for a starting point, not as an absolute age for everything in the pile.
Nah. The one in your link has round speaker grilles, while the one in OP's pic have different shaped speaker grilles. Also OP's one is missing the carry handle.
Does seem to be a similar model and likely related to it, but not quite the same.
good point, I was just getting off work and killing time before heading home, so definitely blew passed some details on the cassette deck!
That ball is way too inflated, it has not been sitting in the sun for over a decade.
The seams are ripped and decaying and there’s moss or lichen growing on it. I wouldn’t doubt for a moment that that ball has been in the woods for 15 or 20 years. It’s not just going to flatten like a balloon when it’s not at full pressure anymore.
I don't know the exact model of the cassette player, but the silver plastic and the rounded bits of the design to me are very late 90's to early 2000's.
My guess is this stuff has only been out there a few years from the general condition.
Hard to say, my reason for guessing older is that the pile appears to be in a fairly dense woodland area. In these types of situations materials do not break down as quickly as they would in direct sunlight, the boogie board on the bottom right leads me to believe the pile has at least partial sun exposure (or it blew from somewhere else / another pile with more sun).
I have seen a 90's USA football sit exactly like that in a pile for years (5+) and still look relatively inflated, although I bet if you pick that ball up you will quickly realize it has little air and is largely held together by the structure of the material.
Love this game though, wish we could find a source of pictures like this where the dump date is definitively known, but obscured, so we could all test our hypothesis's definitively.
R/chaeology
Looks like the speakers are a slightly different shape. Maybe it's an updated version?