Thinking about Landfills

Yesterday’s conference filled my head with thoughts about landfills, and this was exciting indeed. The range of papers from the Neolithic and the Roman to the 20th century provided a complex range of ways to see discard in the past and present.

Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Landfils as Lens. One of the most interesting tensions that came out of the conference was between studying the contents of landfills as a particular kind of deposit that captured the life of a community or the material remains of a process (e.g. harvesting shellfish or the transport of olive oil amphora) and studying landfills as part of a larger regime of waste management at a certain periods in the past. These two questions are obviously interrelated but also quite different. Why did the Romans, for example, decide to build Monte Testaccio rather than use the discarded oil amphora in a different way? How did prehistoric people decide where to deposit shells and how to treat these deposits later? In the modern period, we often think about how the landfill manifest certain social, political, economic, and cultural choices that shaped its location, structure, and function. How did this work in the past?

2. Landfills Define Waste. One of the more interesting functional aspects of the landfill is how the movement to the landfill defines material as waste. There is an almost ritual element to our depositional practices both in the present and in the past. The presence of burials, for example, in shell middens suggests that perhaps landfills were not just dumps, but places where ritual deposits take place that shape the relationship between the present and the past. In this context, landfills are not passive places like in our world where the detritus of our daily lives disappears, but places of active engagement with the past. In this way, the landfill served as an archive where a community’s past is collected and re-experienced.

3. Landfills as Agents of “Mechinic consumption.” In a very compelling article and book, Michael Roller explores the archaeology of mechinic consumption which he proposes reflects the creation of a consumer who buys not to satisfy their needs, but to continue the functioning of a system designed to deprive individuals of their work and to contribute to the enrichment of the owners and managers. In this unabashedly Marxist reading of consumption (articulated in the context of early- and mid-20th-century Americanization as well as life in company towns), the act of discarding trash in landfills (and not adapting even damaged or worn objects for future use) contributed to a disposable culture where people replaced objects rather than repaired them. In this context broken and damaged goods had to be removed to beyond the range of recovery. They were not archived for future use, they were not stored in provisional discard, and they did not see repurposing for mundane or monumental purposes. The convenient disappears of goods from daily life (and the hiding of the processes where goods disappear) fuels the insistent consumerism necessary to support industrial production.     

4. Landfills and the Environment. If landfills represent “managed waste,” they invariably led to consideration of the other side of the coin: unmanaged waste. The Great Pacific Garbage Gyre as well as more mundane anxieties about the permanence of plastic and other synthetic materials that enter and remain in our environment. These anxieties are well founded, of course, and recognize that landfills can be solutions as well as problems. At the same time, archaeological approaches to landfills — and to broader environmental issues — seem constantly to challenge the scale that archaeology can and does work. If unmanaged trash represents contamination on a planetary scale, then landfills and archaeology, no matter how meaning, appears to be grossly inadequate to solving the larger issue of waste management. How we reconcile the enormity of the challenges facing the planet and the comparative inadequacy of our tools serves to define archaeology’s role as a discipline capable to addressing contemporary challenges. 

5. Landfills as Heritage. This leads back to the idea that landfills whatever they can do practically to “manage” waste, they remain a lens through which we understand our lives and the waste that we produce through living whether in the past or the present. As such, they represent a kind of anti-heritage. Many years ago, I attended a conference on monumentality at IEMA in Buffalo, at this conference we concluded the discussion with a conversation about the opposite of the monumental. It is now clear to me that landfills represent a kind of anti-monumental anti-heritage. They are not meant to be seen, encountered, experienced. As Matthew Edgeworth has noted, however, landfills do produce distinct “waste landscapes,” that we go to great pains to ignore, hide, disguise, and repurpose. Making these kinds of landscapes more visible contributes to a kind of “dark heritage” not in the sense of heritage that is painful, but as the kind of heritage that exists outside the light of contemporary interpretative regions and heritage frameworks. They do not represent resilience, reconciliation, or any of the other more positive aspects of heritage. Instead, they lurk below the surface (literally and figuratively) and tell stories laced with acquiesce, resignation, and — in many cases — shame. In some ways, landfills represent failure of both capitalisms promise for more efficient lives and our own failure to hide our own wastefulness.

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I’m not sure when or whether I’ll ever return to the topic of landfills (although this conference has certainly gotten me interested in thinking more about trash), but I’m very happy with how this conference has moved the needle in my understanding of our contemporary waste regimes. I don’t quite think that I have something unique to say about them, but I do think that I can place my experiences in a more historical and archaeological context.  I’m tempted to revise this paper into something more, but I’m not sure. Maybe there are plans to publish this conference. We’ll see.