Writing Wednesday: More on Landfills

Yesterday, I introduced some of the writing that I’ve been doing lately on that Atari Alamogordo Expedition in 2014 (!!). This is part of larger paper on the the archaeology of contemporary landfills. Much of this is based on the first few chapters of my book. The section that I posted yesterday focused specifically on the Atari excavations.

Today, are the first few sections of the paper. It makes for a long post, but hopefully an easy and familiar read. It’s currently titled “Local Landfills, Global Garbage” but I’m not entirely sure that title will stick or fit the paper.

Local Landfills, Global Garbage

This paper begins on the edge of the Alamogordo Landfill in the southwestern United States. Alamogordo is a small southwestern town in the state of New Mexico. It is best known for its proximity to the famous white sands and its eponymous missile range where the Trinity Test took place and introduced the world to the nuclear age. The landfill functioned intermittently in the 1970s and 1980s and by our arrival in 2014, it is almost indistinguishable from the surrounding desert scrub lands with only two large sandy mounds marking the former disturbances to the Chihuahuan Basin playa. As a massive excavator rips into the landfill the slightly sweet odor of decomposition fills the air. The uncompacted layers of the landfill come apart as the bucket of the excavator digs through layers of discarded household garbage and loads it into waiting trucks. From time to time, the excavator pauses to reposition itself on the unstable surface. This instability also necessitates a safety cordon preventing anyone from approaching the jagged edges of the trench. Gusting wind, however, carries a continuous sample of trash over to our vantage point. At one point, a gust catches a parachute entangled in the basket of the excavator and its form billows in the wind.

Archaeology and Landfills

Standing at the edge of landfill hardly seems like promising place to reflect on archaeology. But the study of contemporary trash can’t be separated from the study of archaeology itself. No less a figure than the Berlin physician and preeminent scholar of European prehistory Rudolf Virchow engaged in an early effort to excavate refuse. Virchow is best known for working to document the remains of a number of prehistoric pile dwellings as early as the 1850s. He also visited Troy while it was being excavated by Heinrich Schliemann and helped to arrange for “Priam’s Treasure” transported to Berlin. In the late 1860s he excavated and meticulously recorded a small dump of 18th century kitchen refuse in a Berlin sewer. Virchow originally associated the finds with a prehistoric midden, but closer examination proved that the pots, fauna remains, and shells spoke to the diets of 18th century Berlin households. The presence of oyster shells, in particular, interested Virchow who argued that their presence in this assemblage pushed the date of earliest consumption of oysters in Prussia some 100 years earlier. The presence of these shells led him to find confirmation in the records of royal household that oysters were being consumed in Berlin as early as 1702. 

Some 50 years after Virchow’s mundane, but not insignificant discovery, Alfred Kidder whose excavations at Pecos, New Mexico (some 200 odd miles to the north of Alamogordo) inaugurated the archaeology of the American southwest. In 1921, as he was contemplating his first major work, Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archaeology, he was attending to his aging mother in Andover, Massachusetts. During this year, he took to spending time observing the Andover dump and noting how the trash piled formed into stratigraphic layers which informed his understanding of the dump at Pecos. The stratigraphic relationships that he observed in the Andover dump, in turn, informed his efforts to sequence changing lighting technologies in New England. The shift from candles to oil lamps and then gas lamps as well as the shift from whale bone to flattened steel rods in corsets. These shifts spoke to the changing economy of New England as petroleum replaced whale oil in lighting and steel replaced bone in corsets. 

Evidently, the local residents noticed Kidder’s observations at the dump and reported him to the police. The police detained under the assumption that he might be a vagrant or perhaps an escaped resident from a local mental health facility. When he explained that he was an archaeologist, the police let him go. His encounter at the dump, however, speaks to rather marginal status of individuals prone to spending time around landfills and perhaps helps us understand why so few archaeologists have shown them much interest. Michael Thompson’s observation that discard practices begin a process which allows objects to achieve a kind of ”valueless limbo.“ This status, outside of a system of symbolic or functional values, allows these objects to undergo radical revaluation (but see Lucas 2002). In this way Thompson understood the emergence of the modern and, indeed, contemporary dump, is a place where society renders objects abject and valueless. As a result, dumps and landfills become places designed to control the potential for the kind of radical transformation in value. In practical terms, authorities tend to limit access to landfills on the grounds of safety. Socially, we tend to marginalize jobs and workers engaged regularly with waste streams. Thus, there are powerful social and political forces at play to control the liminality of rubbish.

Virchow and Kidder offer a good reminder that from the earliest days of archaeology, understanding discard and waste streams represents a key lens through which to understand consumer culture. This has continued into contemporary understanding of domestic waste as well. Michael Roller, for example, demonstrated how household discard at a mid-20th century Pennsylvania mining town connected the treatment of trash as both part of the development of more complex waste streams and new consumption patterns. Immigrants not only learned to be American through the practice of mass consumption, but also through practices of mass discard. The consumption of disposable goods, for example, in the name of sanitation not only stimulated industrial production in the U.S., but also contributed to a shared cultural experience between immigrant and more established American communities. The purchasing of disposable goods at annual and even seasonal sales and the decline of household recycling practices in the name of good and fashionable housekeeping ensured a constant flow of new material into sanitary landfills. Just as the appearance of oysters shells in an 18th century Berlin midden and the changing lamp technologies preserved in the Andover landfill marked new forms of consumer culture, so the study of domestic discard practices (and the decline in what Michael Schiffer called “provisional discard”) reflected the integration of immigrant communities in networks of consumption and sanitary waste management. 

Excavating Contemporary Landfills

While excavations associated with household wastes are a common feature of archaeological work in most places and periods, the systematic archaeological interest in contemporary waste streams and, by extension, landfills originated in Bill Rathje’s Garbage Project. Begun in 1973, Rathje’s project sought to document household wasted collected from the curbside in Arizona neighborhoods. He and his team sorted, sampled, recorded, and analyzed thousands of assemblages of household trash. They often complemented the information gleaned from these assemblages with the results of surveys. This allowed them to produce innumerable publications with observations simpler diets with fewer ingredients produce less waste, people tend to under report the quantity of alcohol they consume, and people tend to be more wasteful when they resort to stockpiling goods made scarce by market volatility. Rathje and his collaborators produced research for American companies which produced consumer goods. In many ways, this work benefited from the stability of the post-war American waste streams. The shared expectations that shaped suburban discard practices created a knowable relationship between the trash these household produced and their consumption habits. In this context, we might see the post-war consumer also the post-war waste producer.  

The Garbage Project arose during a particularly fraught time in the conversations about trash, landfills, and American post-war consumerism. Heather Rodgers in her 2006 book called the 1950s a “Golden Age of waste” as post-war American manufacturing accelerated the development of a mass consumer culture. Vance Packard’s influential work in the 1950s, culminating in his 1960 book Waste Makers, imagines a world where production and consumption are so tightly bound that machines transport newly produced goods directly to landfills and cities would ceremonially dump surplus goods into the sea. By the 1970s and 1980s, Americans had displaced some of their anxiety about consumption onto anxieties about waste. Fears of toxic waste, overflowing landfills, and the cost of solid waste removal from increasingly impoverished urban areas filled the news. From this emerged the concept of the “garbage crisis” which highlighted the perceived risk that, soon, landfills will no longer be able to contain the trash that we produce. The ill-fated voyages of the Khian Sea, a ship filled with ash from a trash incinerator in Philadelphia that was denied entry into numerous ports, and the Mobro 4000 barge filled with garbage from New York City which bounced from port to port down the Eastern seaboard and Caribbean, seemed to exemplify America’s inability to manage their sprawling waste streams. 

At around this time, Rathje’s Garbage Project pivoted from exploring the domestic side of the waste stream to landfills themselves. Conducting excavations at landfills in Arizona, California, and Florida, Rathje and colleagues demonstrated that the contents of landfills included significant quantities of construction and demolition debris often exceeds 10% of the landfill total volume. Moreover, some of the bugbears of the 1970s and 1980s garbage crisis — styrofoam fast-food packaging and disposable diapers which the media and activists targeted because they would not decompose in landfills — contribute little to the overall volume of the landfill. Instead, Rathje’s research demonstrated that paper comprised nearly 25% of the samples taken from the landfill and despite the biodegradable character of paper, the anaerobic nature of landfills prevented this paper from breaking down. In this capacity, their work at landfills revealed the limits of popular conceptions of the “garbage crisis” and its preoccupation with the costs of convenience culture.

That said, Rathje and his associates also noted that modern landfills do more than just speak to our collective preoccupation with consumer culture and its detritus. They also recognized that modern landfills, much like their premodern counterparts, consist of lens that reflect part activities whether “spring cleaning, a child’s birthday party, the aftermath of preparing the annual report at the office” or, as we’ll see, the quiet dumping of truckloads of Atari games.