The currency of the Weans consisted of the grand, the fin, the buck, the bit, and the payola.
Ever read a book about archaeology, and wonder how accurate the scholars’ guesses, based on very partial information, are? Robert Nathan had fun with that question in his 1960 short novel, The Weans.
The idea of The Weans is that it’s a book written thousands of years in the future, about what archaeologists have learned in “the Salt Continent” (North America) based on meager findings from their archaeological digs.
Much of the humor rises from the archaeologists’ assumptions. Too many artifacts are assumed to have religious significance, for instance. The book also includes a number of puzzles for the reader, which said reader only figures out gradually (I may have missed a couple, I fear): we wonder why the Americans are known to history as “Weans.” Or why our capitol city is remembered as “Pound-Laundry.”
An amusing book. It contains one gag about underage sex that didn’t age well. But all in all, fun to read.
Thanks for this! The first thing of the sort I ran into – and thoroughly enjoyed – was David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries (1979) (after having studied Roman British archaeology and worked on a Roman shop-site dig as an undergrad in 1977).
And now I’ve just caught up with Tolkien’s part of The Bovadium Fragments (2025) – which is something of the sort, too – and of which Christopher Tolkien begins his Introduction by saying “This work was certainly in being near the end of 1960”! (I still have Richard Ovenden’s “Origin” account to go.)