You Are What You Throw Away: The Anthropology of Garbage

This entry was posted by owl and bear on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 8:50 pm.

The Economist looks at humanity’s legacy of trash.

Waste can be a revelation. Excavations of old rubbish tips (or middens, as archaeologists call them) provide much of our knowledge of everyday life in the past. Many ancient civilisations piled up mountains of garbage. At a spot in America called Pope’s Creek, on the shores of the Potomac river, oyster shells discarded by the pre-Columbian inhabitants cover an area of 30 acres (12 hectares) to an average depth of ten feet. Enormous shell middens can be found all over the world, wherever ancient migrants came across handy oyster and mussel beds.

Archaeologists have found papyruses inscribed with parts of lost plays by Sophocles and Euripides in a Greco-Roman rubbish tip in Egypt. The same site, near the ancient town of Oxyrhynchus, yielded a wealth of 2,000-year-old invoices, receipts, tax returns and other documents.

[The Economist]