Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay is a lavishly illustrated book about Howard Carson, a future archaeologist who stumbles upon an extraordinarily well-preserved ancient tomb — or so he thinks. It's actually a 20th-century hotel room.
Tropes featured include:
- Acronyms Are Easy as Aybeecee: The story focuses on the ancient land of Usa, with places being excavated by archeologists in the 41st century. "Usa" is actually the U.S.A., having been destroyed in the mid-1980s due to an massive influx of junk mail that literally buried the whole country.
- All Hail the Great God Mickey!: Items recovered include the Great Altar (the television) and the Sacred Urn (the toilet); the general assumption of all the future archaeologists is that everything they find has some religious significance.
- Ancient Astronauts: Parodied. The book's discussion of freeways could be taken, practically word-for-word, from a present-day von Dänikenite's description of the Nazca lines.
- Apocalypse How: The complete burial of North America in junk mail and suddenly-solidified pollution, ranking somewhere between Regional and Planetary Social Destruction.
- Brick Joke: An illustration shows Howard Carson entertaining his fellow researchers on the dig by making shadow puppets in a spotlight. Thirty pages later or so, the text tells us that he did the same thing for an appreciative crowd on opening day at THE MUSEUM.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Aside from coming to mistaken conclusions about everything they find, Howard Carson and Harriet Burton are people of extremely bizarre habits of mind.
- When the door of the "tomb" is first opened, Howard begins lighting matches but is unable to see anything — Harriet has to remind him of the electric spotlight standing only a few feet away.
- By the time Howard finds the door to the "inner chamber" (read: "bathroom"), Harriet has already numbered and catalogued it, thinking it to be another wall decoration.
- When the dig at the motel slows down, Howard begins suffering from extremely bizarre nightmares (involving being the only human in a troupe of circus horses) and Harriet demands a chance to wear some of the items of "clothing" they have found.
- Not that these two are the only such people in the book. When THE MUSEUM puts on an exhibition of the recovered items, the official in charge solves the congestion problem by installing a gently sloping floor and giving "a well-oiled pair of roller skates" to every visitor.
- Curse of the Pharaoh: Mirroring the legends of cursed Egyptian tombs, everyone who excavates the Motel dies in some strange way. Carson himself, whose other pet project is dromedary breeding (he hopes to produce the world's first three-humped camel), is killed by a lab assistant infected with rabies; Burton is accidentally electrocuted.
- Entertainingly Wrong: Most of the deductions in the book have some logic behind them. That doesn't mean they're right...
- Fun with Acronyms: The ice bucket in the motel room is taken to be a symbolic canopic jar
. The word ICE is interpreted as an acronym for "Internal Component Enclosure", as ancient North Americans were supposedly fond of long and complex descriptive names. - Future Imperfect: The entire book runs on this. Most of its humor comes from the contrast between the awestruck tone of the text and the highly mundane illustrations which make it clear just how skewed a view of the 20th century the future archaeologists have. Much of this is driven by the fact that the future civilization seems to have retreated to a 19th-century level of technology and has lost most of its knowledge relating to synthetic materials. They are convinced that "The Plants That Would Not Die", as they call them, were grown by some biological process, instead of being made of plastic. Fake wood Formica paneling is, by their standards, unbelievably realistic; incidentally, they also misinterpret the Formica brand name and believe that "Mica" is a Usan god of craftsmanship.
- Generic Name: Used rather ominously. The British Museum (of which we see a picture in the book) is now referred to simply as THE MUSEUM, and has a close relationship with a center of learning known only as THE UNIVERSITY. Which suggests, alarmingly, that they may be the last museum and university remaining on the planet after the cataclysm that destroyed North America.
- Machine Worship: Invoked by Carson, who believes some of the gods the ancient Usa people worshiped and so set up shrines to in the "tomb" are WATT (the wording on the light bulb), and MOVIEA and MOVIEB (the two pay-to-watch movie selections).
- The Merch: In-universe. The last few pages describe the gift shop items sold by THE MUSEUM SHOP in conjunction with THE MUSEUM's Motel exhibit. They include a graffiti-covered section of bathroom wall (available in alabaster or 24-karat gold), a crystal paperweight containing a reproduction of the artificial plant from the hotel corridor, a set of handcrafted marble coasters reproducing the appearance of the cheap acoustic tiles from the "tomb's" ceiling, and so on.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed:
- Currant Bunliffe (Sir Barry Cunliffe); Heinrich von Hooligan (Erich von Däniken); Howard Carson and Harriet Burton (Howard Carter and Harry Burton).
- Some of the pictures in the book are based on photographs of real-life archeologists. There are direct parodies of this picture of Howard Carter◊ and this photograph of Sophia Schliemann◊.
- Currant Bunliffe (Sir Barry Cunliffe
- Punny Name: The book was written after Tutankhamen's relics were displayed in the U.S. The motel's name? The Toot 'n' C'mon.
- Take That!:
- The narrator innocently passes one on when he mentions that, while the remains of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis are close to the geographical center of the ancient country of Usa, "its geographical placement would have been more accurate had a large portion of the west coast fallen off into the sea, as was predicted and in some areas of the country apparently prayed for."
- The book as a whole satirizes the tendency of archaeologists to interpret their finds in a ceremonial or religious context, with little concern for what might be glimpses of mundane daily life in an ancient civilization.
- One of the causes of the cataclysm that destroyed North America was an accidental reduction in postal rates on third- and fourth-class mail. The U.S. was literally buried under a layer of junk mail.
- Consider also the fate of "Usa". Absolutely none of its founding documents have been unearthed, not one piece of its history remains; all that does remain is a collection of the most ordinary and boringly inconsequential shit we can imagine, and archeologists like Carson are reduced to speculating on the possible meaning and ritual significance of such things as televisions, toilets, drain plugs, brassieres, penny loafers, fake plants, room service trays, ice buckets, and the stains on acoustic ceiling tiles. The only messages from the past that have survived are the graffiti on a bathroom wall — carefully restored and painstakingly reproduced as a decorative piece available from THE MUSEUM SHOP.
- Heinrich von Hooligan, a stand-in for Erich von Däniken, a "scientist" espousing Ancient Astronauts—type theories.
- Toilet Humor:
- The deadpan descriptions of various bathroom items sometimes verge on this.
- The image of Carson, in full "regalia", kneeling before the Sacred Urn has to be seen to be believed.
- The fact that the occupants' clothes are strewn around the "tomb" instead of hanging off their skeletons (and that one of them is found lying in the bath) is a very subtle hint as to what they had just finished doing when the apocalypse hit.
- The coffee set inspired by the Sacred Urn.
