The Cartheginian Scrolls

In concurrence with my fellow teammates, the beginning of this problem was cloudy at best. In sharp contrast to the first one, we now had to define the problem before we could solve it. Perusing the problem statement, we were terribly confused, somewhat overwhelmed by the broad spectrum of information presented to us: the Museum of Religious Antiquities in Bangkok wants us to create an exhibit about some recently-discovered scrolls that depict the lavish livestyle of the pax romana...and the Catholic Church's role in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? Some arhaeologists believe the scrolls are fake? What? And what's this about America becoming a theocracy in 2015? What year is it? What does that have to do with any of this?

Drawing on the success of our previous method, we began throwing out questions, ideas, problems, research topics...but got virtually nowhere. When your subject is more or less the fall of the Roman Empire and the ensuing Dark Age (so-called because of a general lack of knowledge as to what happened and why), the questions don't seem to go in any one direction. So, we tried the next-best thing: Google. We searched everything from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Catholic Church to the United States, looking for any possible connection - and finally hit gold. As we delved into the numerous theories about the fall of the Roman Empire, we began to see some parallels between the end of Roman society and the recent crisis in our own: military overreach, the rise of fundamentalist religion both in politics and among the population, and the shift of technology to the East. Jackpot!

So we set out with a narrower goal in mind. We knew we had to create an exhibit for these scrolls, but how to exhibit them and as what, we hadn't had a clue until now. It was obvious there were two underlying theories behind these scrolls: that they described how the rising Catholic Church had played a role in the fall of Rome and the following Dark Age, or that they were forgeries designed to foretell the fall of America and a new Dark Age. Ultimately, we decided to present both theories equally by - in History Channel fashion - answering the question with more questions. The end result was a fantastic "exhibit preview" that would rival any History Channel special.

Links:
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Coming soon: the presentation