Local Landfills, Global Garbage: Paper Draft

As readers of this blog know, I’m scheduled to give a paper at a conference in August in Seoul, Korea. The conference is  hosted by Korean National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage and ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property) and titled World Archaeology: Archaeology of Landfills.

A draft of my paper is due on June 2 and I think that I have a plausible draft done. It cleaves a bit closely to the first part of my book than I would have liked, but perhaps that is understandable in this situation. I wasn’t given very much time to prepare the paper (at least by academic standards) and while I do keep reading recent works on trash, landfills, and discard, the bibliography is massive and complex. 

My plan with this paper then was summarize some of the observations from my book and try to point to some new directions. I like to think I did an adequate job with that, although it is unabashedly directed toward an archaeological generalist audience.

Here’s the draft.