the.com/remains
What's left over insists on being read — by archaeologists, coroners, and very nosy descendants.
means What is left over after something is used, removed, destroyed, or has died — including a dead body or the ruins of something past.
from From the Latin 'remanere,' to stay behind, built from 're-' (back) plus 'manere' (to stay) — a cousin of 'mansion,' which is literally a 'staying place.' It reached English through Old French 'remaindre' in the medieval period, and the noun sense of 'leftovers' (and grimly, of corpses) grew naturally from the verb: what remains is simply what stayed when everything else departed.
- bone memory
- Teeth outlast everything, recording diet and childhood geography
- legal weight
- A body becomes 'remains' the instant law gets involved
- cremation math
- Ashes are mostly crushed bone, not soft tissue
- linguistic ghost
- Same word means leftovers and corpses, fittingly
- deep time
- Most fossils are remains that beat astronomical odds
pompeii — roman city buried by mount vesuvius in 79 ad, preserved with 2,000+ inhabitants' bodies and artifacts
terracotta army — 8,000 life-sized clay soldiers buried with china's qin emperor around 210 bc in xi'an
tomb of tutankhamun — egyptian pharaoh's burial chamber in valley of the kings discovered in 1922 with nearly intact contents
lucy skeleton — 3.2 million-year-old australopithecus afarensis fossil discovered in ethiopia in 1974