Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things

By Sarah Newman

Explores the concept of waste from fresh historical, cultural, and geographical perspectives.
 
Garbage is often assumed to be an inevitable part and problem of human existence. But when did people actually come to think of things as “trash”—as becoming worthless over time or through use, as having an end?
 
Unmaking Waste tackles these questions through a long-term, cross-cultural approach. Drawing on archaeological finds, historical documents, and ethnographic observations to examine Europe, the United States, and Central America from prehistory to the present, Sarah Newman traces how different ideas about waste took shape in different times and places. Newman examines what people consider to be “waste” and how they interact with it, as well as what happens when different perceptions of trash come into conflict. Conceptions of waste have shaped forms of reuse and renewal in ancient Mesoamerica, early modern ideas of civility and forced religious conversion in New Spain, and even the modern discipline of archaeology. Newman argues that centuries of assumptions imposed on other places, times, and peoples need to be rethought. This book is not only a broad reconsideration of waste; it is also a call for new forms of archaeology that do not take garbage for granted. Unmaking Waste reveals that waste is not—and never has been—an obvious or universal concept.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9780226826387

Book preview

Cover Page for Unmaking Waste

Unmaking Waste

Unmaking Waste

New Histories of Old Things

SARAH NEWMAN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2023 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2023

Printed in the United States of America

32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82637-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82639-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82638-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226826387.001.0001

Pablo Neruda, Oda a las cosas rotas, Navegaciones y regresos. © Pablo Neruda, 1959; and Fundación Pablo Neruda. English translation by Sarah Newman.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Newman, Sarah (Anthropologist), author.

Title: Unmaking waste : new histories of old things / Sarah Newman.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022044963 | ISBN 9780226826370 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226826394 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226826387 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Refuse and refuse disposal—Central America—History. | Refuse and refuse disposal—Mexico—History. | Social Archaeology—Central America. | Social Archaeology—Mexico. | Indians of Mexico—Material culture—History. | Indians of Central America—Material culture—History. | Indians of Mexico—Social life and customs. | Indians of Central America—Social life and customs. | Indians—First contact with other peoples | Mayas—Antiquities.

Classification: LCC TD789.L29 N49 2023 | DDC 363.72/80972—dc23/eng/20221026

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044963

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

INTRODUCTION: A Fortress of Indestructible Leftovers

1  Throwaway Living

2  Archaeologies of Garbage

3  Cleanliness and Godliness

4  Dirty Work

5  Things Left Behind

6  Anamorphic Archaeology

CONCLUSION: A Weakness in Our Imaginations?

Gallery

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

0.1  Map of Mesoamerica

0.2  Map of places mentioned in the text

3.1  Codex-style Classic-period Maya vase

4.1  Dumps in Mexico City, ca. 1790

5.1  Classification of Mayan languages

5.2  Glyph for ta’jol (buzzard)

5.3  Glyph for KAB (earth)

5.4  Ancestors on the sarcophagus of the king of Palenque

5.5  Bean plants and flowers, from the Madrid Codex

5.6  Glyph for mis (to sweep)

5.7  Burning offerings in bowls

5.8  Glyph for EL (to burn)

5.9  The king of Yaxchilán and his vassal drilling new fire

5.10  A pair of gods drilling new fire, from the Madrid Codex

5.11a  Scattering rites, from La Pasadita Lintel 2

5.11b  Planting maize seeds, from the Madrid Codex

5.12  The Moche Revolt of the Objects

5.13  The glyphic phrase u-WAY-HA’B (the sealed chamber / sleeping room of the year)

6.1  Excavation profiles from the palace at El Zotz

Plates

1  Michael, Jason, Annie, and Olivia

2  Throwaway Living

3  The Quema del diablo

4  Tlazolteotl/Tlaelcuani, from the Florentine Codex

5  Tlazolteotl/Tlaelcuani, from the Codex Telleriano-Remensis

6  Bloodletting priest, from the Codex Telleriano-Remensis

7  Ixnextli, from the Codex Telleriano-Remensis

8  Codex-style Classic-period Maya vases

9  Fertilizing soil with excrement, from the Florentine Codex

10  Gods carrying brooms, from the Madrid Codex

11  The Sweeping (Tlachpaniztli), from the Florentine Codex

12  Sweeping priest, from the Codex Mendoza

13  Breaking and discarding household items, from the Florentine Codex

14  Anamorphosis by Domenico Piola

15  Piola’s corrected anamorphic image

16  The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger

17  Artifacts from the palace at El Zotz in situ

18  Reconstructed vessels from the palace at El Zotz

19  Bone artifacts from the palace at El Zotz

20  Reworked pottery sherds from the palace at El Zotz

21  Worked and unworked fragments of the same vessel from the palace at El Zotz

22  Weathering on ceramic vessels from the palace at El Zotz

23  Rodent gnawing and weathering patterns on a bone spindle whorl fragment from the palace at El Zotz

24  Burning patterns on a worked bone artifact from the palace at El Zotz

25  Heat-exposed chert flakes from the palace at El Zotz

26  Burning patterns on reconstructed ceramics from the palace at El Zotz

27  Charred organic materials within a vessel from the palace at El Zotz

28  Altars in Momostenango

29  Accumulations of potsherds at Momostenango’s shrines

INTRODUCTION

A Fortress of Indestructible Leftovers

In Italo Calvino’s fictional travelogue, Invisible Cities (originally published in Italian in 1972), Marco Polo regales an aging Kublai Khan with stories of the cities he has seen on his journeys across the khan’s vast empire.¹ In Leonia, the city that refashions itself every day, nothing is used more than once. Everything is disposable. Each morning, fresh plastic bags, filled with the remains of yesterday’s Leonia, line the sidewalks, awaiting garbage trucks. Newspapers, containers, and wrappings mingle with slightly squeezed toothpaste tubes, barely read encyclopedias, pianos, and porcelain dinner services. The Leonians dress themselves in brand-new clothes every day and take unopened tins from their refrigerators at each meal. As Calvino writes:

You begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday’s existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.²

Indeed, hardly anyone in Leonia thinks about where rubbish goes. The street cleaners, of course, know: as the city creates ever-newer products, with ever-newer materials, they pile the refuse into a fortress of indestructible leftovers around Leonia. Leonia’s high-quality rubbish becomes a chain of stratified mountains of trash, increasingly resisting time, the elements, fermentations, combustions.³

The result is that the more Leonia tries to discard things, the more they accumulate. The real Leonia becomes yesterday’s sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and all of its days and years and decades.⁴ In the end, a single tin can or old tire tips the balance and the city is submerged in the avalanche of its own past. The bulldozers of other cities are waiting at the ready. They simply flatten the terrain that was once Leonia, making room to push their own street cleaners farther out.

Today, Calvino’s Leonia seems like an allegory of profligate consumerism that is almost too obvious. Yet for Calvino, who had been born in Cuba and had grown up in rural Italy during the 1930s and was a former member of the Italian resistance movement and the Communist Party, midcentury United States consumer culture was both novel and shocking. In one of his personal letters, Calvino described the United States as a different world, as far from Europe and our problems as the Moon. . . . A good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno.⁵ Calvino’s Leonia reflects an eminently modern, capitalist mindset and a very specific historical moment: America’s new waste regime.⁶ Waste is understood not only as unintentional, but also as unchanging once it is thrown away—the very literal mounting problem of Leonia.

An idea of trash as simultaneously looming yet overlooked remains pervasive. This familiar narrative, a story steeped in ideas of moral and ecological crisis, assumes that the production of waste is inevitable and that its existence is universally corrupting of both culture and nature.⁷ In fact, waste has become such an expected fact of life that the literary critic Patricia Smith Yaeger once argued that for twenty-first-century artists, trash is the modern equivalent to nature for the Romantics of the late eighteenth-nineteenth centuries. The binary trash/culture, Smith wrote, has become more ethically charged and aesthetically interesting than the binary nature/culture. In a world where nature is dominated, polluted, pocketed, eco-touristed, warming, melting, bleaching, dissipating, and fleeing toward the poles—detritus is both its curse and its alternative.⁸

But waste is neither universal nor self-evident. Rather, it has a history, much like other supposedly universal and ahistorical domains of human existence, such as sexuality,⁹ olfaction,¹⁰ or religion.¹¹ Contemporary practices of waste making are culturally (not to mention historically and geographically) specific, molded by the forces of capitalism, industrialism, consumerism, and, more recently, environmentalism. Put simply, people in different times and places have interacted differently with things, including those they deem no longer useful or wanted. The concept of waste encapsulated in Calvino’s description of Leonia is widespread and of urgent concern in much of the world today, but it is bound up with moral and economic norms regarding what constitutes rubbish, who is responsible for it, and how it should be discarded.

Dedicated histories of waste and waste management, however, are few and limited. They focus almost exclusively on the United States and Europe and follow remarkably similar trajectories, marking the late eighteenth century as the start of waste management and everything that came before as antiquity.¹² This book shifts the usual starting point for thinking about waste both geographically and temporally, examining its changing nature in Mesoamerica, from pre-Columbian times through the nineteenth century CE. Broadly, I ask when, where, and why—in what contexts and under what conditions—people came to think of objects as having an end, as reaching a point where they become obsolete and worthless. I also ask what happens when there is disagreement about what constitutes waste, both synchronically (in emerging colonial systems of waste management) and diachronically (between the people who deposited or discarded artifacts in the past and the archaeologists who recover them in the present). A history of waste in Mesoamerica looks very different—and for those who are most likely to read this book, much less familiar—than a history of waste in contemporary, urban North America or Europe.

Shifting History

Waste and ways of making it are neither natural nor inevitable. As the well-known adage puts it, One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously exposed and explored this variability half a century ago. Douglas argued that dirt requires two conditions, both a set of ordered conventions and a contravention of that order: where there is dirt there is system.¹³ For Douglas, the unwanted—dirt, pollution, trash, waste, etc.—violated some ideal sense of the way things ought to be. By identifying and rejecting inappropriate elements, people engage in a kind of systematic ordering that helps them conceptualize the world and structure their appropriate place within it.¹⁴ Shoes are not dirty in themselves, she wrote, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing.¹⁵

Histories of waste, then, are histories of experience. They reveal not only how particular ideas and meanings are created and learned, but also how they change. Again, such histories traditionally have been written from a narrow perspective, centered almost exclusively on Europe and the United States. As the essayist Pankaj Mishra has argued, however, this myopic focus is a misleading vantage point:

From a Western standpoint, the influence of the West can seem both inevitable and necessary, requiring no thorough historical auditing. Europeans and Americans customarily see their countries and cultures as the source of modernity and are confirmed in their assumptions by the extraordinary spectacle of their culture’s universal diffusion. . . . But there was a time when the West merely denoted a geographical region, and other peoples unselfconsciously assumed a universal order centered in their values.¹⁶

Intentionally disorienting this point of view offers an opportunity to scrutinize dominant narratives and to challenge them. Modern assumptions made about waste—not only what is included under the term, but also that such a concept is universal—impose a perspective on the past and the present that is inseparable from a particular historical trajectory. Uncritically extending that understanding to other times and places masks alternative insights, interpretations, meanings, and motivations, some of which may be revealed in moving beyond familiar frameworks. For example, rather than asking what else might be done to or with waste (e.g., incinerating, recycling, composting), what if the very concept of waste itself were questioned?

When I discuss modern understandings of waste, I mean those that hold true as a result of the predominant processes of consumption and disposal in the global North, or those areas and/or nations characterized by a particular mode of capitalist lifestyles and development, as defined by the sociologist David Pellow.¹⁷ Those ideas are far from universal and came into being at different points in time, in different contexts, with slightly different formulations (see chapters 1 and 2).¹⁸ Today, however, they are probably shared by many of the readers interested in this book. Extending those ideas to other times and places is not only anachronistic and ethnocentric, but also actively limits our capacity for understanding trash and discard in other contexts. The historian Brent Nongbri has eloquently made similar arguments with respect to the idea of religion in antiquity. Although the concept of religion may be analytically useful to modern scholars, it did not exist in the ancient world. Waste could just as easily be substituted for religion in Nongbri’s critique:

If we want to go on talking about ancient Mesopotamian religion, ancient Greek religion, or any other ancient religion, we should always bear in mind that we are talking about something modern when we do so. We are not naming something any ancient person would recognize. . . . Religion is a modern category; it may be able to shed light on some aspects of the ancient world when applied in certain strategic ways, but we have to be honest about the category’s origins and not pretend that it somehow organically and magically arises from our sources. If we fail to make this reflexive move, we turn our ancient sources into well-polished mirrors that show us only ourselves and our own institutions.¹⁹

Most scholars today do not imagine the ways people in the past discarded things to have been the same as in today’s capitalist cultures of planned obsolescence. But neither do they consider whether or to what extent a basic view of the world in which objects lose value over time and through use is applicable to other times and places. This book is primarily aimed at those scholars—archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, art historians, and other specialists (professional or otherwise) who produce and consume knowledge about the human past. It is also aimed, however, at Calvino’s Leonians, all of us who are building fortresses of indestructible leftovers and facing a future among their ruins. Taking garbage for granted limits not only our understanding of the past, but also the possibility for changing our relationship to trash in the present and future.

There is much overlap among those intended audiences. The intellectual historian Peter Miller uses the phrase past-loving creatures to describe anyone who employs objects as historical evidence. Past-loving creatures is a more inclusive category than historian, archaeologist, or even antiquarian. They are not only university-based scholars, but also museum curators, conservators, local folklorists, artists inspired by the past to create new vision, writers of historical fiction, reenactors, and the large and late-born clan of public historians.²⁰ The archaeologist Felipe Rojas prefers the expansive term archaeophilia, emphasizing the ubiquitous urge to explore and explain the past by identifying, interpreting, and manipulating things that are (or are imagined to be) old over specific practices that make use of objects to explore human history.²¹ Past-loving creatures and archaeophiles are united by a backward-looking curiosity, a desire to know the past by systematically considering its traces in the present.

Whether or not we are past-loving creatures or archaeophiles, however, we are the inheritors of a ruined planet. Inexorably, then, we are past-living creatures. We share a forward-looking, unsystematic anxiety about the proliferation of material remains of the present as the lingering traces they will become in the future. People have always been aware of traces of the past in their present and of the possibility of manipulating or misinterpreting the past in later times.²² Past-living, however, requires a peculiar understanding of those material traces as waste—the unwanted, inevitable, and lasting residues of everyday life. Past-living assumes that people don’t think about the trash we make, even though that trash will likely be our most durable legacy.

Past-living creatures’ assumptions about waste are historically and culturally contingent. They arise out of specific confluences of people, events, technologies, and materials. Yet those contemporary understandings are easily imagined as timeless and universal, perhaps simply because other ways of relating to material remains have largely disappeared. The chapters that follow chronicle when, where, and why those ideas took shape, illuminate how they influence our knowledge about other times and places (past, present, and future), and detail some of the alternatives to them that have and can exist.

Place, Time, and People

The primary geographical scope of this book is broad. As much as it can be considered a spatial unit, Mesoamerica extends roughly from central Mexico to northern Costa Rica, from the Caribbean to the Pacific (figures 0.1, 0.2). Mesoamerica was defined as a culture area in 1943 by Paul Kirchhoff, based on its geographic limits, ethnic composition, and cultural characteristics at the time of Conquest.²³ As the archaeologist Rosemary Joyce has explained, however, the term Mesoamerica is more akin to the notion of Western civilization than a regional moniker like Central America.²⁴ That is, although Mesoamerica has a geographical referent, it is also a cultural area defined by shared values, practices, and institutions, rather than physical or political boundaries. Those cultural traditions have grown out of a long history of intensive social interaction among peoples with varying languages, systems of governance, religions, and ecological settings.

FIGURE 0.1 A map showing the approximate geographical limits of Mesoamerica. Drawn by Omar Andrés Alcover Firpi.

Originally, elements such as agricultural systems or architectural structures, religious or philosophical concepts (e.g., calendrical systems), linguistic features (e.g., a vigesimal counting system, shared metaphors), and specific activities (e.g., the ball game, autosacrifice) were understood to have diffused across the region, producing a kind of shared cultural ground. Today, scholars emphasize the social and material processes responsible for such similarities, rather than lists of essential traits. Common traditions are understood as the result of sustained and extensive networks of exchange, across which materials, objects, words, ideas, and information could be adopted and adapted. This is, of course, not to say that there were no tangible and intangible differences or that context is not important, only that specific forms of agricultural economies, social differentiation, understandings of the natural and supernatural world, and material styles were widely understood and shared.

Following others, I deliberately employ this twentieth-century neologism.²⁵ Using Mesoamerica as a spatiotemporal framework emphasizes pre-European exchanges and intellectual traditions over modern nationalist histories and boundaries in ways that can interconnect and illuminate practices and images that might otherwise appear insignificant, isolated, incomprehensible.²⁶ The sources of information I draw on throughout this book are thus temporally and spatially diverse. They include colonial-period dictionaries of Indigenous languages, pictorial manuscripts, and municipal records; modern ethnographic studies; and my own and others’ archaeological fieldwork and analyses, all ranging from the Guatemalan highlands to Central Mexico. The combination of these different forms of evidence does not imply a Mayan essence transcending history,²⁷ nor should it be understood as a methodology that seeks (or claims) to uncover the past. Rather, this book offers a materially grounded anthropological approach to the long-term, changing relationships between humans and the worlds they inhabit and create.

Mesoamerica offers an important vantage point to write a real and specific alternative to traditional histories of waste. There is an abundance and variety of available evidence—archaeological, historical, and ethnographic—that can be combined to generate fine-grained detail. Archaeologists working in Mesoamerica have engaged in far-reaching comparisons for nearly a century, making it relatively easy to follow connections and changes among widespread practices. Moreover, some ancient Mesoamericans communicated ideas about their world, eloquently and often, in hieroglyphic texts, pictorial documents, and complex iconographic systems. Ethnographic undertakings from the sixteenth century onward have described languages, customs, social organization, beliefs and rituals, economies, and arts. Combining the contributions of archaeologists, epigraphists, ethnologists, linguists, and ethnohistorians offers a means of exploring ancient ideas about discard, disposal, and deposition both materially and conceptually.

FIGURE 0.2 A map highlighting key places (ancient and modern) mentioned in the text. Drawn by Omar Andrés Alcover Firpi.

Those multiple lines of evidence highlight a notion of waste with attendant ideas and associated practices that are markedly different from the contemporary understanding I have pointed to above. Some scholars of Mesoamerica have argued that Indigenous world views are so radically different from Western scientific classifying, subdividing, and categorizing that the very processes used to study them thwart any possibility for understanding them.²⁸ I am more optimistic. Put simply, I hope that explorations into ancient and colonial Mesoamerican conceptions of waste encourage a rethinking of certain basic assumptions, from the role of objects often overlooked to the alleged universality of conceptual categories, as well as a reconsideration of the (broadly) archaeological approaches that rely on those assumptions.

Words for Waste

Even my optimistic perspective, however, acknowledges the impossibility of inquiring into the topic of waste from within a neutral framework. Intentionally or not, when we bring inherited vocabularies to new contexts, they come with baggage. Throughout this book, I use a variety of English terms like garbage, refuse, rubbish, waste, and trash interchangeably. This is not because they all refer to the same thing—even if, in general usage and some dictionary definitions, they do—or because the differences among them are insignificant. They all have distinct meanings and histories. Perhaps the most common, trash, enters the English language sometime during the sixteenth century, seemingly borrowed from a Scandinavian source, perhaps Icelandik’s tros, rubbish, fallen leaves and twigs, Norwegian’s trask, lumber, twigs, sprigs, or Swedish’s trasa, rags, tatters.²⁹ For centuries, it referred primarily to things broken, snapped, lopped off, or torn for use—twigs, splinters, straw, rags, and the like. H. de B. Parsons, in his 1906 Disposal of Municipal Refuse, appears to be the first to apply trash to domestic refuse, differentiating between animal and vegetable matter as garbage and ashes, sewage, and rubbish as household trash. For Parsons, the offensive odor of rotting meat, fish heads, and banana peels, in addition to their high water content and their commercial value as hog feed, fertilizer, and marketable grease, distinguished garbage from other kinds of refuse (even though many of the same qualities can be said of sewage).³⁰ Many later writers on the subject largely follow this model, using garbage for food waste and rubbish, trash, or refuse for mixed waste.³¹

The vocabulary available for discussing waste has expanded rapidly since Parsons’s work. Emerging terms simultaneously incorporate new forms and materials and provide a way to express concern over their potential impacts, benefits, and risks, from dregs and debitage to e-waste, biodegradable, and radioactive. Moreover, words and the categories they designate express specific forms of action and ethics: one can be the kind of person who composts, the kind who recycles, or the kind who litters. Obviously, then, we cannot assume that equivalents or even close correlates to English words—or the ideas they invoke—exist in other times or places. Words are far from neutral analytical tools. Applying them out of context forces both observations and the conclusions drawn from them into an a priori framework for describing reality that a particular language makes available.³² Just a few examples: words that characterize much of our lives today, from global warming to blog, did not exist even a quarter of a century ago; learn once meant its apparent antonym (teach; cf. German lehren)³³; and we no longer refer to shrewd, unprincipled politicians as snollygosters, even though we still suffer them.³⁴

These issues of translation arise not just in equating words, but in comparing their referents as well. As the historian of science G. E. R. Lloyd argues, Whether in ethnography or ancient texts, we may need to revise our own categories and understandings, quite substantially perhaps. . . . It cannot be assumed that our existing concepts will be adequate, and to do so is to miss the opportunities for learning that ethnography and the study of ancient societies both present.³⁵ In contemporary usage, what do we mean by trash? Food wrappers littering the side of the road? Plastic bags swirling in the ocean? A kitchen garbage receptacle (a can or an InSinkErator?)? An overflowing landfill? And what about other associations, not involving objects? People (white trash)? Insults (trash-talk)? States of intoxication (trashed)?

This is not a book about Mesoamerican waste (or Mesoamerican trash, Mesoamerican garbage, etc.). One of my principal aims is to show that modern ideas about such concepts are historically shallow and culturally specific, which means that trying to find their correlates (whether in linguistic terms or archaeological artifacts) would be counterproductive. Other options—neologisms or constant quotation marks—are clunky and vague, if not misleading. Where material distinctions are important, I make them as clearly as possible; human excrement, for example, is not susceptible to great semantic slippage.

Outline of the Book

This book aims to dissect the very idea of waste, to peel away and analyze accumulated layers of materials and meanings while also attempting to understand how and when they developed. I begin by exploring familiar, widespread ideas—and illusions—about waste in the present and proximate Euro-American past before shifting to the more muddled matrix of New Spain’s colonies during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Finally, the most temporally and geographically specific analysis examines ancient Mesoamerican understandings of waste that are radically different from those examined at the start. Those understandings demand a reconsideration of centuries of assumptions imposed on other places, times, and peoples. Although trash is often considered an inevitable fact of human existence, the ways it is imagined, produced, or managed are constantly being (re)defined. This flux raises the question of how and if we can apply our own often inconsistent notions of rubbish to distant contexts. The chapters that follow attempt to recontextualize refuse, to investigate and incorporate understandings of waste and value from other times and places on equal footing with Euro-American traditions, and, by doing so, to broaden the interpretive possibilities of the kinds of archaeological thinking employed by today’s past-loving and past-living creatures.

The first chapter, Throwaway Living, examines the problem of defining waste by chronicling the development of currently dominant understandings of the concept. I outline pivotal moments in Western constructions of waste, highlighting four key changes in what it was and what it meant. In tandem with broader social changes, waste shifted from an unregulated aesthetic nuisance to a source of contagion, from a public health problem to a technological challenge, and from a by-product of progress to an environmental pollutant. Tracing that trajectory reveals the very idea of waste to be a contingent concept rather than a stable human universal. It also shows contemporary practices of waste making to be culturally, historically, and geographically specific.

The practices of waste management arising from that history not only inculcate the ways in which people interact with their refuse, but also make those interactions seem natural and self-evident. In homes equipped with both toilets and trash cans, decisions about which waste goes where and how long it is allowed to remain inside the house are almost unconsciously made. Swift reactions to public littering, CURB YOUR DOG signs, and recycling campaigns are framed and experienced in moral terms, implying that there are universal, ethically right and wrong ways to waste. Waste-management systems depend on these kinds of specific, habitual behaviors in order to be effective.

The second chapter, Archaeologies of Garbage, shows how those commonplace, contemporary understandings about what waste is and what it means—the ideas and behaviors detailed in chapter 1—directly impact what we know (or think we know) about more distant times and places. Specifically, chapter 2 traces the connections between key changes in Euro-American perceptions of waste and the ways archaeologists have envisioned the past through its remains since the advent of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. I emphasize how cultural concepts of trash in the present (whenever that present moment may be) inform what is considered possible for trash in the past, often reifying historically and geographically situated notions of waste as if they were transtemporal, universal, and even inevitable. Anachronistically extending those ethnocentric concepts to the past actively limits the possibilities of knowing about it. Chapter 2 thus lays out the stakes of the book, while also serving as a key turning point: a transition between the Western context it shares with chapter 1 and the Mesoamerican focus of chapters 3 through 6, between the present and the past, and, for most readers, between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

The third chapter, Cleanliness and Godliness, highlights one of many alternatives to the trajectory of Western ideas examined in chapters 1 and 2 by asking what happened when Indigenous perspectives on human and material wastes came into contact with those of Spaniards in colonial Mesoamerica. Early modern European ideals of civility and Christian understandings of good and bad, expressed metaphorically in terms of cleanliness and filth, both transformed and were transformed by traditional Mesoamerican interactions with bodily and material wastes. For both Spaniards and Indigenous Mesoamericans, violent colonial encounters created new forms of wasting.

Chapter 4, Dirty Work, shows how the conceptual clashes detailed in chapter 3 played out in practice. As new colonial ideas about waste took shape within new colonial cities, concerns over trash as both physically and morally unclean crosscut social and spatial boundaries and waste became one of many arenas in which colonizers exercised control and established hierarchies. Waste management systems marginalized Indigenous inhabitants, literally forcing them into constant proximity with materials and spaces that had recently been defined as sources of contamination. That association with physical filth marked them as morally impure, positioning native Mesoamerican peoples and practices as responsible for crime, failures of politics and development, and public health scares. Taken together, chapters 3 and 4 stress the complex layering of moments of coincidence and points of conflict that may be involved in seemingly mundane activities. Those contested meanings are easily overlooked when modern, Western models are imposed on the Mesoamerican past.

The fifth chapter, Things Left Behind, continues further back in time, highlighting understandings of discard and disposal in ancient Mesoamerica. I show how exploring Indigenous concepts and semantic categories in Mayan languages provides insight into different conceptions of waste and forms of deposition. Rather than an irreflexive and undesired by-product, refuse in Mesoamerica was understood to be entwined with human action and intent, creating an ambivalent category with powerful potential for reuse and remembrance. Discard and disposal could simultaneously be productive, ritual processes and daily, necessary work. Chapter 5 makes plain how modern notions of trash not only limit our ability to accurately capture ancient practices, but also actively mask the complex flow of material objects from and through cultural systems to the archaeological record.

In light of those ongoing interactions, chapter 6, Anamorphic Archaeology, offers a new way of approaching archaeological assemblages from the past in the present; indeed, of rethinking the endeavor of archaeological inquiry more broadly. The methodological attention devoted to individual artifact histories in chapter 6 embraces the multiple physical and conceptual lives of objects examined in chapter 5. Centering examples from Mesoamerican archaeology, history, and ethnography, I reposition ancient objects that have long been simply assumed to be ancient trash—broken pots, bone fragments, worn-out tools, crafting debris—as key components in many pre-Columbian rituals, particularly calendrical ceremonies of renewal undertaken to celebrate and ensure the continuation of time and the cosmos. In order to facilitate thinking about the kind of multitemporality implied by those lives and afterlives, I propose an analogy. Mirror anamorphic art—in which a distorted projection is transformed into a recognizable image by a reflective surface—helps me explain how I understand the relationships among material traces, interpretations, and interpreters of the past. The analogy not only incorporates the multiple and overlapping frameworks that shape contemporary visions of the past, but also enables me to suggest how archaeological objects and assemblages can exist in multiple categories simultaneously and intelligibly. Anamorphic archaeology thus serves as a kind of recursive method—one that calls on the theoretical and methodological tools of the discipline to explore its own assumptions and preconceptions.

In a short conclusion, A Weakness in Our Imaginations?, I discuss the implications of this book not only beyond Mesoamerica, but also beyond history and archaeology. Acknowledging waste as a conceptual category and social construction—one that may not remain stable over temporal or geographical distances—presents an opportunity to conceive and construct anew. Currently dominant moral and environmental discourses surrounding refuse, including mantras like Reduce, reuse, recycle, are one way of understanding our relationship to material waste; but, as this book details, they are just that—a single approach. As much as they reframe our perceptions and practices, they also constrain them. Our energies are focused on what to do with our garbage, not how to think (about) it.

Calvino’s seemingly prophetic message is foreboding. It is also clear. Leonia’s eventual undoing is rooted in its ways of doing: the continual production and discard of wastes without value. The Mesoamerican practices highlighted in this book engage with a world in a constant state of flux, transformations that could be attended and even controlled by human interventions. And while they do not provide a model of environmental stewardship based on a notion of an ecological Indian,³⁶ they do offer a counterpoint to an understanding of things as discrete nominal entities with singular functions, intended uses, and even existences. What new possibilities might arise if we were to attend to some of those past perspectives in the present, perhaps even disposing of the notion of waste altogether?

1

Throwaway Living

For a project called 7 Days of Garbage, the photographer Gregg Segal asked his family, friends, and neighbors to save a week’s worth of their trash and recyclables, then lie down and be photographed among them. The artist arranged his subjects—both the people and their waste—among scenes of water, forest, snow, and sand, all of which he created in his backyard in Altadena, California (e.g., plate 1). According to Segal, the photographs are intended to make trash impossible to ignore, to show that no environment is left untouched by the pervasiveness of garbage, and to elucidate a need for change in practices of consumption and disposal.¹

Although 7 Days of Garbage is driven primarily by environmentalism, the discarded items convey more than just today’s ethos of disposability. Beyond the sheer abundance of carefully arranged trash in Segal’s portraits, individual products and packaging reveal details about family composition, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender roles, and health—characteristics that are often more clearly indicated by the rubbish than by the individuals nestled among it. Segal himself describes 7 Days of Garbage as a form of instant archeology, a record not only of our waste but of our values.² Segal’s photos are as striking as their message: we are the trash we make.

Yet neither trash nor the ways in which it is made are static. Waste is an essential element of all societies today, but its seeming inevitability is more a testament to the success of the system that depends on it than a universal aspect of human nature. In the words of the academic and activist Max Liboiron: The truism that humans are inherently wasteful came into being at a particular time and place, by design.³ In order to reconsider what refuse once was and what it might have meant in different times and places—let alone what it might still be—this chapter explores how the very idea of waste as an unavoidable and unchanging problem came into being.

There is, of course, no monolithic history of waste that applies to all places and all people. What counts as trash, produced physically and understood conceptually, has changed over time as new