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It will be interesting to see all the uses the successors find for our garbage.
After the fall of Rome, the population of the city fell to 10,000 people. People used the ancient buildings as quarries from which to build their new dwellings. Even as late as 1500 AD there was ample construction material available. St. Peters was built using marble from the Colosseum, melted down bronze from the Pantheon, and stone from the tomb of Hadrian.
In Nimes, France, the entire population of the town moved into what was formerly the gladiatorial arena.
In 5000 AD or whatever, bands of savages will live inside the few high rises that still stand.
I liked traveling around the Yucatán in Mexico and seeing that in small villages with lesser known pyramids people had just taken the stone from the pyramids in the town center and repurposed it to build fences and mundane daily things.
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There was a set of TV specials, 'life after people', which could shed some light I suspect, at least on 'what decays when(and what we should expect the environment to change into in certain ways)'.
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