estimates of the refuse that goes to MSW (municipal solid waste, or standard community refuse) landfills. Nevertheless, C/D accounted for 20 percent or more of excavated refuse by volume and was the second-largest category of discarded materials recovered by the Garbage Project from MSW landfills.

The largest category occupying MSW landfill space was paper. This was true for refuse buried in the 1980s as well as for refuse dating as far back as the 1950s, because in most landfills, paper seemed to biodegrade very slowly. As a result, by volume, nearly half of all of the refuse excavated by the Garbage Project consisted of newspapers, magazines, packaging paper, and nonpackaging paper such as computer printouts and phonebooks.

Not long after the Garbage Project’s first reports following its landfill digs, the energy directed at passing bans was largely redirected toward curbside recycling. A number of communities began placing emphasis on reuse and recycling programs for C/D, and paper recycling promotions started stressing the need to keep paper out of landfills because it did not biodegrade as quickly as most people had once hoped. An association of state attorneys general determined from dig data that several products that claimed to be “biodegradable,” including some brands of disposable diapers and plastic garbage bags, did not biodegrade in landfills, and the false advertising of these products was eradicated. All of this was evidence that some crucial views of garbage held by policy planners, the media, and the public had changed—and that garbology had been validated as a new kind of archaeology, one that could make an immediate public contribution.

The Rationale for Garbage Archaeology

For as long as there have been archaeologists there have been jokes, cartoons, and stories that guess what it would be like for an archaeologist to dig through our own refuse (Macaulay 1979). Although often humorous, such speculations are, in fact, based on a serious rationale: if archaeologists can learn important information about extinct societies from patterns in ancient garbage, then archaeologists should be able to learn important information about contemporary societies from patterns in fresh garbage. The pieces of pottery, broken stone tools, and cut animal bones that traditional archaeologists dig out of old refuse middens provide a surprisingly detailed view of past ways of life, just as all the precisely labeled packages, food debris, and discarded clothing and batteries in modern middens reveal the intimate details of our lives today.

During the summer of 1921, the great American archaeologist alfred v. kidder seemed to understand this fact when he took the trouble to observe the artifacts that were coming out of a trench being cut for a sewer line through a “fresh” garbage dump in Andover, Massachusetts. From at least this point on, archaeologists have studied contemporary urban refuse informally and sporadically as class exercises and methodological experiments. A variety of subspecialties—ethnoarchaeology, historic sites archaeology, industrial archaeology, and experimental archaeology—have been edging ever closer to analyzing what citizens of the industrialized world discarded last year, last month, and even yesterday. In fact, all archaeologists are aware that it is inevitable that contemporary rubbish will be studied by traditional archaeologists in the same manner they now study the middens of ancient Troy and Tikal—that is, in a hundred or so years from now.

If there are useful things to learn from an archaeological study of our garbage—things that can enrich human lives and minimize the undesirable environmental consequences of the industrialized world—why wait until we (and I literally mean you and I)are all dead and buried to find them out? At least, that is what a group of students and I thought when we founded the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona in the spring of 1973. Today, all of us who are a part of the project, including codirector Wilson Hughes who was one of the founding students, are still thinking along these same lines (Rathje 1996).

After nearly two and a half decades of sorting, recording, and interpreting MSW, garbology, or the archaeological study of contemporary urban refuse, has become a recognizable subspecialty within archaeology and other behavioral