Archeologists are, at least according to a very candid acquaintance of mine, essentially trash collectors. The great civilizations of antiquity did leave behind the occasional magnificent building and a few glorious burial chambers full of exquisite artworks and treasures, but the great weight of what they left for us to find was their garbage. This is natural enough, of course. Gold and jewels are things you take good care of and only bury with some reluctance, but trash, well you just chuck it out the door and it really piles up back there. Fortunately, it is possible to learn a great deal from careful study of trash, arguably more that can usually be learned from treasure. What foods were popular, what tools were commonly used and broken, what fashions came and went, they’re all there in the trash heap.
With this in mind, it is marvelous to consider what a fantastic wealth of material the societies of the 20th century left for us to discover. Recently, I sent our ROV, an essential tool of modern underwater archeology, down for a look deep along the slopes of the volcanic island of Lipari, off the north coast of Sicily. The submarine escarpments of the volcano were home to some lovely marine life, including anemones, sea stars, and urchins, and among them we found a few artifacts which merit careful analysis. A dark glass bottle lying on the sand, roughly 20 centimeters long, could belong to an as yet undiscovered class of Greek amphora, but more likely it was manufactured to contain a popular beverage of the 20th century called beer. Although the art of brewing this drink was known to much earlier civilizations, it was only in the industrial age that a method was perfected for making and selling very large quantities of very low quality beer in bottles of this kind. This has to do with an associated phenomenon called advertising, a topic best left for another class. Nearby lay a disk of shiny white material, approximately 45 centimeters in diameter. Although I hold out some hope that this was an enameled Etruscan shield, it could also be a lid for a 20th Century container known as a five gallon bucket. Although these were manufactured to hold liquids like paint or oil (but not usually beer), they were more often used in a wide variety of roles including as furniture, as percussion instruments, and as toolboxes (you may recall our earlier discussion of milk crates).
The peoples of the 20th century were very generous indeed to archeologists of our time; in fact, one is tempted to surmise that they must have made a concerted effort to so thoroughly coat the surface of the planet with their crap, er, artifacts. Some authorities are convinced that signs of higher culture can be observed among the piles of refuse, but the question remains open and further investigation will be necessary. Meanwhile, we can enjoy the anemones.
