I was trained as a processual archaeologist in the 1960s, and as a result my interests and research, along with the vocabulary I have used to express these, have followed a different trajectory from those paths that have emerged out of what we once called postprocessual archaeology. This is not to say that we do not have common beacons. I believe we certainly do. To this end, I am writing this dialogue with Harrison's piece to rename the ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’ as ‘archaeology in and of the present’ and ‘for the future’. I like the new name for contemporary past archaeology, but archaeologists in and of the present should not forget about their own past.Footnote 1
Grounded in the then contemporary methods and theory of archaeology, the Garbage Project has recorded data in great detail on 192.2 tons of fresh garbage collected from 20,416 individual households in seven different metropolitan areas, and has excavated and recorded 45.3 tons of refuse dating from the 1920s to 1991 from 19 landfills and four open dumps in 15 North American cities. The majority of Project data sets record item-by-item inventories (by more than 150 item categories, original item weight and volume recorded from packaging, item cost (if available), weight of any waste, brand name, specific type and material composition) of assemblages of fresh garbage placed out for disposal over the last quarter-century by individual households in census tracts with known sociometric characteristics and geographic coordinates. Several Garbage Project data sets even record garbage, sociometrics and interview-survey responses to questions about behaviour and lifestyle, all collected with permission, from the same individual households.Footnote 2
During the past 32 years, the Garbage Project's data sets and associated analyses have literally defined what has come to be known as ‘garbology’ (see the Oxford English dictionary and the American heritage dictionary, any edition of either after 1985) as the behavioural science focused on the study of contemporary garbage (see Rathje 2001). The variety of refuse data collected by the Garbage Project, combined with sociometric data and respondent reports of attitudes and behaviours, makes this database of assemblages a unique tool for posing and answering important behavioural questions facing behavioural scientists, government policy-makers, industries and individual families today. Therefore I totally applaud Harrison's view of archaeology creating assemblages in and of the present and future that can be revised and reassembled by archaeologists, professionals in other disciplines, policy planners, and the public. To put it another way, the garbology project was, from the beginning, explicitly focused on the future through an engagement with ‘specific social and environmental problems of the present day’ (Dawdy 2009, 140; also see Shanks and Witmore 2010). This is not new and we have a mountain of garbage to prove it.
I never apologized for this work. Perhaps one of the reasons that this is typical of archaeologists’ research in the US (versus the UK) is that UK archaeologists are usually in their own archaeology departments separated from departments of social/cultural anthropology, while archaeologists in the US are usually based in anthropology departments which include social/cultural anthropologists, physical anthropologists and linguists. Social/cultural anthropologists in US institutions are typically pleased with the new kinds of data on behaviour in and of the present that their archaeological colleagues provide.
Furthermore, from the beginning, the goal of the Garbage Project was to inform householders about their beliefs and attitudes, material-culture use and waste behaviour. This intersects well with notions of ‘alienation’, ‘the abject’ and ‘the Other’, but these are terms that never crossed my mind. I simply wanted to make people aware of how their actual behaviour differed from what they thought they were doing. This disjuncture between what people do and what they say they do happens to be a fundamental characteristic of modernism (Witmore 2006a). The goal was always an understanding of how beliefs, behaviour and material culture interact in unsuspected ways that people could change if they became more aware of the material outcomes of their interactions. Once more we find a perhaps unacknowledged line of convergence. Here again, I totally agree with Harrison that archaeologists should focus archaeology on the present and for the future.
About acceptance by other archaeologists: I clearly remember when I learned the affects that certain terminologies can have. I was giving a talk about the Garbage Project to a seminar at Stanford. There was an esteemed European theorist in the audience who broke out in laughter several times when I was talking about analysing garbage and the conclusions that produced. I admit that I was shocked and mystified by the laughter when I was talking about huge amounts of household food waste, about the way informants misreported their diets that could seriously affect their health, about how little people recycled compared to what they reported recycling, and about all the hazardous household wastes that were thrown in home refuse. When I questioned one of my student–colleagues, he informed me that the humour was that the Garbage Project studies were sanitizing an ‘abject/Other’ by transforming refuse into a familiar information source. Suddenly I understood. And later the same laugher asked to reprint one of the Garbage Project's papers in a respected archaeological journal in Europe (Rathje 2004).
Harrison correctly states that the Garbage Project and similar studies that came after were never directly criticized in published articles. But since he was not around at the time of the founding of the Garbage Project he did not hear or see unpublished comments from colleagues. I well remember an archaeologist approaching me at a national meeting of the Society for American Archaeology and saying, ‘How can you live with yourself? Ancient sites are being vandalized every day, and all you do is pick and paw through fresh garbage.’ And a few years later I vividly remember an evening I spent with David Hurst Thomas in 1979, when we amicably dialogued for hours about whether or not the Garbage Project should be included in the next edition of his popular introduction-to-archaeology textbook. I am pleased to report that Thomas's next edition included a substantial and very fair description of the Garbage Project, as have the versions since. I also remember some early national US television appearances, such as the Today show, where the ‘super’ under my name was ‘archaeologist’. In response I received several anonymous mailings which said something like, ‘Why don't you say what you really are? A sociologist, a nutritionist, a specialist in household hazardous waste, but not an “archaeologist”’. These messages made me feel estranged from my discipline.
But 15 years later, when the ‘garbage barge’ sailed down the East Coast of the US and into the Caribbean in search of a place to dump its cargo, a national ‘Garbage Crisis’ was front-page news. By then, the term ‘garbology’ had been coined and I was identified by TV ‘supers’ as a ‘garbologist’. I was surprised, as you might expect, to receive mail saying, ‘Why don't you tell people what you really are – an “archaeologist”?’ At that point I felt as if I were back in the fold.
If Harrison wants to give the archaeological study of contemporary society a new vision, I believe that he should focus not on just a name change, but on ‘intervention’ to communicate with contemporary society. The Garbage Project is one of the longest-running projects in social science (1973–2005) and has significantly ‘intervened’ in US culture. I have testified before two US Senate committees about the nature of resource waste in household refuse and how US landfills could be better designed to protect nearby residents. I have also testified before 13 state legislative committees and 15 local city councils and committees.
In addition, the Garbage Project has made a point of not receiving funding from normal archaeological funding sources, so as not to usurp monies available for traditional archaeology, restoration and preservation. Given the diversity of funding sources that we worked with, we do not have the extensive list of publications in archaeological media I would like. On the other hand, we have reached out in a wide variety of publications which are not often read by archaeologists. We have used every medium we could to relate householders to their discards so they could decide for themselves what they wanted to perpetuate and what they wanted to change.
Our attempts to reach a wide variety of audiences in US publications included the popular Archaeology magazine (Rathje 1974); American behavioral scientist (Rathje 1984); the Atlantic monthly (Rathje 1989); National geographic (Rathje 1991); Rubbish! The archaeology of garbage (Rathje and Murphy 1992); and the Encyclopaedia Britannica yearbook of science and the future – 1997 (Rathje 1996). These publications were meant to intervene directly in Anglo-American scientific and popular culture and behaviour without a single apology for using archaeological methods to reveal untold relationships between material, behavioural and mental realities. In addition, the Garbage Project published its methods and results in scientific journals and proceedings in a wide variety of disciplines.
We first concentrated on food waste (see Rathje 1974; Harrison, Rathje and Hughes 1975; Rathje and Harrison 1978; Rathje and Ho 1987), because it was so obvious in garbage – a whole head of lettuce, half a loaf of bread, half a steak. Yet the vast majority of householders interviewed by the US Department of Agriculture denied discarding or wasting food. What we found was that households threw out 15 to 20 per cent or more of what they bought (based on the weight or volume printed on original containers and not adding in any ‘garbage-disposal’ effect). The waste factor was so large that US food waste could feed Canada. ‘Abject’ food waste should be brought to the attention of everyone who prepares or eats food.
Our exposure to the public through myriad media outlets was not difficult to achieve.Footnote 3 Just about any place an archaeologist works has a PR unit or person. Ours, at the University of Arizona (UA), became aware of our modern garbage research. How, I don't know. A reporter from Psychology today, who was at the UA on another story, was informed and wrote a short piece for the May 1974 issue. From that publication on, neither the UA PR unit nor I ever made any ‘cold’ or any other kind of call to a media source; we just returned calls. Any archaeology of our contemporary society is a fascinating ‘story’ because archaeology is popularly perceived as a study of the past; the turnabout of studying ourselves the way archaeologists study the ancients is not only fair, but also fascinating, play. If the results have significance to the public and their legacy to the future, they take on newsworthy implications that reporters drool over.
Finally, as I mentioned, I like Harrison's arguments as the Garbage Project has tried to put them into practice for 32 years. I just want results that justify and utilize archaeological techniques to ‘intervene’ in a positive way in contemporary society. However, that level of activism is not only a potential future for archaeology in and of the present, it is part of its actual past.
