Writing Wednesday: Landfills

Last month, I excitedly accepted an invitation to attend a conference in Korea hosted by Archaeological Heritage Division of the Korean National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage and a group called ICCROM. I have to admit that the invitation flattered my ego (always the downfall of academics) and made me curious about visiting Korea. The conference will focus on the archaeology of landfills and I’ve been asked to speak about the archaeology of contemporary landfills. 

The downside is that I need to have a manuscript prepared by the end of May. The talk is about 30 minutes long and I will anchor what I have to say in the opening chapters of my fairly recent book and in my experiences at the Alamogordo Atari Expedition. My talk is titled “Local Landfills, Global Garbage” which probably will sound better in English than in Korean.

As much as I’d prefer to be scribbling away on other, future projects, it probably makes sense for me to buckle down and produce a draft of this landfill paper before I decamp for Cyprus this summer.

My paper will have four sections after a lede that locates me and my colleagues on the edge of the Alamogordo Landfill.

First, I want to stress that archaeology had its origins in trash and talk briefly about  Rudolf Virchow excavations in Berlin in the 1860s and Alfred Kidder’s observations in the Andover Dump in the 1920s. 

Second, I will locate archaeology of contemporary landfills in the work of Bill Rathje and the Garbage Project and use that to frame the first wave of American projects focusing on the archaeology of the contemporary world. 

Third, I want to return to edge of the Alamogordo Landfill and discuss how this excavation fit into these earlier traditions, but also charted a new direction in the archaeology of trash.

Fourth, I want to discuss the globalization of trash (i.e. global garbage) and how the archaeology of landfills can speak not only to new ways of thinking about trash, but also to new ways of thinking about archaeology more broadly. 

The paper needs to be between 3000-4000 words and it feels like this can easily produce a text of that length. I’m looking forward mostly to improving the final section. I’ve been collecting bibliography on the archaeology, anthropology, and history of trash and I want to try to trace recent directions informed by archaeology.