Residential Urban Refuse

Refuse Archaeology

Residential trash began to pile up in conjunction with the acquisition of excess. The advent of excess food occurred about 10,000–12,000 years ago throughout most of the world, during what is commonly known as the agricultural revolution. This is known because new forms of storage containers, such as ceramic vats, appear at about this time in history.

People living in this era became more sedentary, and social complexity grew increasingly intricate. Residences became closer together in general. Most scholars agree that an evolution of refuse indicates social complexity and density of populations: who was using what and where.

Urban residential garbage intrigues archaeologists and anthropologists. Household-level, as opposed to municipal- or regional-level refuse repositories, provide empirical information about the day-to-day behavior of families and other people who live in or frequently visit a given house. From such refuse, archaeologists glean data regarding factors about the composition of individual households, including the number of household members, as indicated by the relative quantity of garbage. An archaeologist can determine with some certainty whether they are male or female, as indicated by the gendered material culture in the family repository. The researcher can often determine the family's level of status or income, as indicated by the quantity and type of disposed of objects, as well as the family members’ ages and taste preferences. The archaeologist can then compare these individual households’ compositions to the rest of the settlement.

Further, the archaeologist can learn about the variability of consumption and discard behavior and measure the degree to which these change over time. The garbage can indicate if the family was throwing away more or fewer objects from one year to the next—if it was a time of scarcity or plenty in the home. Household trash can reflect change in communities, including growth, movement, and structural differentiation, such as a change in the composition of the household.

Urban residential refuse is a valuable source of data for archaeologists studying both the past and the present. Using only slightly different methods to analyze premodern or modern trash, archaeologists can provide answers to these same sorts of inquiries about the present. What people say they do, and their actual behaviors, often diverge. This applies both to the quantity and type of material culture people consume, use, and discard and to the ways they discard trash. People often under-report taboo or socially unacceptable behaviors in their homes, and evidence for such practices often manifests in the garbage. In the trash, one can find medicine bottles, non-nutritive food, cigarette packages, and other paraphernalia that family members would rather keep secret. For this reason (in addition to sanitation reasons), people often close their trash containers, keeping the contents invisible to the archaeologist or other inquisitive investigator. Maybe that is why residential urban refuse is so fascinating: its very untouchable nature reveals the truth of dirty little secrets.

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