Waste Landscapes

Just a quick post today because I’m on my way out to door headed to annual ASOR meeting in Chicago this week.

I’ve been enjoying the special section in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology on waste landscapes. The contributions range from Matthew Edgeworth’s “mega-scale” interrogation of landfills built from the former clay mining pits to Estelle Praet and colleague’s more fine-scaled examination of plastic objects on the coasts of the Galápagos Islands. The papers generally put descriptions and historical contexts of landscapes first and theorizing about wastelands second. I appreciated this version of what my buddy Bret Weber sometimes calls “grounded theory” (mild pun intended).

Of particular note were the efforts to recognize how individuals engage with waste landscapes whether as unwanted intrusions, as forms of heritage, as the invisible infrastructure of discard, or as landscapes susceptible to reimagining, reuse, and adaptation. The complex methods adopted to understand waste landscapes is representative of archaeology of the contemporary more broadly. It also reveals how the crucial role that individuals and communities play in both the production (and discard) of waste and its definition. 

I was particularly fascinated by the way in which “waste” exists within world. Conventional definitions of waste as “matter out of place” or “discard” from systemic contexts suggested a division between our placemaking strategies and the detritus from those processes. The articles in this issue often show how waste is inherent in our sense of place and many of the conventional efforts to distinguish “waste” and “waste landscapes” from ourselves are illusory: the massive landfilling projects that received the debris from the Blitz in England support soccer pitches, centuries of waste form the basis for the soil and local topographies, and we (and other animals) regularly ingest microplastics. A definition of waste as matter out of place runs counter to the persistent reality of a world not just suffused by waste, but comprised of waste.

Finally (and this is a finally for this post, rather than some kind of conclusion to what could be said about this collection of papers), the authors recognize that how we think about waste invariably informs how we think about the Anthropocene. This infuses the collection with a sense of futurity. Our waste landscapes whatever they appear to be in the present anticipate future forms. In this way they offer — too adapt the speculative archaeology offered by Jeffery Benjamin in his contribute to this forum — a “discursive common ground” for the future as residents of these waste landscapes (which as we’ve noted represent not just areas set aside for discard, but the very fabric of our existence). If the Anthropocene is geological formation determined both by our habits of life and our practices of discard, then waste landscapes already frame existence on Earth. The concept of waste in this formulation, however, is not so much about how it exists materially, but how we carve out space to think about different futures. By ignoring (or forgetting to use Benjamin’s piece as a foil) waste landscapes, we create the conditions for future action. By burying waste in the concept of the Anthropocene we render it geologically inevitable. There are curious parallels here with how we engage with concepts like capitalism that so shape our world that they active encourage us to overlook their place in our lives. 

The papers in this forum not only reinforce the centrality of waste to archaeology of the contemporary world, but also its key role in larger conversations about how dealing with waste shapes daily lives.