What rubbish!
- jeskarees
- Jul 9, 2024
- 3 min read
One of the most well-known archaeological studies of everyday households is The Garbage Project, which set out in 1973 to comprehensively demonstrate what can be understood about a society from what it throws away.
The Garbage Project did not seek insights into individual behaviour - they didn't want to know who was taking pregnancy tests or throwing large parties - but there were interested in discard patterns across neighbourhoods and cities. Archaeologists and students collected rubbish from households and sampled landfill sites, sorting it by category, weight and size. By 1992, the Project had sorted and catalogued 250 000 items of rubbish. They also asked certain households to estimate what kinds of rubbish, and how much of it, their households generated.
But why look at rubbish?
Systematic garbage disposal dates only from the nineteenth century and the rise of industrialised cities, and typical modern rubbish is dominated by plastics, cardboard and construction materials.
But other items such as food waste, broken tools and jewellery have a much longer history of being discarded and remaining in the ground long after the people who created them have left. Archaeologists have, therefore, frequently turned to rubbish pits to understand the habits, diets and lifestyles of previous societies. (See also my post on Little Lonsdale Street in Melbourne for an example of archaeologists working this way.)
What did the Garbage Project find?
Researchers found that people's understanding of their own habits can be inaccurate. By comparing the households' estimates of their rubbish, and looking at the rubbish they actually produced, they found that many people over-report healthy lifestyle decisions, such as consumption of fresh produce, and under-report their consumption of processed foods. Sometimes people appeared to be in complete denial about their consumption habits: several households reported that they ‘never’ consumed alcohol – but their garbage contained multiple empty alcohol containers each week. (Don't worry, all households gave permission for their rubbish to be analysed, and all were de-identified in the analysis.)
The findings support the notion that archaeologists can confidently rely on garbage sites for accurate insight into behaviour in the past – and that researching the current day must account for the delusions of self-reporting.
Should we worry about running out of space for landfill?
An ongoing theme in public discussion of rubbish disposal is the risk of 'running out of room' for rubbish. As recently as July 2024 the media reported such concerns were being raised in Sydney.
Back in 1992 the lead researchers on the Garbarge Project were unconvinced by this threat. They argued that modern disposal techniques associated with landfill
effectively seals garbage
underground, preventing leakage and preventing a lot of biodegradation - in their sampling of landfill, they found meat that they could date to over fifty years old! The stability of landfill contents keeps alive the possibility of redeveloping the the surface above into parks, golf courses and even commercial activity areas once the landfill site has reached capacity. In their view, humans can continue to throw away their rubbish without too much risk for centuries to come - something future archaeologists may welcome as they sort through the debris that we throw away today.
However, whether we should continue to throw away rubbish - given the environmental impact of manufacturing and unsafe disposal of plastics - is another question, of course.
Further reading
W. Rathje, W & C. Murphy, Rubbish! The archaeology of garbage, University of Arizona Press, Tuscon, 1992
A. Reinhard, 'The video game graveyard', Archaeology Magazine.
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