Conference Day in Seoul

Today, I’m presenting my paper on the Alamogordo landfill that I shared last week. As a warm up to that, we were invited to do an interview with a local “influencer.”

Here are his questions and my responses:

What’s something you find yourself throwing away most often these days?

Packaging. Boxes, bags, wrappers, containers, and so on. These seem to me to be artifacts of movement. Packaging is necessary to transport the goods that populate our lives, but are also ephemeral. When something arrives and is put to use, we discard the packaging which often bears the marks of the processes that bring these things into our hands.

Or, imagine this — if someone were to excavate your desk drawer 100 years from now, what item do you think they’d find the most of?

Cables! I have a seemingly endless archive of old computer and high-fi cables in my desk drawers which I keep in hope that someday they will once again be useful. Most of them, of course, aren’t useful which is why they’re buried in a desk drawer, but perhaps someday soon I’ll need a SCSI cable or parallel port cable for a dot-matrix printer!

Introduce yourself!

My name is Bill Caraher and I’m an archaeologist of contemporary America as well as the Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean world. My talk tomorrow will start with the excavation of Atari games from the Alamogordo landfill in 2014 and use this as a jumping off point for discussing how the excavation of this landfill opens a window into both the history of archaeology and the future of our discipline as we come to understand how our modern trash manifests interconnectedness of the contemporary world.

Why do we study trash? How does the study of trash make the invisible, visible?

Modern landfills are particularly good at making the detritus of our everyday life disappear from view. Archaeologists of the modern world have long recognized that modern “waste streams” – that infrastructure that supports how we throw away trash – works to make not just our discard practices invisible, but also our consumer habits and our growing dependence on things. In other words, the hidden character of landfills and the marginalization of individuals who work with trash, obscures the consequences of our disposable lifestyle. A century ago, people discarded most of their trash at home in the United States (and globally!) whereas today most people rely on municipal trash disposal to whisk our trash out of view. By studying the material remains of this trash disposal process, we make both the trash visible once more as well as the processes that created these landfills. 

What is your message to our audience?

Landfills help us understand the infrastructures necessary to support our world full of things. Landfills, then, are a vital support for how we live today. The relative invisibility of landfills and garbage collection, however, works to keep hidden the support for our everyday life. Excavating and studying contemporary landfills shows how archaeology can lay bare the complex working of this infrastructure in the past and the present. It also prepares us to understand the changing nature of our trash as we our consumer goods become increasingly digital and our discard practices become increasingly global. Thus, focusing on trash and landfills shows how archaeology can not only open a window into the past, but also help us understand more clearly the present and the future. In this way, is helps us think about how we live today and the choices that we make when we surround ourselves with things.