If a natural disaster big enough to cause one of today's cities to disappear, what artifacts....?

Question

Natural disasters have struck many civilizations at different times since man first built cities. If a natural disaster big enough to cause one of today's cities to disappear, what artifacts do you think would remain? How would the historians of the future be able to determine who the inhabitants of the "lost city" were and how they lived?

Answer 1

In the current world we keep a lot of records on a lot of different media. Also, many of the products, buildings and other artifacts have a better chance to survive years of neglect. So, unless the disaster totally destroyed all, I think that historians will have a very large amount of info to go from.
If the civilization was totally and utterly destroyed (or that primitive it doesn't keep records) then they will have to go by records retained by other civilizations.
Also, since there is much more communication between all communities worldwide you will find many more records in surviving civilizations.

Or at least that's what I think. :)

Answer 2

Yes, a small city along the Mississippi river in the mid 1800's but, I don't have the name, I'm sorry. It was in Missouri when a great earthquake hit and changed the flow of the Mississippi river and sucked the small city, which was along the banks and in a Central valley, down under the river, the people narrowly escaped with their lives, the city vanished forever but, the people rebuilt the city along the top of the valley above the river, it still flows that way today. It's in central Missouri.

Answer 3

personal effects and perhaps some of the inscoptions wjhich would help the historians to reconstract the indedites and lifes of the last inhabitans of the lost city