What comes to mind when you think about archaeology? Egypt? Bones? High-waisted trousers and chisels? The word “archaeology” comes from the Greekarkhaiologia, which literally means “the study of ancient things.” But in the 1970s, an American archaeologist named William Rathje decided to study his own era’s trash, and a new field emerged: contemporary archaeology.
In their 1992 book,聽Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage, Rathje and co-author Cullen Murphy wrote, “What people have owned鈥攁nd thrown away鈥攃an speak more eloquently, informatively, and truthfully about the lives they lead than they themselves ever may.” They found that humans consumed less fruit and more junk food and alcohol than they said they did. And, counterintuitively, people actually wasted more during economic recession.
Phonebooks, disposable diapers, medicine vials, half-empty cans of paint鈥攖his was the stuff of Rathje’s attention. It was no less deserving of it, he argued, than the artifacts placed behind glass in museums. (After all, one could argue that’s just antique trash.)
But while Mayan remnants look like limestone fragments and ceramic vessels, humans of the past century have left behind aluminum, concrete, plastic, and more.
According to a study published in July in聽Science Advances鈥�the first to analyze all plastic ever manufactured鈥攈umans have made 8.3 billion metric tons of the material in total. By 2050, that number is expected to increase by nearly 50 percent. By then, there might be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans, says聽a report released earlier this yearby the World Economic Forum.
Plastic, which is cheaper and easier to make than glass and ceramics, is ephemeral in function but not in life span鈥攁 plastic bag takes at least 500 years to disintegrate. In 2013, scientists found what they called “plastiglomerates”鈥攔ocks made from plastic, volcanic rock, sand, shells, and coral鈥攐n a beach in Hawaii.
“[The plastiglomerates] might be a nice marker,” geophysicist Douglas Jerolmack told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s聽Sciencemagazine in 2014, “of when humans came to dominate the globe and leave behind their refuse in mass quantities.”
And it’s not just pieces of trash that we’re leaving behind: The human species has actually modified the sediment of the earth. According to another article published in聽厂肠颈别苍肠别听by a working group of 24 scientists who study the Anthropocene, there is now plastic, radiation, and soot聽embedded in the actual surface of the planet. 聽
“This is hyper-consuming, hyper-disposing, and discarding that’s happening at a rate that we haven’t seen,” said Courtney Singleton, a PhD student in anthropology at Columbia University, who, like Rathje did, studies modern-age trash. She’s currently focusing on a homeless encampment in the Bronx, where ballpoint pens, bottle caps, Styrofoam scraps, broken toys, film canisters, condoms, tiny vials that once contained crack cocaine, and hairclips provide clues to the lives of the people who have passed through the squat since at least the 1980s.
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