[RegulatorCountry]

If a Chuck E Cheese were to survive 3,000 years and be discovered by future archaeologists, I wonder what sort of theory regarding its purpose would get them grant money?

[meadsjn]

How about the average garage?

These people reserved the largest space in their dwellings to worship their four-wheeled mechanical beasts. Shelves lined the walls with various containers of religious oils. Round metal cans held various sizes of nuggets decorated with spiraled grooves; likely carved imitations of the body parts of the beasts ...

[JoeFromSidney]

If a Chuck E Cheese were to survive 3,000 years and be discovered by future archaeologists, I wonder what sort of theory regarding its purpose would get them grant money?

There have been numerous science fiction stories on this theme.

One is "Digging the Weans," about archaeologists excavating an ancient civilization of the people who referred to themselves as "us," and whose capital was Pound-Laundry.

Another, that appeared years ago in ANALOG, purports to be an interview with a far-future archaeologist about his career. He spent years studying "religious sites" that consisted of small rooms, lined with tile, whose primary feature was a porcelain object of undetermined use. He states that despite spending a lifetime at it, he was never able to determine the precise use of these rooms. He says of his studies, "Waste. All waste."

[Cronos]

well, 3000 years is an incredibly long time -- I remember that I was once trying to picture back different language groups back in time (I love Indo-EUropean socio-cultural-religious-linguistic history) -

• 1000 to 1400 years ago, most of the Slavic speakers spoke mutually intelligible languages - may be even the same language
• around 200 AD (1800 y.a.) the various Germanic groups, whether Goths, Vandals, Suebi, Angles, Jutes, etc. spoke the same language with slight variations, but mutually intelligible
• 3000 y.a. (1000 B.C.), the various northern Indic languages (the indo-aryanic branch of the indo-european family) was just one: Sanskrit and its prakrits (dialects) - and was nearly intelligible with Avestani (ancient Irani),
• while there were Irani speakers in all of what is now Iran, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kirghizstan, Uzbekistan, south Kazakhstan and Ukraine
• There were Indo-european speakers in Western China (what is now Uighuristan) -- these and the above Iranis were chased out by Turkic speakers from 700 AD onwards - chased, killed or assimilated
• the various Celtic languages were spreading across Europe from their base in the Czech republic (which wasn't Czech at that time :)
• Semitic languages were dominated by Assyrian, Babylonian, Aramaic etc. with Arabic not even developed yet

3000 years is a huge amount of time -- even politically -- in 1000 AD:

• Rome was not even founded -- Western Europe was mostly forest with the only great culture areas being in the south of Spain founded by Phoenicians (like Cadiz or Gades as they called it)
• Eastern Europe was forest, with the southern part mostly barbaric -- the Greeks were in the middle of their Dark age with the Dorian invasions and Athens, having been sacked in 1200 BC still smouldering...and Crete abandoned
• The situation in the near east was similar, with the hittite empire, the Egyptian new kingdom and the myceneans collapsed and gone. in Assyria you had Assur-Rabi, but he focused on fighting the Mushki in the north while the kingdom of Israel attained great power status with the collapse of the northern and southern superpowers

Ok, I could go on and on, but the situation was completely different and I can imagine that in 3000 years, the cultural, political and language.