Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things 0226826376, 9780226826370

Citation preview

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).

La vida va moliendo vidrios, gastando ropas, haciendo añicos, triturando formas, y lo que dura con el tiempo es como isla o nave en el mar, perecedero, rodeado por los frágiles peligros, por implacables aguas y amenazas.

Life goes on grinding up glass, wearing out clothes, making fragments, breaking down forms, and what lasts through time is like an island or a ship in the sea, perishable, surrounded by dangerous fragility by merciless waters and threats.

Pongamos todo de una vez, relojes, platos, copas talladas por el frío, en un saco y llevemos al mar nuestros tesoros: que se derrumben nuestras posesiones en un solo alarmante quebradero, que suene como un río lo que se quiebra y que el mar reconstruya con su largo trabajo de mareas tantas cosas inútiles que nadie rompe pero se rompieron.

Let’s put everything at once, clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold, into a sack and carry our treasures to the sea: that our possessions may sink into one alarming breaker, that sounds like a river may whatever breaks be reconstructed by the sea with the long labor of tides so many useless things that nobody broke but that were broken anyway.

pa b l o n e ru da , Oda a las cosas rotas

pa b l o n e ru da , Ode to Broken Things

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix

introduction: A Fortress of Indestructible Leftovers  1 1  Throwaway Living  14 2  Archaeologies of Garbage  37 3  Cleanliness and Godliness  67 4  Dirty Work  91 5  Things Left Behind  111 6  Anamorphic Archaeology  139 conclusion: A Weakness in Our Imaginations?  161 Acknowledgments  171 Notes  175 Bibliography  235 Index  275

Illustrations

Figures 0.1

Map of Mesoamerica  7

0.2

Map of places mentioned in the text  8

3.1

“Codex-­style” Classic-­period Maya vase  83

4.1

Dumps in Mexico City, ca. 1790  105

5.1

Classification of Mayan languages  114

5.2

Glyph for ta’jol (buzzard)  116

5.3

Glyph for KAB (earth)  116

5.4

Ancestors on the sarcophagus of the king of Palenque  117

5.5

Bean plants and flowers, from the Madrid Codex  117

5.6

Glyph for mis (to sweep)  121

5.7

Burning offerings in bowls  125

5.8

Glyph for EL (to burn)  125

5.9

The king of Yaxchilán and his vassal drilling new fire  126

5.10

A pair of gods drilling new fire, from the Madrid Codex  127

5.11a

Scattering rites, from La Pasadita Lintel 2  128

5.11b

Planting maize seeds, from the Madrid Codex  128

5.12

The Moche “Revolt of the Objects”  134

5.13 The glyphic phrase u-­WAY-­HA’B (the sealed chamber / sleeping room of the year)  136 6.1

Excavation profiles from the palace at El Zotz  143

x

il lustr ations

Plates ( following page 150) 1

“Michael, Jason, Annie, and Olivia”  a

2

“Throwaway Living”  b

3

The Quema del diablo  c

4

Tlazolteotl/Tlaelcuani, from the Florentine Codex  d

5

Tlazolteotl/Tlaelcuani, from the Codex Telleriano-­Remensis  e

6

Bloodletting priest, from the Codex Telleriano-­Remensis  e

7

Ixnextli, from the Codex Telleriano-­Remensis  f

8

“Codex-­style” Classic-­period Maya vases  g

9

Fertilizing soil with excrement, from the Florentine Codex  g

10

Gods carrying brooms, from the Madrid Codex  h

11

“The Sweeping” (Tlachpaniztli), from the Florentine Codex  h

12

Sweeping priest, from the Codex Mendoza  i

13

Breaking and discarding household items, from the Florentine Codex  j

14

Anamorphosis by Domenico Piola  k

15

Piola’s “corrected” anamorphic image  l

16

The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger  m

17

Artifacts from the palace at El Zotz in situ  n

18

Reconstructed vessels from the palace at El Zotz  o

19

Bone artifacts from the palace at El Zotz  o

20

Reworked pottery sherds from the palace at El Zotz  p

21 Worked and unworked fragments of the same vessel from the palace at El Zotz  p 22

Weathering on ceramic vessels from the palace at El Zotz  q

23 Rodent gnawing and weathering patterns on a bone spindle whorl fragment from the palace at El Zotz  q 24

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

25

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

26

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

27

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

28

Altars in Momostenango  t

29

Accumulations of potsherds at Momostenango’s shrines  u

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. Every­ thing is disposable. Each morning, fresh plastic bags, filled with “the remains of yesterday’s Leonia,” line the sidewalks, awaiting garbage trucks. Newspa­ pers, 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 enjoy­ ment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, dis­ carding, 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 devo­ tion, 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

2

introduction

sweepings of the day before yesterday and all of its days and years and de­ cades.”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, mak­ ing 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 consump­ tion, 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 per­ vasive. This familiar narrative, a story steeped in ideas of moral and ecologi­ cal crisis, assumes that the production of waste is inevitable and that its ex­ istence 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 equiva­ lent 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) spe­ ci­fic, 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,

a fortr ess of in destructibl e l eftov ers

3

but it is bound up with moral and economic norms regarding what consti­ tutes 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 geo­ graphically 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 be­ come obsolete and worthless. I also ask what happens when there is disagree­ ment 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 appro­ priate 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 mis­ leading vantage point:

4

introduction

From a Western standpoint, the influence of the West can seem both inevi­ table and necessary, requiring no thorough historical auditing. Europeans and Americans customarily see their countries and cultures as the source of mo­ dernity 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 scruti­ nize 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, interpre­ tations, meanings, and motivations, some of which may be revealed in mov­ ing 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 dif­ ferent 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 analyti­ cally 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 nam­ ing 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

a fortr ess of in destructibl e l eftov ers

5

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 ob­ solescence. 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 understand­ ing 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 any­ one who employs objects as historical evidence. “Past-­loving creatures” is a more inclusive category than “historian,” “archaeologist,” or even “antiquar­ ian.” 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 crea­ tures. We share a forward-­looking, unsystematic anxiety about the prolifera­ tion 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 pres­ ent and of the possibility of manipulating or misinterpreting the past in later times.22 Past-­living, however, requires a peculiar understanding of those ma­ terial traces as waste—­the unwanted, inevitable, and lasting residues of every­ day 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.

6

introduction

Past-­living creatures’ assumptions about waste are historically and cultur­ ally contingent. They arise out of specific confluences of people, events, tech­ nologies, and materials. Yet those contemporary understandings are easily imag­ ined as timeless and universal, perhaps simply because other ways of relating to material remains have largely disappeared. The chapters that follow chron­ icle when, where, and why those ideas took shape, illuminate how they influ­ ence 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 civi­ lization 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 in­ tensive social interaction among peoples with varying languages, systems of governance, religions, and ecological settings. Originally, elements such as agricultural systems or architectural structures, religious or philosophical concepts (e.g., calendrical systems), linguistic fea­ tures (e.g., a vigesimal counting system, shared metaphors), and specific ac­ tivities (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 materi­ als, 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 econo­ mies, 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

a fortr ess of in destructibl e l eftov ers

7

f i g u r e 0 . 1 A map showing the approximate geographical limits of Mesoamerica. Drawn by Omar Andrés Alcover Firpi.

boundaries in ways that can “interconnect and illuminate practices and im­ ages that might otherwise appear insignificant, isolated, incomprehensible.”26 The sources of information I draw on throughout this book are thus tem­ porally 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 es­ sence transcending history,”27 nor should it be understood as a methodology that seeks (or claims) to uncover “the” past. Rather, this book offers a materi­ ally grounded anthropological approach to the long-­term, changing relation­ ships 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 vari­ ety 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,

8

introduction

f i g u r e 0 . 2 A map highlighting key places (ancient and modern) mentioned in the text. Drawn by Omar Andrés Alcover Firpi.

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 six­ teenth century onward have described languages, customs, social organiza­ tion, 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. Those multiple lines of evidence highlight a notion of waste with attendant ideas and associated practices that are markedly different from the contempo­ rary 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

a fortr ess of in destructibl e l eftov ers

9

assumptions, from the role of objects often overlooked to the alleged univer­ sality 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. Intention­ ally 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, seem­ ingly borrowed from a Scandinavian source, perhaps Icelandik’s tros, “rub­ bish, 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 sew­ age).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 con­ clusions drawn from them into an a priori framework for describing reality that a particular language makes available.32 Just a few examples: words that

10

introduction

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 com­ paring 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 soci­ eties 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 land­ fill? 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 archae­ ological 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 un­ derstand how and when they developed. I begin by exploring familiar, wide­ spread 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 tem­ porally 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 as­ sumptions imposed on other places, times, and peoples. Although trash is of­­ ten 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 recontextual­

a fortr ess of in destructibl e l eftov ers

11

ize 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 archae­ ological 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 understand­ ings 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 tan­ dem with broader social changes, waste shifted from an unregulated aesthetic nuisance to a source of contagion, from a public health problem to a technol­ ogical challenge, and from a by-­product of progress to an environmental pol­ lutant. Tracing that trajectory reveals the very idea of waste to be a contingent concept rather than a stable human universal. It also shows contemporary prac­ tices 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 cam­ paigns 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 com­ monplace, 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 (when­ ever 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. Anach­ ronistically extending those ethnocentric concepts to the past actively lim­ its 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.

12

introduction

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 inter­ actions 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 chap­ ter 3 played out in practice. As new colonial ideas about waste took shape within new colonial cities, concerns over trash as both physically and mor­ ally 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 forc­ ing 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 layer­ ing 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 re­ membrance. Discard and disposal could simultaneously be productive, ritual processes and daily, necessary work. Chapter 5 makes plain how modern no­ tions of “trash” not only limit our ability to accurately capture ancient prac­ tices, 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

a fortr ess of in destructibl e l eftov ers

13

objects examined in chapter 5. Centering examples from Mesoamerican ar­ chaeology, 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 after­ lives, I propose an analogy. Mirror anamorphic art—­in which a distorted pro­ jection is transformed into a recognizable image by a reflective surface—­helps me explain how I understand the relationships among material traces, inter­ pretations, 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 geo­ graphical 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 understand­ ing 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 prac­ tices, 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 ar­ ranged his subjects—­both the people and their waste—­among scenes of wa­ ter, 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 un­ touched 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, individ­ ual products and packaging reveal details about family composition, socio­ economic 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 ar­ cheology, 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 univer­ sal 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

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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 un­ derstood conceptually, has changed over time as new ways of making and managing it have developed. Indeed, one of my aims in this book is to explic­ itly counter the notion of waste as self-­evident by examining practices and perceptions in contexts both near and distant. Still, varied cultural and his­ torical trajectories are increasingly converging. Modern waste-­management strategies—­practices such as dumping, incinerating, and recycling; central­ ized and decentralized models of refuse collection; physical infrastructure, from latrines to waste-­transfer stations and sanitary landfills—­not only have traveled the globe but are today also reliant on global networks of things and people.4 In most historical accounts, that convergence is presented as forward progress, each development spurred by the accumulation of knowledge or the invention of new technologies. Rather than a sequence of self-­evident steps toward the rise of today’s widespread waste-­management systems, however, this chapter reconsiders that trajectory of progress as a series of significant shifts in cultural conceptions of waste. The widely accepted history of waste is a particular and constructed narrative. That narrative serves to create an image of a self-­aware, conscientious, and potentially responsible modern so­ ciety, while also distinguishing that image from its antithesis: everything that came before. In what follows, I identify four key historical constructions of waste: (1) the unmitigated filth of “antiquity,” a broad-­brush epoch punctuated by sporadic but unsustained moments of hygienic enlightenment; (2) the health hazard of incipient public sanitation, which explicitly tied bodily and material wastes with the spread of disease and prompted early systematized efforts to control disposal; (3) the technological challenges posed by the pace and materials of industrialized production and consumption; and (4) the “pollutant” concept of the environmentalist movement, which reimagined solid waste itself—­in addition to its biological and chemical by-­products—­as a threat. I examine each stage not as a moment of progress or a linear developmental step, but rather as a pivotal change in common understandings of what waste is—­an unregulated nuisance, a contagion, a by-­product, a contaminant—­and what those changes meant for the ways waste could or should be made and dealt with. My aim is to demonstrate that widespread, seemingly fundamental ideas about waste have a history, one that is short, specific, and socially constructed. Those ideas and that history, then, are by no means inevitable.

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Sewers and Slums In most histories of waste, “antiquity” is given relatively short shrift. A seem­ ingly obligatory introduction covers a period that is shockingly long, usually beginning with the rise of human civilization—­our early ancestors’ penchant for knocking sharp flakes from stones and using them expediently for imme­ diate purposes before leaving them behind—­and ending around the nineteenth century. Although some histories mention third-­millennium-­BCE cesspools and sewer systems found at Mohenjo-­daro in the Indus River Valley or stone drains excavated in Middle Kingdom Egypt (ca. second millennium BCE), the focus of any section on waste management in “antiquity” is on Roman baths and aqueducts. The singular, celebrated innovations of Rome then give way to centuries of filth and forgetfulness, during which Europe became “a vast garbage dump after the Fall of Rome,”5 before the nineteenth century ushered in the “Age of Sanitary Enlightenment.”6 In an 1881 speech before the Ohio State Medical Society, Professor Edward Orton, former president of The Ohio State University, traced out this familiar story: Ancient Rome was also wise in its day and for its day, in regard to sanitary law. . . . No city of modern times has ever approached imperial Rome in the number or equipment of its public baths. . . . The Dark Ages that followed the downfall of the Roman Empire were darker in nothing than in their utter ignorance and neglect of the most obvious principles and laws that apply to the preservation of the public health. For many centuries the cities of Europe reeked in incredible corruption. Plague and pestilence swept through them periodically, like fire through forest leaves. . . . It is only within the last century that the unfailing connection between tainted air and polluted water on the one side, and wide-­spread sickness or the devouring pestilence on the other, has come to be clearly recognized and, to some extent, to be acted upon. It is only within the last quarter of a century that a science of public health has been created. More has been done within this period to organize and systematize the various facts that bear on the health of communities, more practical work has been done to prevent and crush out diseases, than in all the previous cen­ turies of Christendom.7

Despite the century and a half since Orton’s lecture, his version of history is still being repeated. The author Katherine Ashenburg, for example, circum­ vents an uninterrupted bathing culture in ancient and medieval Anatolia and the Levant when she writes: “By the eighth and ninth centuries . . . the baths in the West had fallen into disrepair. . . . Extraordinary achievements in engineer­ ing, architecture, public health, and city planning that stretched from Italy to

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Britain to North Africa, they mostly lay in ruins for centuries.”8 Other histor­ i­cal overviews of waste management are even more punctuated, with chro­ nological divisions limited to (1) ancient civilizations, (2) the Roman Empire, (3) the post-­Roman era to the nineteenth century, and (4) the modern day.9 This commonplace version of history rests on a series of questionable as­ sumptions: the notion of Roman sanitation as an isolated precursor to later hygienic and engineering achievements; the idea of premodern European cit­ ies plagued by a “daunting volume of all organic matter produced, consumed, and excreted . . . uneaten foodstuffs, animal hides, carcasses, dung, all human bodily fluids and solids”;10 the imagined contrast between a muck-­filled past and a clean modernity. Archaeological and historical evidence undermines not only those specific scenarios, but also the grand evolutionary—­indeed, teleological—­narrative of scientific, technological, and civil progress, from a past of simple waste making to a present and future of modern waste management. The Roman city as a model of healthy and pleasant urbanism is readily imagined: white togas, gleaming marble surfaces, spacious villas, flowing wa­ ter. Drawn largely from the writings of Vitruvius and bolstered by the prestige of classical precedent in Europe, that vision is one of comfort, convenience, and health as the result of careful city planning. According to the historian Neville Morley, however, Rome was deliberately envisioned in contrast to “dan­ gerous, unhealthy, and above all chaotic” nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century cities.11 Indeed, for early sanitary engineers in Europe and North America, put­ ting responsibility for water supply, sewer construction, waste disposal, and general public health in the hands of the state was not something new and innovative, but rather a return to a successful and well-­evidenced approach to city management that had prevailed in antiquity before it was lost to the obscurity of the Middle Ages.12 But ancient sources concerning sanitation are limited, and they have been evaluated and interpreted in widely different ways. The historian Alex Scobie, mining many of the same textual sources cited by those who championed Roman sanitation, paints a distinctly different picture of the imperial capital—­ one rife with overflowing sewers and corpse-­strewn streets. Incorporating ar­ chaeological evidence along with textual sources, Scobie points out that very few Roman latrines were flushed by water or provided with washing facilities of any kind. Rather, they were cesspits situated in household kitchens, which needed to be manually emptied at regular intervals and often seeped into gar­ dens. Connecting household drains to city sewers, however, would have been worse: Roman drains lacked traps to prevent gases escaping from sewers, which not only would have allowed noxious odors to permeate connected houses, but also would have created a risk of explosions. Moreover, whenever the Tiber

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flooded, sewage and wastewater that normally flowed into the river would have been forced back into the network of combined sanitary and stormwater drains, as well as into any houses connected to them.13 Sewer connections also opened houses to wandering vermin. One literary anecdote tells of an octopus that swam up a house drain from the sea each night to eat Iberian merchants’ pickled fish.14 More recent scholarship suggests that neither Orton’s optimism nor Scobie’s pessimism are entirely accurate. The notion of “public health” in Rome de­ pends on who among the city’s one million inhabitants is imagined as the “pub­ lic.” An enormous gulf separated the advantaged from the disadvantaged, a distance that meant differences in access to washing facilities; food and wa­ ter contamination by fecal matter; streets clogged with blood, animal by-­ products, excrement, and urine; and unbearable flies.15 Despite being lauded by nineteenth-­century sanitary engineers and twenty-­first-­century popular historians, the Cloaca Maxima (Rome’s seventh-­century-­BCE sewage drain to the Tiber River) and its branches were neither motivated by concerns over health and hygiene nor particularly effective in mitigating them. Yet the idea that the presence of sewers, public latrines, baths, and aqueducts in ancient Rome must reflect a serious concern for health and hygiene has been perpet­ uated simply because, as the archaeologist Ann Olga Koloski-­Ostrow puts it, “the notion seems so logical to our modern, sewer-­lined outlook.”16 The construction of aqueducts and baths in the Roman world was of­ ten prompted by concerns over aesthetics and personal prestige, rather than by considerations of public health. Water-­supply infrastructure was deeply political—­the construction of aqueducts, in particular, was competitive rather than collective. Building or repairing an aqueduct could happen at the whim of an individual—­a public performance of beneficence that served primarily as a political tool for personal advancement.17 Once built, however, an aque­ duct became the city’s possession. If the necessary, time-­consuming, and ex­ pensive but decidedly inglorious tasks of upkeep were neglected, the result could be a water crisis, as occurred in the late Republic.18 Nearly a century of archaeological excavations in sewers, from the Cardo V sewer at Herculaneum to the Cloaca Maxima, has revealed substantial buildups of silt, debris, and mixed refuse (from floor to ceiling in some cases), both underscoring the lack of maintenance and raising questions about the extent to which the sewers effectively cleansed the city.19 The Roman city was thus neither a paragon of health and hygiene nor a visionary forerunner of civil sanitation. In brief, “life in Rome was probably nastier and certainly shorter than many historians are likely to appreciate.”20 Although the systems in place for waste disposal would have allowed for streets

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to be cleaned somewhat regularly and therefore would have reduced popula­ tions of rats and other scavengers, they were also rudimentary and poten­ tially hazardous. Flowing water likely reduced instances of disease, but the aqueducts and public baths that supplied it were not particularly hygienic.21 Regardless of its efficacy, imagining Roman infrastructure as the ancient foun­ dation for modern traditions of sanitation, urban planning, and organized medical care myopically assumes that concerns about public health are uni­ versal and timeless, while also ignoring the blatant political and social moti­ vations for the construction of aqueducts, baths, and drains. The idea of a “Sanitary Dark Ages” after the fall of Rome has likewise been exaggerated and mythologized. The nineteenth-­century historian Jules Michelet famously bemoaned the “war persistently waged by the Middle Ages against the flesh and against cleanliness . . . never a bath known for a thousand years!”22 As early as 1928, however, the historian Lynn Thorndike attempted to undermine the “three-­headed slander, barking like Cerberus” of assump­ tions that (1) the streets of premodern towns were constantly foul smelling and full of filth; (2) soaps and baths were widely shunned; and (3) crowded, dirty, and pestilence-­ridden towns were devoid of anything resembling sani­ tation or concern for public health.23 The historian Ernest Sabine, who wrote a trilogy of articles on butchering in medieval London, the city’s cesspools and latrines, and city cleaning, echoed Thorndike’s frustrations.24 “Although writers on life in mediaeval London have one and all asserted that the city was extremely filthy,” Sabine wrote, “none of them seem to have taken the trouble to find out just what city-­cleaning machinery was actually in operation.”25 Eighty years after Sabine’s articles, the historian Dolly Jørgensen confronted the same assumptions in her critique of the BBC Two television series Filthy Cities.26 In an episode focused on medieval London, Filthy Cities suggests that the city was a place of “dirt and squalor,” until the catastrophic arrival of the Black Death in the mid-­fourteenth century forced its citizens to change their ways. In the episode, the host (wearing rain boots) trudges through an ankle-­ deep muck consisting of mud, dung, entrails, rotting fish, beer, urine, and human excrement while referencing the fourteenth-­century records of the assize of London, which document disputes among neighbors over property rights and responsibilities, including the construction and placement of la­ trines and cesspits. Yet between 1301 and 1346, in a city of nearly a hundred thousand inhabitants, London’s highest city court heard only twenty-­nine cases about waste disposal, with twenty-­four of those dealing with the place­ ment of latrines against party walls in shared buildings.27 Rather than viewing the existence of those medieval court cases—­which, on average, deal with sanitation nuisances once per year—­as evidence of the filthiness of medieval

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cities and the lack of sanitary facilities, Jørgensen argues that the records sug­ gest “a general enforcement of established sanitary standards, even if there were transgressors.”28 That is, medieval cities kept promulgating environmental ordinances and citizens kept lodging nuisance complaints precisely because they were reasonably effective. Archaeological excavations support Jørgensen’s revisionist history. De­­ spite the widespread impression that inhabitants of early medieval rural and urban sites simply tossed their rubbish wherever convenient, many towns had common dunghills, or “muckhills,” that served as designated locations for dis­ posal. In addition, most tenements had temporary heaps for domestic house­ hold waste within their yard areas. Once communal dumps began to “sweeten” (i.e., rot down), their contents could be spread laterally, which served to im­ prove the productivity of farms and gardens, reclaim poorly drained areas, and level hollows.29 Between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, unlined earth-­cut pits were commonly used as latrines or dug specifically to dispose of offal or butchery waste. Some unlined pits were deliberately dug for refuse disposal; others may have primarily served as quarries for building materials that were expediently reused. Unlined waste pits eventually went “sour,” however, at which point they would be infilled with any available rubbish, including the fill excavated from a replacement pit dug nearby.30 As towns grew and houses became more densely packed, rubbish was in­ creasingly collected and deposited off-­site, beyond urban limits. By the early fourteenth century, regulations restricting waste disposal were common, bol­ stered by organized systems of street cleaning and rubbish collection.31 Unlined pits were replaced by those with brick or stone linings, some of which might be vaulted (for two-­storied buildings) or be fed by brick-­lined chutes.32 Con­­ tracts awarded to construct shops and tenements required that lined la­ trines be provisioned, dug to specific depths and dimensions,33 and emptied periodically—­some larger pits might take more than a year to fill.34 Cleaning happened at night, in part because privies were in daily use, but also to miti­ gate the impact of ensuing odors. By 1671, the practice was written into law: such “night soil” could be removed only by “gong farmers”—­gong referring to both a privy and its contents—­after ten o’clock at night in the winter and after eleven o’clock in the summer; a fine was also imposed should cleaners spill filth in the streets. Some citizens gave such serious thought to the care and cleaning of their privies that they provided for those matters in their wills.35 Archaeological assemblages recovered from English tenements notably de­ crease in size (in terms of surviving artifacts) around the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, reflecting the impact of organized collections.36

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Despite often being read as evidence for abject conditions throughout Europe after the fall of Rome, the historical and archaeological records of sanitary legislation (including nuisance complaints), public and private in­ frastructure (including fountains, latrines, and lined and unlined cesspits), and municipal efforts to remove dung and rubbish to sanctioned dumping places reveal widespread concerns for community cleanliness, decorum, and health.37 In fact, the historian Guy Geltner notes that “successfully managing its diverse, crowded, and turbulent population is perhaps the greatest unsung achievement yet of medieval civilization.”38 Popular stereotypes of the Middle Ages as an era of unmitigated squalor or of all medieval towns as foul and fetid, however, continue to serve as “a dramatic, if overblown backdrop of the primitive ‘other’ that is employed to highlight the ‘advances’ of more enlight­ ened ages.”39 A Public Health Problem Ancient investments in sanitary infrastructure were desirable, even expected, as necessary elements for aesthetically pleasant city life. They were not, how­ ever, necessarily built with the intention of improving the health of a city’s in­­ habitants. That changed in the early decades of the eighteenth century, when physicians began assembling qualitative and quantitative data about the health of European populations, including meteorological, topographical, and de­ mographic information.40 Their efforts revealed alarming mortality rates in Europe’s cities: not only were there more deaths than births, but the life ex­ pectancy of city residents was also lower than that of their counterparts in the countryside. Informed by miasmic theory, in which filth or foul smells are the agents of disease, the onset of epidemics was blamed on the cumulative ef­ fects of the proximity of humans and animals in cities and the accompanying putrefying wastes that tainted the air, soil, and water. Much as it had in antiq­ uity and the medieval era, this body of medical theory (now strengthened by quantitative data) stressed specific measures to avoid and prevent miasmas. Cities were encouraged to implement new requirements for managing their collective forms of excreta and to carry out sanitary reforms, including circu­ lating water in canals and cisterns, draining standing pools, flushing garbage from areas of human habitation, burying refuse, ventilating living quarters and meeting places, and interring corpses beyond city limits.41 Those efforts, however, were not enough to prevent waves of Asiatic chol­ era (an acute bacterial infection of the intestine), which originated in India and swept through Europe along trade routes and waterways beginning in

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the 1830s.42 As the Times commented in 1848, “The cholera is the best of all sanitary reformers. It overlooks no mistake and pardons no oversight.”43 In the wake of those epidemics, England’s Poor Law Commission published its Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population in Great Britain in 1842, principally authored by its secretary, Edwin Chadwick.44 Although Chadwick’s ideas were no different from those of his predecessors—­filth was a miasmic menace; its bad smells were responsible for what he often referred to simply as “fever”—­the Report was more specific in its recommended re­ forms. Clean water was to be made available in all households, for example, and water closets were to be installed to remove feces and urine from residen­ tial quarters via underground sewer networks. Chadwick’s recommendations were bolstered by exhaustive quantitative and qualitative investigations that used mapping and statistical analyses to draw direct linkages between the en­ vironmental conditions in which the working poor were living and a higher prevalence of disease and early death. Remarkably, despite their cost, the major infrastructural changes proposed by Chadwick were implemented in most cities throughout Europe and North America by the end of the nineteenth century.45 Even if there was nothing new in Chadwick’s specific recommendations, many cities were physically trans­ formed by the campaigns he inspired, making Chadwick into a hero in the history of sanitation.46 As had happened for centuries, newly built water pro­ visioning and sewerage systems, street paving and cleaning initiatives, and other efforts removed sources of fecal infections and raised living standards. After Chadwick, however, the primary purpose of those investments in infra­ structure explicitly shifted. Rather than addressing general aesthetic or olfac­ tory concerns, water-­supply systems and sanitary regulations sought specifi­ cally to improve collective health by preventing the spread of diseases. The shift from thinking about bodily and material wastes as nuisances to viewing them as sources of contamination also marked a change in how pro­ ducers of waste were perceived. Sanitation represented more than just the strug­ gle against disease—­it stood for civilization, morality, and an orderly way of life.47 One American sanitary inspector wrote in the late nineteenth century, “The fact is clear to us that crime is begotten by sin, and sin begotten by dis­ ease, disease begotten by filth and filth begotten by ignorance and neglect of the individual or the inefficiency of the agencies employed by the municipal­ ity to correct such conditions.”48 Early municipal sanitation programs dispro­ portionately targeted the immigrant poor and working classes, often imposing inspections of rented, multifamily tenements without request or permission from property owners or residents.49 A particularly zealous Department of Health supervisor justified the practice, claiming that “incessant, systematic,

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and searching inspection from house to house and street by street, from Jan­ uary to January, can alone prevent the growth of sanitary evils, which when matured and in full force, are beyond the control of men.”50 As nineteenth-­century physicians learned more about disease transmis­ sion, a modified theory of miasma took hold: diseases were understood to be caused by contagia, but a contagion could act only in conjunction with foul air, unhealthy soil conditions, or “predisposing social factors.”51 The condi­ tions in which the poor lived, as sources of potentially polluting miasmas, were an imminent threat to the health of a community. But so too were the poor themselves, who might spread the contagia that thrived in those condi­ tions to other places and people. Municipal governments’ “public health” re­ sponsibilities thus centered around providing and improving not only sanitary infrastructure, but also intimate moral and social reforms. In the late nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Robert Koch, and others proved that diseases were caused not by filth itself, but rather by microorganisms contained within it. Koch, in particular, isolated the bacte­ ria that caused cholera in 1883. Suddenly, as the historian David Barnes de­ scribes, “the same old excrement; the same old ‘croup’ and diarrheal diseases; the same old stairway odor of urine, unwashed sweaty bodies, and renfermé (stale air) all acquired qualitatively new meanings at century’s end. The same material realities, reshaped into new configurations, combined to forge a new reality. Nothing had changed, and everything had changed.”52 In that new re­ ality, cleanliness was no longer something recommended by gentility manu­ als or variably practiced in religious rituals; instead, it became standardized and medicalized as “hygiene.” Once again, older conceptions blended with newly introduced germ theory, generating transitional theories in which diet, mental and moral states, degrees of exercise, personal cleanliness, inborn con­ stitutional factors, air quality, ventilation, housing, and family relations could all influence the balance of a person’s system and their susceptibility to conta­ gious bacteria.53 Early hygienists primarily transformed the method of public health inves­ tigation, rather than the content of health-­related knowledge.54 What mattered most to them was that investigations would be scientific. The science of hy­ giene necessitated a commitment to gathering empirical evidence and ana­ lyzing it quantitatively, along with a nearly obsessive focus on waste and waste disposal as threats of contamination in urban environments and faith in tech­ nocratic regulations, rather than the prohibition of putative health hazards.55 Concerns about hygiene brought bodily waste out of the cellars, outhouses, and streets and into the distinctly modern space called the bathroom, which was re­­ designed as a kind of “hospital in the home” or “laboratory of modernization.”56

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Any respectable community thus needed citywide waterworks, which were largely centralized, capital-­intensive systems.57 That reordering of the physi­ cal environment was accompanied by, and perhaps inseparable from, perva­ sive moralism. Cities induced cleanliness in their citizens by literally linking the most private of spaces to some of the most extensive public infrastructure: networks of toilets, sewers, and drainages.58 Plumbing, the sociologist Gay Hawkins notes, “altered the disciplines of bodies, the ways we manage and map them, and how we experience them as clean. . . . It has also been funda­ mental to distancing us from any direct role in managing our own waste.”59 The acute disgust with which certain substances and behaviors were iden­ tified as health hazards both occurred within the context of and reshaped ideologies of what it meant to be civilized—­which was understood simulta­ neously as the inevitable outcome of historical processes and an urgent reform project.60 Sewer systems and water closets were reimagined as material expressions of modern salubriousness, as distinct departures from chamber pots, latrines, cesspools, and other earlier forms of waste management. For a time, previ­ ously threatening underworlds were transformed into utopian spaces of sci­ entific wonder.61 In Paris, boat tours of the sewers became an attraction for visitors and residents alike (particularly women) following the Exposition Universelle of 1867.62 Nineteenth-­century scientific and journalistic accounts of sewers make little mention of filth, disease, odor, or discomfort. Rather, sanitation systems were envisioned as offering a means of reconciliation for the working classes who labored in and maintained them.63 Paris’s égoutiers (sewer workers) were mythologized as perfect mirrors of the kind of laborer who was desired aboveground, a “community of naturally good men free from the vices and shams of civilization below the city.”64 Henry Mayhew, a nineteenth-­century journalist and author of the four-­volume London Labour and the London Poor (1861–­1862), described sewer workers as “strong, robust, and healthy men, generally florid in their complexion, while many of them know illness only by name” who shared “a fixed belief that the odour of the sewers contributes in a variety of ways to their general health.”65 Public health required effective governmental administrators, elected offi­ cials, and scientific efforts, but it could not be achieved without those enlight­ ened experts successfully instilling new standards of civic order and personal cleanliness. Perhaps ironically, this shifted the onus of waste management from private citizens to city officials and organizations. As in earlier epochs, specific people, their behaviors, and their living conditions were understood as com­ munal health hazards, but those threats now revealed a municipal, regional, or national failure of civil and moral education. For example, in 1880, when

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summer in Paris was marred by a pervasive and disgusting stench—­a “Great Stink” (a not-­uncommon event in nineteenth-­century European cities)—­de­ bates raged over what might have caused the odors and what appropriate public and private remedies might be. Everyone agreed, however, that the ur­­ gent threat to public health was the responsibility of the government, scien­ tists, and technical experts.66 When New York’s commissioner of street clean­ ing attempted to implement source separation (requiring households and businesses to sort organic wastes, rubbish, and ashes into distinct containers) in 1896, people were so conditioned to regard sanitation as a municipal—­rather than an individual—­responsibility that the new ordinances were met with “a great deal of opposition.”67 Early sanitation improvements thus established one of the basic premises of modern waste-­management systems: waste is an individual product, but a collective problem. Trash Technologies Refuse problems were exacerbated by the vast economic expansion and rapid urbanization of the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization, moreover, ex­ panded concerns over waste from pollution to production. The scale and mag­ nitude of issues of disposal were suddenly much greater. Techniques that had been used for centuries—­disposal in wells and watercourses, digging pit priv­ ies and cesspools, collection of refuse by scavengers, and dumping or burn­ ing garbage, ash, and rubbish—­simply could not cope with the ever-­greater amounts and the new kinds of waste products that were being generated. Yet industrialization also offered new avenues for waste management. Sensorial and epidemiological concerns over refuse became technological challenges to be met by new forms of production, exchange, disposal, and reuse. Prior to industrialization, the production of refuse was largely regarded as a result of ignorance and improper household management. In fact, due to widespread reuse and recycling practices, little trash was produced before the twentieth century. Food scraps were boiled into soup or fed to domestic animals, durable items were passed on across social classes or generations, broken or worn-­out things could be brought back to their makers or to spe­ cialists for repair, and items that were beyond fixing would be dismantled and sold as parts or to junk men.68 Household management manuals from the nine­ teenth century celebrated thrift and efficiency in reuse as domestic virtues and often featured instructions for lengthening the lives of thinning sheets, tech­ niques for mending glassware and crockery, and recipes for turning grease into candles or soap.69 Early industrial cities maintained those traditional ideas about recycling

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and reusing waste as raw materials. Demographic growth and urbanization required increased agricultural production, which, in turn, necessitated im­ provements in croplands through fertilization. Cities offered dense concen­ trations of human and animal excreta and other organic wastes. Street mud and the contents of pit privies, rotten food, beef blood, and even old shoes were collected, processed, and sold to farmers.70 “In industry there must no longer be waste as such, and everything must be used either for industry itself or for agriculture,” wrote Henri Napias, a prominent late-­nineteenth-­century doctor and the general secretary of the Society of Public Medicine and Pro­ fessional Hygiene in Paris.71 Some emerging industries relied on refuse materials that could only be sup­ plied by cities: vegetable rags were essential for papermaking; animal bones from slaughterhouses were processed into traditional grease and glue prod­ ucts, but also became important sources of phosphorus for matches, charcoal for sugar refinement, and gelatin for photographic negatives. “Rag-­and-­bone men” or “swill children”—­poor scavengers who traded in used paper, iron, and bottles in addition to rags and bone—­formed an essential link between the households that discarded urban by-­products and the industrial manu­ facturers who reused them as raw materials.72 Street scavengers then sold ma­ terials to small-­time junk dealers, middlemen who amassed larger quantities before selling them to salvage companies.73 Scavenging itself was eventually converted into part of the great indus­ trial machine. Former rag-­and-­bone men became salaried workers at refuse sorting plants, where they hand-­separated paper, cartons, rags, corks, bones, scrap metals, and food remains from rubbish that passed by on belt convey­ ors. Stationed on either side of the “travelling table,” pickers performed spe­ cialized work: “One man picks only manila papers, another only spruce pulp papers, another the shoes, another the cloths and rags, another the bottles and cans and all metal substances.”74 Carefully processed, the salvaged materials could be sold to farmers and manufacturers at higher prices and in greater quantities, transforming scavenging from an informal economy to a competi­ tive market.75 By 1905, a weekly publication, the Waste Trade Journal, printed standard prices and specifications for the kinds and sizes of metal, rags, and rubber that could be sold to scrap companies, as well as a directory for the waste trade, listing every importer, exporter, and consumer in North America and Europe.76 Yet even with industrial-­scale sorting and reuse, great quantities of ash, street sweepings, and garbage remained. Crude disposal methods—­most of­ ten indiscriminate dumping on open land or into water—­generated new ex­ penses and problems. Dumping refuse in rivers led to constant complaints

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and lawsuits from downstream, while ocean dumping fouled beaches and imperiled fish supplies. On land, open dumps were breeding grounds for rats and cockroaches, light materials blew into neighboring properties, and pe­ riodic fires were both noxious and dangerous. Urban growth also made it in­­ creasingly costly and difficult for cities to acquire new dumping sites.77 For solutions, cities turned to engineers. In earlier fights over filth, sani­ tary engineers had produced impressive results in constructing waterworks and sewerage systems to alleviate public health concerns. The hope was that refuse problems could likewise be solved by technical skills and solutions. According to a 1908 editorial, “The chief hindrance to putting refuse collec­ tion and disposal on a satisfactory basis is the failure of the public and of non­ technical officials to recognize that the most difficult of the problems involved are engineering in character and will never be satisfactorily solved until they are entrusted to engineers.”78 The rise of sanitary engineering, moreover, helped establish a sense of shared global (or, at least, transatlantic) problems and ap­­ proaches regarding waste. In the early twentieth century, the International Association of Public Works Officials and the International Conference on Public Cleansing devoted sessions to refuse disposal, street cleaning, and other matters of sanitation, encouraging the exchange of ideas and compari­ sons of various methodologies.79 European cities, which had been grappling with waste long before the ex­ istence of the United States and had much less land and water available, of­ fered two potential alternatives to dumping: incineration and reduction.80 Of the two, incineration was more widely implemented and was considered the most sanitary, efficient, and economical method of disposal, with the added benefit of producing steam to power various kinds of work.81 American en­­ gineers marveled at these “destructors” and the power of fire as a “disinfec­ tant.”82 In 1888, in an impassioned speech, the president of the American Public Health Association summed up both the problems of refuse disposal and the promises of incineration: We cling to the old crude methods of waste disposal, or permit the accumula­ tion of animal and vegetable deposits in the vicinity of our homes, only to find that the chemistry of Nature is inadequate for our protection. . . . Nevertheless, we are slow to learn the lesson of the new order of things, and still we permit the soil and the air and the water about us to be contaminated by human and animal dead; still we heap up, to our own destruction, the offscouring of our stables and our houses; still we poison the pure sources of our water supply with deposits of carrion, night-­soil, garbage, and manure. Future generations, could they unearth the strata of refuse with which our inhabitants of the past half century have overspread the sites of our cities, or turn the rivers from

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their accustomed courses to view the waste material with which we have lined the beds of the streams, would surely be justified in denominating this the age of filth-­formation. . . . Everywhere interest in the question of cremation is awakening, and the present points to a future—­a near future—­in which every city, large or small, upon the American continent will consider the crematory a necessary part of its municipal outfit; and not only is it given to each of us to look forward to a time when our cities will be redeemed from the curse of accumulating waste, when the rivers will be unpolluted by the sewage which now converts them into common sewers, when the cess-­vault and the garbage-­pit and the manure heap and even the earth cemetery will be abandoned, when the age of filth-­formation will be superseded by the era of filth-­destruction, when fire will purify alike the refuse of the living and the remains of the dead,—­but also it is allotted to each one of us to help to bring in the coming of this sanitary consummation.83

The first generation of American incinerators, however, never lived up to ex­ pectations. Although destructors offered many advantages in England and Germany, where land and fuel were limited resources, their design and op­ eration were not adapted to the different spatial and demographic character of American cities. In the United States, cities were already separating ash, mixed refuse, and organic material, of which only the latter was sent to incin­ erators. The high water content of organic material (compared to unsorted refuse burned in Europe) required higher temperatures. Incinerators were forced to either augment the garbage with coal and other fuels, driving up costs, or deal with the incompletely burned waste and increased smoke and gas emissions at lower temperatures. Converting waste to steam and electri­ cal energy was more expensive than deriving energy from wood, coal, and other sources. Moreover, the incinerator industry was rife with graft and manipulation—­companies notorious for constructing poor-­quality plants won large contracts based on personal and political favors. Of 180 furnaces built between 1885 and 1908, 102 were abandoned or dismantled by 1909.84 Another European solution, the “reduction process,” compressed garbage to extract oils and other by-­products, which could be sold as fertilizers, lubri­ cants, and, ironically, perfume bases. Reduction seemed to offer a new and more technical development in the reutilization of waste—­seductive “glowing promises of rich rewards” as one New Orleans city councilman put it.85 Un­­ like incineration, however, the reduction method had never seen widespread success or implementation. Although the process was invented in Vienna, European cities did not produce enough wasted food matter to make it prof­ itable. American affluence solved that problem. Several cities—­Columbus,

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Akron, and Dayton in Ohio, as well as Chicago and Detroit—­built success­ ful reduction plants in the early twentieth century, but they were unsustain­ able ventures. Reduction plants, which “cooked” huge quantities of putrefy­ ing wastes to recover grease and oils, filled the air with pungent odors, while dark-­colored liquid runoff from the compression process polluted nearby waterways.86 Reduction plants went out of service faster than first-­generation incinerators.87 Even landfills, when designed by sanitation engineers, were rooted in a sci­ ence aimed at productive resource recovery. As opposed to open dumping, a “sanitary” landfill’s successive layers of waste are crushed, compacted, and covered with earth at the end of the day to prevent the escape of windblown trash and offensive odors and to minimize insects and rodents. Once a layer’s fermenting temperature stabilizes, another is added, each within carefully constructed cells or trenches. Like incineration, this technique emerged in England (in 1912). The method became increasingly widespread from the 1930s onward—­by the 1960s, 60 percent of English rubbish and 68 percent of American garbage was being dumped into landfills.88 In the context of the “suburban century”—­the twentieth-­century expansion of urban populations, especially in the United States and England—­the shift in populations toward the periphery strained solid waste services and increased their costs.89 Sani­­ tary landfills were considered not only the most economical form of disposal, but also a method which produced reclaimed land.90 Cities today continue to chase the nineteenth-­century dream of not only making waste pay for itself, but also transforming profligate consumption into positive production. The technology known as plasma gasification, for exam­ ple, promises to vaporize municipal garbage, recycle metal, blast toxic con­ taminants, and produce electricity, all while drastically reducing emissions. Arcs of electrical energy heat matter to up to 10,000°C (over 18,000°F), leav­ ing behind only a layer of molten heavy metals (removed, cooled, and used for making steel and other products) and a glassy, obsidian-­like slag that meets standards for nonhazardous disposal and takes up only 1 percent of the waste’s original volume.91 In the United States, the USS Gerald R. Ford (the first of a new class of air­ craft carriers) and cities such as Portland, Reno, and New York have experi­ mented with plasma gasification; countries with operational plants include Japan, China, Taiwan, and India. Yet the technology has yet to make it past “pilot project” status and operate at a meaningful scale. A functioning plasma gasification plant in Pune, India, for example, is capable of processing 72 met­ ric tons (80 tons) of waste per day, which falls far short of the nearly 7,700 met­ ric tons (8,488 tons) of garbage produced daily by New York City’s residents

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or even the 1,900 metric tons (2,094 tons) that are discarded each day in Portland, one of America’s greenest cities.92 The cost of a single plant can also be any­ where from ten to twenty times more expensive than other material recovery facilities.93 And although one of the technology’s selling points is the possibil­ ity of running a plant off the electricity it produces (the greater the capacity and processing of the plant, the lower construction and operation costs be­ come), communities need to produce and process an enormous amount of waste per day to balance out the energy consumed by the average plasma gas­ ification plant. A plant proposed for the Bahamas, for example, is projected to require 1,500 metric tons (1,653 tons) of combustible waste per day—­a thou­ sand metric tons (1,102 tons) more than the nation actually produces.94 Acti­ vists have critiqued thermal treatments as equivalent to incineration, fearing the potentially harmful by-­products plants might emit in residential areas.95 The similarities between incineration and plasma gasification also appear to extend to their short lifespans as promising methods for managing wastes. Dozens of planned projects have failed and plants have been shut down—­ some due to community or government opposition, others because they were unable meet expectations or requirements for energy and revenue generation, some for falling short of pollution control limits.96 Industrialization generated new kinds and quantities of wastes, but also new ways of managing them. Scavenging and recycling were subsumed into factory cycles of production and consumption, while waste-­disposal systems became the purview of sanitation engineers. In those transitions, the prob­ lem of refuse was no longer simply one of dirt, disease, or discipline. Instead, it became a problem of finding a technical solution to transform trash into something useful, even profitable—­a quest that continues to drive design and decision-­making in modern waste-­management systems. Polluting the Planet Technological solutions to waste focus on its removal, on designing new and better ways to throw or flush something away. In reality, however, methods for disposing of waste only ever displace or delay its effects, passing on its associated nuisances or hazards to land, water, or air. As the nature of waste shifted, so too did the ideas about the problems it could cause. Changing inter­ actions among technology, scientific knowledge, cultural values, and the en­ vironment variably reduce or exacerbate those problems or transfer them to different places or new forms.97 It was not until the mid-­nineteenth century, however, that the term pollution began to be used to refer to human degrada­ tion of the environment98 and not until the mid-­to late twentieth century,

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with the passage of various Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, that it became an entity to be regulated by the state.99 As with solid wastes, industrialization changed both the quality and qual­ ity of environmental pollutants. Under miasmic theory, smoke was under­ stood not only to be harmless, but it was even thought to be an antidote to pollution: its high quantities of acids and carbon were considered powerful disinfectants. The most polluted environments were not those in which the air was clouded by smoke, but those in which it was filled with the smell of rot—­sewers and cesspools, but also marshes, jungles, and graveyards. As early as 1804, however, citizens of Pittsburgh (known as the “Smoky City”) began to view (and experience) smoke as a nuisance and advocated for clean-­burning furnaces and ordinances to regulate the height of factory chimneys. Despite their efforts, “the sun did not shine in Pittsburgh for close to a century.”100 Smoke was a visible sign of progress and modernity, proudly depicted belch­ ing out of smokestacks in postcards and city views, but it was also noxious. Soot penetrated deeply into the cities where it settled, leaving its patina over both buildings and people. By the late nineteenth century, public monuments had to be regularly cleaned and architects and urban planners reconceived city layouts to place industries downwind of administrative and residential areas.101 The sanitary reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had prompted hundreds of cities and towns across Europe and North America to pro­ vide cleaner and more copious water supplies. Yet no city simultaneously constructed both waterworks and a sewer system to remove the water.102 Wastewater was diverted into cesspools, stormwater sewers, or street gut­ ters, all of which were designed to accommodate much smaller volumes of water than new public waterworks flushed into cities. When water closets in individual homes were widely adopted as a hygienic fix to the problems of privies, they were simply connected to existing cesspools. Flooded with “black” water (i.e., water that has come into contact with fecal matter), cess­ pools not only became impossible to clean, but they also leached into and saturated surrounding soils. In 1895, the secretary of the State Board of Health of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Lee, bemoaned the situation in a short but vehe­ ment speech before the American Public Health Association, which he aptly entitled “The Cart before the Horse”: The first thought of the citizen who proposes to build himself a country resi­ dence is beauty of location. The second, architectural adornment. The third, possibly, a copious and pure water supply, and with this, modern plumbing follows of course, as a necessary accompaniment. Last of all, he or his archi­ tect bethinks himself that it will be necessary to find a receptacle for this little

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stream which he is going to divert from its natural course and fill with the accumulated filth of his household. That which should have been most care­ fully considered first, before a line was drawn or a plan designed[,] is left to be provided last in some hap-­hazard way, as if it were a trifling detail of no mo­ ment whatsoever. The problem may prove impossible of satisfactory solution to himself. Or if provision can be made in such a way as to relieve himself of annoyance, the chances are ten to one that his neighbor will begin to complain of the flooding of his yard or the pollution of his well; or, what is still worse, and unfortunately of undoubtedly frequent occurrence, sickness may be cre­ ated in families more remote, the cause of which is unsuspected and therefore unremoved. . . . Copious water supplies, with the aid of what is known as mod­ ern plumbing, constitute a means of distributing fecal pollution over immense areas, through the soil, through subterranean water-­courses, and in surface streams, and cannot therefore be regarded with unmixed approbation by the sanitarian. . . . No water-­closet should ever be allowed to be constructed until provision has been made for the disposition of its effluent in such a manner that it shall not constitute a nuisance prejudicial to the public health.103

Engineers, public health professionals, and city officials settled on capital-­ intensive water carriage systems—­designed to use running water as a me­ dium to transport wastes—­as the newest solution to the newest problems of disposal. Although initial costs were considerable, once sewerage systems were built, they simply channeled wastes into adjacent streams or lakes. The diver­ sion of untreated sewage into waterways operated under the commonly ac­ cepted argument that “running water purifies itself,”104 a “fact” that was often confirmed by the methods of chemical analyses used to assess water quality that were available at the time.105 Of course, urban sewerage systems had only shifted the sink for human wastes and wastewater from the land to the water, transferring the health and sanitary costs of disposal downstream. Morbidity and mortality rates soared in communities that drew their water supplies from sources in which other cities disposed of raw sewage, even though many of the cities that suffered most severely from sewage-­polluted water had themselves spent millions of dollars on sewerage systems to improve local conditions.106 In the first decades of the twentieth century, disinfection technologies such as water filtration and chlorination were used to address the problems of sewage-­polluted drinking water. However, other chemical developments re­­ sulted in the creation of wholly new hazardous by-­products that affected wa­ ter quality. Industrial wastes from paper mills (acids, alkali, and bleaches), textile companies (sulfuric acid, muriatic acid, lime, and dyes), woolen mills (soda ash, calcium chloride, phosphates), and tanneries (arsenic, lime, and organic fats) were all washed into local waterways.107 Household laundry de­

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tergent runoff appeared in streams, rivers, and lakes thought to be pristine as suds that washed up on shores, or as foam in household water taps hundreds of miles from the source of contamination.108 The same was true for air qual­ ity. Leaded-­gasoline additives and new synthetics being burned in incinerators no longer produced just smoke or dust, but also “air pollution.”109 On July 26, 1943—­now known as “Black Monday”—­downtown Los Angeles was so en­ gulfed in noxious fumes that visibility was reduced to three blocks.110 Not long after, in October 1948, when a suffocating smog settled over the steel town of Donora, Pennsylvania, seventeen people died in a span of twelve hours, with thousands more left gasping for breath.111 As concerns over water and air quality grew, land presented itself as a viable alternative. Although garbage dumps produced noxious odors and attracted flies and rats, those nuisances did not compare to the epidemics generated by water pollution or the thick blankets of smoke that blotted out the sun. The advent of the sanitary landfill in the early twentieth century was hailed by pub­ lic works officials, public health professionals, and municipal engineers, who responded much in the same way they had to earlier water carriage solutions: possible hazards were overlooked in order to provide a new “solution” to the problem of urban waste disposal. The shift to landfills, however, occurred in tandem with a meteoric rise in new kinds of solid wastes: disposable goods and packaging. The emphasis on hygiene, technology, and increased production, especially in the United States, prompted the development of the “throw-­away society.” New consumer goods such as paper cups, towels, straws, and Kleenex were designed for both one­ time use and swift, complete disposal. Single-­use products and packaging not only reinforced new ideals of cleanliness, but fed aspirations of luxury, ease, and progress. Consumption itself became a form of work, but the burden of buying new things and throwing them away never rivaled that of traditional reuse and recycling.112 The idea that progress simply made life easier and cleaner is evident in a now-­infamous article published in Life magazine in 1955, entitled “Throwaway Living.” A large photo from the magazine’s cover (plate 2) shows a young fam­ ily surrounded by single-­use diapers, paper napkins, and ashtrays, gleefully tossing disposable plates and cups into the air. Below, the article begins by stating, “The objects flying through the air in this picture would take 40 hours to clean—­except that no housewife need bother.”113 The text lists the objects in the photo and is accompanied by other examples of products designed to “cut down household chores”: a disposable waterproof bowl for feeding pets, “to eliminate washing-­up chore”; a “DISPOSA-­PAN,” made with a steel frame and heavy foil that rendered the work of scouring pots unnecessary; and a

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barbecue grill complete with stand, asbestos shell, wire grill, one hour’s worth of charcoal, and excelsior topping “for a quick light.”114 Today, the short piece reads eerily like Calvino’s allegory from the previous chapter, but “Throwaway Living” was a serious celebration of modernity. Physical waste, which had previously been considered evidence of inefficiency and a lack of creativity in the household, had become a sign of efficient consumption, a marker of social status, and a means of saving one’s time and effort. Quality-­of-­life concerns about public health, protecting nature, and pollu­ tion control had been simmering since the rapid urbanization, industrializa­ tion, and ever-­expanding frontiers of the late nineteenth century. Following World War II, the rise of overproduction and mass consumption, petrochem­ icals, and nuclear power further challenged the public’s faith in unchecked economic growth and progress. The engineers, public health officials, and other sanitarians who had established earlier systems began to exchange disparate concerns over pure water supplies, adequate sewerage, and sanitary refuse disposal for a more holistic view of the domino effects of various biological, chemical, and physical pollutants, including the nature of waste.115 In the wake of the environmentalist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, solid wastes were no longer mere problems of nuisance that could be solved by ef­ ficient removal, but rather “a cancer growing on the land, awful in themselves and awful in the way they further foul[ed] the already polluted air and wa­ ters near them—­a third pollution inextricably interlocked with the two that [had] long been considered as unacceptable environmental hazards.”116 Waste joined air and water pollution as a primal ecological threat. Conclusions Trash has a history. Today’s endless and global accumulations can make it ap­ pear universally necessary, natural, and negative, but waste—­as an idea and as a material substance—­is both the product of a particular trajectory and inseparable from the associated forces of globalization, capitalism, consum­ erism, materials science, mass production, and environmentalism. Tracing the shallowness and specificity of that history not only sheds light on how pre­ dominant ideas about waste came into being, but also undermines the seem­ ing inevitability of those perspectives. In the past few centuries alone, Western practices of waste making and waste management have undergone radical transformations. From a general­ ized threat to health, waste became a particular problem of hygiene. What had literally been a private matter became not only a public concern, but also a municipal (i.e., someone else’s) responsibility. Industrialization changed both

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the quantity and quality of waste’s production—­before and after consump­ tion. Waste became a technical challenge, a problem whose best solution was to be found in the same technologies, systems, and ways of thinking that cre­ ated it in the first place. That hubristic confidence—­that we will eventually find a way to undo what has been done, rather than change our behavior—­ underlies myriad forms of so-­called waste management, from landfills to in­ cinerators to plasma gasification. As wasting became more prolific and waste products became more permanent, the world’s permeability became more apparent. Runoff contaminated distant land and water, landfills seeped toxic chemicals or exploded methane gas, plastic followed the ocean tides to dis­ tant shores. As an ecological menace, waste itself became a crisis. The historian Reinhart Koselleck identified the end of the eighteenth cen­ tury as the moment when “progress” became a modern historical concept, one “whose content of experience and whose surplus of expectation was not available before.”117 He argues that by 1800, the term progress shed its mean­ ing as simply stepping forward through space. Instead, it came to imply a cumulative process of advancement, in which the most recent stage is always superior to what preceded it. Progress, moreover, was not only change itself, but also the agent of that change. In a similar vein, the anthropologist Michel-­ Rolph Trouillot argued that progress (along with words such as development, modernity, and globalization) should be held with suspicion. For Trouillot, they are “North Atlantic universals”—­“words that project the North Atlantic experience on a universal scale that they themselves helped to create . . . par­ ticulars that have gained a degree of universality, chunks of human history that have become historical standards.”118 Histories of waste management typify Koselleck and Trouillot’s arguments. Their imbalance is obvious: hundreds of pages devoted to the past two and a half centuries, only a few to encapsulate the millennia that came before. The narrative arc of ancient fits and starts separated from the Enlightenment by a long age of cultural and intellectual darkness (all now clearly seen from the viewpoint of modern scientific understanding)—­what the historian Guy Geltner has called the “continuing tyranny of ameliorist views in the histori­ ography of public health”119—­is a recurring trope across many disciplines, in­ cluding medicine, astronomy, and archaeology.120 The anthropologist Wiktor Stoczkowski has referred to that trope as “conjectural history,” a method “tra­ ditionally rich in fragile extrapolations and unconcerned with providing a sufficient empirical basis for its assertions.”121 According to Stoczkowski: When pondering on our origins, we have a tendency to move in a limited field of possibilities, where innovations are most often restricted to combinations

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of conventional elements, that can also be arranged into broader composi­ tions; for example, the “positive” and “negative” periods can be multiplied at will and linked together in complex historico-­philosophical constructions—­ decadence, fall and redemption, progress, perverted progress, cycles of prog­ ress and decadence, etc.—­like letters in an alphabet, whose limited number enables countless words to be formed, or like words, the raw material of pos­ sible sentences infinitely more numerous than the words.122

The issue with a conjectural history of waste is not only that everything pre­ ceding modernity has been given short shrift or that it “reduce[s] the his­ tory of sanitation to technological innovation and a few male visionaries.”123 Conjectural history systematically misrepresents not only the past, but also the present. The dirtier, the more backward, and the more distant the past is made to be, the greater the present becomes by contrast. It is an example of what Bruno Latour called “the chief oddity of the moderns, the idea of a time that passes irreversibly and annuls the entire past in its wake.”124 Thus, nineteenth-­century reforms that advocated for governments to provide clean water, build sanitary sewers, and remove animal carcasses and other refuse from public places can be seen as “a truly radical idea,”125 despite millennia of similar (if not identical) efforts that came before. Conceptual history also masks the fact that modern ideas about what waste fundamentally is, what it can do, and what should be done to it are relatively recent. Rather than a series of progressive innovations and developments culminating in where “we”—­i.e., the Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies who are “among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans”126—­are now, the formation of today’s technical and civic means of waste management can be understood as moments of reconceptualizing what counts as waste and its implications. Waste-­making and waste-­managing habits were and are not natural, but rather take shape according to those changing socially constructed meanings.

2

Archaeologies of Garbage

In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges de­ scribes a planet where a person’s idea of an object produces a solid material­ ization of that object. In Tlön, as that planet is called, lost objects thus multi­ ply as people search for them: Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These sec­ ondary objects are called hrönir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer.1

The Tlönian process of producing and recovering lost objects has important implications for archaeology, which Borges explicitly addresses: “The meth­ odological fabrication of hrönir has performed prodigious services for archae­ ologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future.”2 A Tlönian prison director promises freedom to his inmates if they can find—­or produce—­ important discoveries. Archaeology students on Tlön are trained first to gen­ erate, and then to excavate, gold masks, archaic swords, and clay urns. There are also potential complications presented by these proliferating ob­ jects from the past. Take, for example, a common Tlönian paradox, one that long confused even the planet’s greatest thinkers: “On Tuesday, X crosses a deserted road and loses nine copper coins. On Thursday, Y finds in the road four coins, somewhat rusted by Wednesday’s rain. On Friday, Z discovers three coins in the road. On Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor of his house.” For the Tlönians, the paradox lies in the fact that the loss and retrieval of the same coins is simply impossible. According to Borges, “They recalled

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that all nouns (man, coin, Thursday, Wednesday, rain) have only a metaphor­ ical value. They denounced the treacherous circumstance ‘somewhat rusted by Wednesday’s rain,’ which presupposes what is trying to be demonstrated: the persistence of the four coins from Tuesday to Thursday.” After a century, however, someone finally arrived at the solution: there is only one subject. “X is Y and is Z. Z discovers three coins because he remembers that X lost them; X finds two in the corridor because he remembers that the others have been found.”3 Reading “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” can be unsettling. The short story prompts a reconsideration of conventional epistemologies of archaeology that have long troubled practitioners of the discipline, much like the coin paradox baffled Tlön’s scientists and philosophers. Over half a century ago, the archae­ ologists Philip Phillips, James Ford, and James Griffin expressed concerns over the nominalization of archaeological evidence in words that almost echo those of Borges. They wrote: “Exigencies of language require us to think and talk about pottery types as though they had some sort of independent existence. ‘This sherd is Baytown Plain.’ Upon sufficient repetition of this statement, the concept Baytown Plain takes on a massive solidity.”4 The transformation of in­­ vented entities into reality that occurs in the case of both Tlönian hrönir and ceramic types raises a fundamental question: To what extent are the names, categories, and connections used to identify and interpret objects from the past simply metaphorical projections, akin to Tlön’s “man,” “coin,” or “Thursday”? More important, is archaeological excavation ever something other than uncovering hrönir—­that is, other than discovering mentally predetermined facts? The anthropologist Cristóbal Gnecco has leveled precisely this critique against archaeological traditions in South America, where pre-­Columbian so­ cieties were defined as “chiefdoms” well before actual searches for goldwork, statuary, and mobilization of labor (the predetermined accompanying mark­ ers of such political entities) were undertaken. The archaeologists, Gnecco writes, “looked for what they already knew they would find: caciques [i.e., tribal lords] and the expressions of their power.”5 Even more distressing ques­ tions are inevitable: Is archaeological knowledge of the past not only prede­ termined, but actually just the things that archaeologists have wanted to find? “Stranger and more pure than any hrön,” Borges cautions, “is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope.”6 What, then, determines, the hrönir archaeologists might produce, the things they want to find? Interpretive and evaluative judgments made about what archaeological objects are, or what they can or should be, are not universal. Those convictions reveal insights into contemporary (i.e., historically and geo­ graphically contingent) ideas and practices as much as, if not more than, an­

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cient ones. In what follows, I examine those revelations with respect to rub­ bish: I analyze how major shifts in archaeological theory and practice took place in the context of changing cultural perceptions of and practices involv­ ing waste. In fact, archaeology has often served to reify particular situated no­ tions as universal, timeless, even inevitable. Societal understandings of trash in the present (whenever that present moment may be) influence claims about trash in the past, and, in turn, make the ways in which rubbish is thought about and dealt with in the present seem natural and logical: the culmination of hu­ manity’s continuous progress from waste-­making to waste-­managing creatures. Certainly, some archaeological artifacts or deposits meet present common­ sense and/or empirical criteria according to which it is possible for archaeol­ ogists to classify them as “rubbish.” But did those same classification systems exist for people in the past? How stable are such criteria over time? When “we”—­whether past-­loving or past-­living creatures—­recognize something as garbage, what conclusions are already precluded by today’s imagined dichot­ omies between rubbish and ritual, waste and value? Tracing the changing nature of trash in archaeology requires a long-­term view of the discipline. Most histories of archaeological thought and theory chronicle three pivotal transformations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: culture-­historical archaeology; processual archaeology, or “New Archaeology”; and postprocessual archaeology—­each reflecting particular ideas about what it is that archaeologists study, how archaeological investigations should be undertaken and to what ends, and whether and what it is possi­ble to learn or know about the past.7 Since the turn of the millennium, archaeo­ logical theory has often been characterized somewhat differently, as a set of diverse but complementary approaches. Within that set is a range of related positions that variably emphasize the relations among people, things, and places, often in ways that aim to undermine the primacy afforded to humans in those interactions.8 Archaeologists and historians of archaeology continue to debate whether these developments should actually be considered revolutionary paradigm shifts (complete rejections and replacements of what came before) or simply continuous, often cumulative changes in ways of thinking. Regardless, the divisions do serve to characterize and historicize broad changes in archae­ ological epistemologies.9 Those particular ways of thinking in archaeology developed in the context of broader cultural and historical changes in what counts as waste, what should be done with it, and what kinds of information about the past it retains.10 To be clear, I am not suggesting that ideas about rubbish cause shifts in archaeological theory and practice, but rather that at­ titudes and understandings involving trash have formed part of the broader

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conditions under which archaeological thought and practice can be revised and refined.11 Prevailing understandings of waste at any given moment are what Michel Foucault (perhaps confusingly in this case) famously called the “archaeologi­ cal” level of knowledge12—­they contribute to a set of implicit rules that allow (archaeological) discourses to take root and have value. If, as Borges mischie­ vously implies, archaeologists tend to find what meets our expectations, those expectations inevitably correspond to the world in which we dwell. Although the nature of the available data has for the most part remained unchanged, conceptual expansions and refinements of what counts as trash and what trash can mean have made possible wholly new approaches to and understandings of the traces of the past. Making Middens Meaningful: Culture-­Historical Archaeology Archaeologists have often thought and argued about trash—­what it is and what it isn’t, how it is produced, and what it looks like on the ground. Archae­ ology has been called “an important but by no means exemplary form of waste collection,” and it has been defined, by practicing archaeologists, as “the sci­ ence of rubbish” or “the discipline that tries to understand old garbage.”13 But interest in knowing about the past did not always involve the investigation and interpretation of trash. Unlike pollen, tooth enamel, microscopic seeds, and radioactive isotopes of carbon, all of which have become meaningful in­ dices of antiquity only in the past century,14 a particular confluence of epis­ temic and sociopolitical factors transformed ordinary (and always available) rubbish into a source of facts suitable for making archaeological narratives.15 Those factors first came together forcefully in the mid-­nineteenth cen­ tury, alongside the formation of the modern discipline of archaeology. The very idea of prehistory, of a deep time inaccessible via written records, was taking shape just as industrialization, urbanization, and population growth were forcing Western Europe and the United States to reckon with systems of waste management. Politicians, developing industries, and sanitary engineers confronted the accumulation, reuse, and transformation of everyday waste, but scholars, too, were thinking about things left behind.16 Geologists, pale­ ontologists, evolutionary anatomists, and other “past-­loving creatures”17 had begun to realize that sources of physical evidence for distant and unknown natural history were buried in the earth, waiting to be found. That revelation was extended to objects left behind by ancient humans, which were under­ stood to be somewhat like the traces of extinct animal species (i.e., fossils). Ancient and modern refuse heaps thus emerged as sources of physical evi­

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dence of distant natural and human pasts. Archaeology became a science of the past, akin to geology, paleontology, and comparative anatomy, with rub­ bish as its distinct data set to be collected, identified, and put in order. That early alignment shaped the standard methodologies and theoretical possibili­ ties of the new discipline. The notion of “prehistory”—­the idea of a past beyond the reach of tex­ tual sources—­emerged in the early nineteenth century.18 Prior to this inven­ tion, antiquities were fit into a framework constructed around views of the past purportedly supported by classical or biblical textual evidence. A biface stone tool, recovered beside the molar of a mastodon, was explained as the spearhead of an ancient Briton, lying alongside the remains of an elephant brought there by the armies of the emperor Claudius; a mammoth tusk in Siberia was also an elephant—­transported there by the biblical flood.19 In the late eighteenth-­century, while geologists and paleontologists were “bursting the limits of time” and discovering “worlds before Adam,”20 historians had begun to question biblical chronologies, but they did so in ways that made history shorter rather than longer.21 History became limited to those periods from which written sources survived—­effectively making the deepest parts of humankind’s past unknowable to historians. Knowledge of prehistory, then, could be provided only by antiquarians and their interpretations of objects from those distant times. The recognition of humanity’s deep antiquity and its accessibility via ma­ terial remains—­both major intellectual revolutions22—­coincided with the cre­ ation of the Museum of Nordic Antiquities in Copenhagen. The director of that museum, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, famously organized its artifacts according to the three-­age system: a universal progression through Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages.23 Despite its importance in the history of archaeology today, Thomsen’s comparative methodology generated conflict and resistance.24 Thomsen’s organizational principles followed examples provided by early nineteenth-­century natural history museums, including Georges Cuvier’s Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, which focused on morpholog­ ical and functional differences over geography or chronology. Moreover, in order to fit the museum’s collection into discrete material and functional cate­ gories and present them as a singular, continuous narrative from the Stone Age to the advent of Christianity, Thomsen often mixed together antiquities from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden or broke apart contemporaneous finds.25 His contemporaries in academic and antiquarian circles were not immediately convinced by the new framework. The British archaeologist Thomas Wright wrote in The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon: “There is something we may perhaps say poetical, certainly imaginative, in talking of an age of stone, or an

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age of bronze, or an age of iron, but such divisions have no meaning in his­ tory, which cannot be treated as a physical science, and its objects arranged in genera and species.” Instead, Wright argued, artifacts should be organized “according to the peoples to whom they belonged, and as they illustrate their manners and history.”26 the science of “kitchen middens” Thomsen’s explicit characterization of his work as “comparative archaeology” and “a new branch of science” marked the formation of prehistoric archaeol­ ogy not only as a discipline focused on the interpretation and comparison of material culture, but also shifted its alignment away from history and phi­ lology toward other field-­and museum-­based forms of inquiry, particularly paleontology and geology.27 Methodological and theoretical approaches that united those other developing disciplines also became key aspects of prehis­ toric archaeology, from field excavations and the relationship between stra­ tigraphy and chronology to the role of morphology in defining new taxono­ mies and tracing functional change. Those ties were made even more explicit in 1848, when the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters established an interdisciplinary commission to investigate massive mounds of oyster and cockle shells that had been observed along Danish coastlines and found to contain numerous prehistoric artifacts. The commission included a represen­ tative from each relevant field: Thomsen’s protégé, the archaeologist Jens J. A. Worsaae; the zoologist Johannes Japetus Steenstrup; and an eminent geolo­ gist, Johan Georg Forchhammer.28 The early, collaborative investigations of those shell-­mound sites—­what the Danish called køkkenmøddinger (kitchen middens) once they were iden­ tified as ancient human settlements—­had a widespread and lasting impact on the emerging practices of prehistoric archaeology. Not only did the inves­ tigators establish the use of the term midden to denote a particular type of archaeological refuse deposit (the word had been used in English since the fifteenth century specifically to describe a dungheap29), but they also sought to reconstruct paleoenvironmental changes, constructed chronologies based on stratigraphic excavation methods, and employed experimental techniques to understand artifact forms and functions.30 The pioneering work of Danish scholars, made available in six volumes of annual reports published between 1851 and 1856, was quickly emulated in other parts of the world.31 By the 1860s, translations of the recent advances in Danish archaeology appeared in English, and these directly encouraged the investigation of shell heaps along the Atlantic coast of North America that “ar­

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chaeologists had hitherto regarded as unworthy of study.”32 Established global scientific networks helped extend the influence of the Scandinavian models well beyond Europe and North America, prompting late nineteenth-­century archaeological investigations of shell mounds in Asia and South America.33 As interest in prehistory and the techniques for exploring it spread, the perceived affinities between archaeology and other sciences of the past—­ particularly geology and paleontology—­also deepened. An 1861 summary of recent advances in European archaeology—­which, according to the archae­ ologist and intellectual historian Bruce Trigger, influenced all the early shell-­ midden excavations along the east coast of North America either directly or indirectly34—­stated: Before the beginning of history there were life and industry, of which various monuments still exist; while others lie buried in the soil, much as we find the organic remains of former creations entombed in the strata composing the crust of the globe. The antiquities enact here a similar part to that of the fos­ sils; and if Cuvier calls the geologist an antiquarian of a new order, we can reverse that remarkable saying, and consider the antiquarian as a geologist.35

Naturalists examining shell mounds in North America recognized the pres­ ence of distinct strata and the significance of temporal changes reflected in that stratigraphy, even identifying evolutionary stages based on artifacts and specific sequences from styles of pottery. The application of stratigraphic prin­ ciples allowed scientists and antiquaries to prove the contemporaneity of hu­ man artifacts and extinct animal species in cave deposits, as well as to refute arguments that anthropological materials were intrusive in older deposits.36 By the early twentieth century, archaeologists began to extend those ideas be­ yond shell middens and caves to other anthropogenic deposits; but it was the geologists and paleontologists who laid the theoretical and methodological groundwork for the eventual combination of stratigraphic excavation and arti­ fact sequencing that would allow archaeologists to build relative chronologies.37 t h e s e a r c h f o r “ g r e at r u b b i s h h e a p s ” The various sciences of the past not only shared methodological develop­ ments, but also provided one another with important concrete evidence. Ac­­ cording to the anthropologist and historian of science Irina Podgorny, ar­ chaeology offered an essential bridge between the deep past, which could be reconstructed only via material traces, and aspects of the more proximate past that, although well within the time frame of written history, had been lost because they had been excluded from documentary records.38 Specifically,

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Podgorny demonstrates how the Danish kitchen-­midden excavations pro­ vided proof that certain animal species no longer found in Denmark had for­ merly coexisted with humans. That revelation forced paleontologists and zool­ ogists to reckon with the notion that the process of extinction was not limited to geological time, but instead was something that had taken place within relatively recent historical memory. Archaeological excavation raised new questions; it provided scholars with new approaches to answer them as well. For example, ornithologists trying to ascertain whether the disappearance of species like the great auk were actual extinctions struggled against a lack of evidence and conflicting oral histories, but they were able to locate physical remains of hunted birds in recent refuse dumps used by sailors and fishermen. As Podgorny tells it: The Danish archaeological excavation model thus expanded to the north Atlantic and other British colonies. . . . Administrative networks in Mauritius, Rodrigues Island, and the Seychelles were activated in order to look for re­ mains of the dodo and the solitaire, species that went extinct leaving even fewer remains than the great auk. . . . The request was a success: shortly after­ wards, the magistrate of Rodrigues Island sent a box to Mauritius filled with turtle and bird bones recovered from midden excavations.39

Those bones, when sent to London, served to raise funds for further excava­ tions in island middens of the Indian Ocean. It soon became apparent across the natural sciences that, in addition to shedding light on the dark times of deep prehistory, stratified refuse deposits could provide information about more temporally proximate but still unknown pasts. In fact, early twentieth-­century excavation projects that were key in iden­ tifying pre-­Columbian cultures and chronologies in the Americas did so by explicitly searching out deposits that appeared similar to the shell middens and caves that had produced such rich prehistoric finds in Europe: deep, dense, layered accumulations of artifacts, fauna, and flora.40 Nels C. Nelson, for ex­ ample, is celebrated in histories of archaeology for his early use of stratigraphic excavations at the Pueblo San Cristóbal site in New Mexico in 1914 and for building local chronologies based on the frequency of different pottery types found in each excavation level.41 Nelson’s techniques in New Mexico, however, were applied methods borrowed from the natural sciences. As Nelson himself wrote in a personal letter, his “chief inspiration to search for chronological evidence came from reading about European cave finds; from visiting several of the caves, seeing the levels marked off on the walls, and in taking part in the Castillo Cave in Spain for several weeks in 1913.”42 Nelson also drew on the model provided by the archaeologist-­paleontologist team of Freidrich Max

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Uhle and John C. Merriam and the stratigraphic principles they had used in the excavation of a shell mound in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as his own investigations of a similar shell midden at Ellis Landing, a site also near San Francisco.43 Nelson, in turn, inspired Alfred V. Kidder, who is also heralded for his stratigraphic excavations of “great rubbish heaps” to establish local chronolo­ gies in southwestern North America. Kidder visited Nelson in the field in New Mexico before beginning his own work at Pecos Pueblo in 1915.44 In an early description of the Pecos excavations (a work dedicated to Nelson), Kidder describes not only how “it was hoped that the remains would there be found so stratified as to make clear the development of the various Pueblo arts and to enable students to place in their proper chronological order numerous New Mexican ruins,” but also that “this hope was strengthened by the fact that Mr. N. C. Nelson . . . had recently discovered very important stratified remains at San Christobal [sic] a few miles to the west.”45 The role of “kitchen middens” and “refuse heaps” in archaeological inves­ tigations was strictly limited to providing the stratigraphic layers and associ­ ated materials necessary to reconstruct the occupational chronology of a place. Trash provided evidence of timing. Culture-­historical archaeologists built and refined regional chronologies by sorting artifacts into types that permitted the sequencing of rough cultural time periods—­methods that some archaeolo­ gists referred to as “stratigraphic observation of refuse heaps” or “refuse stra­ tigraphy.”46 Each layer of artifacts represented a progressive stage of human technological and stylistic development that could be chronicled by morpho­ logical change over time, much as biological and paleontological taxa were or­ ganized into evolutionary sequences.47 Indeed, anthropologists such as Alfred L. Kroeber made the analogy explicit, referring to cultural traits as the anthro­ pologist’s equivalent of the biologist’s species: the smallest units of materials the scientists had to deal with. For Kroeber, tracing the geographic and tem­ poral distribution of cultural traits would allow for “inference as to the origin and areal history of the group,” just as with plant and animal taxa.48 Rubbish deposits thus served as testaments to human presence or absence—­ the anthropological equivalent of rich fossil beds. Archaeologists understood individual strata not as indications of cultural change, but as the remains of distinct cultures. A small site or smaller deposits (“rubbish pits”) were under­ stood to offer archaeologists evidence of the brief occupation of a single cul­ ture, while larger accumulations (“rubbish mounds”) allowed for the identi­ fication of multiple, superimposed cultures.49 Even as archaeologists began to entertain the possibility that stratified deposits could indicate changes in material culture over time (rather than occupational breaks between distinct

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cultures), the processes behind those cultural changes or continuities remained unknown and of little interest.50 Today, Kidder’s description of Pecos Pueblo’s massive “refuse heaps” is remarkable, reading as an almost programmatic at­ tempt to avoid ancient intentionality and meaning: Against the mesa the deposit was found to vary from 15 to 20 feet in depth. It sloped away gradually toward the plain. Its composition was very uniform, soft earth darkened by charcoal and decayed organic matter, filled with pot­ sherds, animal bones and chips of building stone. The heap was also used as a cemetery, our trench revealing over 150 burials. . . . Mortuary pottery occurred only in the earlier graves and not abundantly even in them. Besides skeletons and pottery there were recovered a great number of broken and many whole specimens of bone and stone tools, as well as ornaments, clay toys, and figu­ rines. The most important results, however, were, as had been hoped, of a stratigraphical nature. . . . Care, of course, had to be exercised to choose for the test places which seemed to contain no burials, and all trials were abandoned when it became clear that a grave shaft had disturbed the original deposition of the refuse.51

A myopic focus on the importance of rubbish not only spread quickly to ar­ chaeological excavations beyond the American Southwest, but also continued to characterize archaeological practice for decades. For example, George C. Vaillant, an archaeologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who had worked with Kidder, similarly sought out sites “possessing deep beds of debris” when he began excavating in Mexico in the 1920s.52 Almost half a century after Nelson’s and Kidder’s excavations, Mortimer Wheeler, who developed an eponymous method of stratigraphic excavation aimed at preserving both vertical and horizontal stratigraphy, continued to emphasize the presence of trash as fundamental to archaeological research. According to Wheeler, it was both “surprising and reassuring to find how much good constructive material can in fact be extracted from a rubbish-­pit.”53 “ m i d d e n ” a s a n a r c h a e o l o g i c a l c at e g o r y As the importance of ancient refuse to archaeology grew, so too did the vari­ ety of deposits that could be included under the category “midden.” The origi­ nal Danish word—­køkkenmøddinger—­today has a slightly different meaning than in its original use, but the term remains specific. Distinguished from either a “shell midden” or a “shell midden site” on the basis of size and shell density, køkkenmøddinger refer exclusively to “a special type of coastal settle­ ment in which shell refuse is a dominant part but which is mixed with cultural debris such as flint, bone, antler, charcoal, ceramics, ash, fire-­cracked stones

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(‘potboilers’), and features such as hearths, pits, stake-­holes, and graves, etc.”54 At first, the direct translation of køkkenmøddinger was used in archaeological reports, distinguishing archaeological kitchen middens (as the remains from food production and procurement that were of scientific interest) from mid­ dens as they were more commonly known and used (as dumps for human and/or animal excrement). By the early twentieth century, however, many ar­­ chaeologists had dropped the kitchen clarifier and used simply midden (or rubbish/refuse heap), even though the term still referred to deep, stratified accumulations of anthropogenic materials—­shell mounds without the shells. What counts as a midden remains ambiguous, despite the term’s long and central role in archaeology. For Nelson or Kidder, the sizes, shapes, or loca­ tions of middens did not matter, but the deposits did need to be deep and stratified.55 Almost a century later, in a dedicated discussion of “midden­ ing behavior” observed at Runnymede Bridge in southern England, Stuart Needham and Tony Spence defined a midden as “an[y] occupational deposit relatively rich in refuse and with evidence for deliberate and sequential accu­ mulation of refuse at one location.”56 In most cases however, a deposit is clas­ sified as a midden simply if it includes a relatively high density of artifacts, whether compared to other areas within a site or to other sites. This empha­ sizes the relative nature of the term, removing the explicit characteristic of being “rich in refuse,” and moving away from the intentionality present in Needham and Spence’s definition.57 Methods for determining whether a de­ posit is “relatively rich,” moreover, can range from simple shovel test pits, in which a fifty-­by-­fifty-­centimeter (about one-­and-­a-­half-­by-­one-­and-­a-­half-­ foot) probe is assumed to serve as a representative sample of a deposit’s char­ acter and contents, to more intensive combinations of electromagnetic survey, magnetometer survey, and test pitting.58 In the decades following the establishment of archaeology as a compar­ a­tive discipline, distinct from both historical and antiquarian traditions, Scandinavian “kitchen-­midden” investigations transformed seemingly ordi­ nary trash into what the philosopher of archaeology Alison Wylie calls “ar­ chaeologically usable facts.”59 The specific timing of rubbish’s emergence as a source of evidence of the past—­ancient and historical—­coincided with broader social shifts in thinking about garbage and discard. At the end of the nine­ teenth century, disposal became separated from production, engendering a host of administrative challenges and new forms of waste management in order to face the problems caused by processes of industrialization and the growth of cities.60 According to the historian Susan Strasser, this was the moment when “trash and trashmaking became integral to the economy in a wholly new way.”61 The goal of finding productive reuses for rubbish and value in discards

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spread readily from industry to academia. Indeed, in 1868, Jeffries Wyman began his “Account of Some Kjœkkenmœddings, or Shell-­Heaps, in Maine and Massachusetts” with this statement: Anyone who would take the trouble on going to a strange city, to examine the rubbish in its suburbs and streets, and carefully collect and compare the fragments of pottery, pieces of cloth, of paper, cordage, the bones of different animals used as food, worked pieces of stone, wood, bone, or metal, might gain some insight into the modes of life of the inhabitants, and form a fair conception of the progress they had made in the arts of civilization.62

In contrast to earlier antiquarian practices of collecting singular objects for their intrinsic value or art-­historical interest, the realization that knowledge of an otherwise unknowable prehistoric past could be gained by sorting through ancient refuse—­by analyzing “middens,” broadly writ—­made new kinds of archaeological inquiry possible. Waste Making as Cultural Adaptation: The New Archaeology In the middle of the twentieth century, questions of how and why cultu­ral pat­ terns were created and maintained became the focus of the “New Ar­chae­ o­logy.”63 Proponents of the New Archaeology (also known as processual ar­ chaeology) understood societies to progress from hunting and gathering to industrialization—­societal changes that took place not because of human ideas or agency, but rather as evolutionary adaptations to ecological factors.64 Processual archaeology’s neoevolutionary framework had two major impli­ cations. First, that as biological adaptations to the environment, human cul­ tures were predictable and widely comparable, determined by the same laws of cultural dynamics everywhere—­forces of which humans themselves were unaware. Second, the high degree of regularity imagined in human ecological adaptations meant that archaeologists could study living cultures—­specifically, the correlations between particular human behaviors and particular types of material culture—­to understand and reconstruct the past. Once again, trash played a key role in the development of new archaeo­ logical methods and theories. Between 1969 and 1973, Lewis R. Binford, argu­ ably the most influential archaeologist in American archaeology and a leader of the New Archaeology movement, studied settlement and subsistence pat­ terns among the Nunamiut of Alaska in order to gain insight into the behav­ iors behind Paleolithic stone tool assemblages of Western Europe.65 Binford documented the transitions of material remains from Nunamiut hunting, cooking, camping, and other activities into what would become the archaeo­

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logical record, diagramming in particular where different varieties of waste were discarded. Binford’s schematics, meant to serve as models that could explain the spatial patterning of archaeological assemblages, relied on the theory that all hunter-­gatherers make the same use of space and mate­ rial resources—­that the San of the Kalahari, the Nunamiut of Alaska, and Paleolithic cave dwellers in Europe would all generate the same newly defined “drop zones,” “toss zones,” and “aggregate dumping areas.” This method—­ ethnoarchaeology—­was used by processual archaeologists to infer a wide range of human behaviors from archaeological evidence.66 As the archaeologist Kent Flannery put it, processualists were “not ultimately concerned with ‘the Indian behind the artifact,’ but rather with the system behind both the Indian and the artifact.”67 For New Archaeologists, making waste and discarding it in particular ways were systematic (i.e., generalizable, predictable) human responses to the chal­ lenges of living. Middens were no longer simply dumps to be mined for tem­ porally and culturally diagnostic artifacts, but key elements in universal human processes of production, consumption, and discard that revealed how archae­ ological sites could be identified and explained.68 Not only were those pro­ cesses made available and reconstructable by the archaeological record, but they were understood as continuing to unfold in the present. Neoevolutionary theories of change assumed that new technologies and complexities in social organization were progressive adaptations to environmental factors—­the re­ sults of humanity’s universal and ever-­increasing control over nature. The concerns that postwar Americans felt over finding sanitary and efficient ways to remove and dispose of waste were thus assumed to have been felt by all people in the past as well. Simultaneously, New Archaeology’s systemic views of culture were fueled by the broad faith in science, technological optimism, and profound sense of cultural hegemony that characterized the midcentury United States.69 In all times and places, humanity was united by an ability to solve problems and make life better. Technology as the contemporary answer to the problem of waste was thus likewise projected into the past. The result was a narrative of the longevity—­effectively, of the universality—­of garbage as an inevitable hu­ man problem, which had to be dealt with in innately human ways, and also as an index of human resourcefulness and the human capacity for extraction, production, and creativity. Municipal waste-­collection services, incinerators, and sanitary landfills were viewed as addressing the timeless problems of waste: they were simply the culmination of waste management’s evolution from drop zones, toss zones, and aggregate dumping areas. Practically, this meant that many New Archaeologists embraced Binford’s ethnoarchaeological research

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methods and models. As they observed living people, however, most ethno­ archaeologists simply documented what happened to the objects they con­ sidered to be trash and how those items were be recycled, discarded, or pro­ visionally retained. They did not question when, or even if, those items were regarded as waste by the people making and using them. t h e f o r m a t i o n o f m a t e r i a l i z e d b e h av i o r s As archaeologists began to focus on the processes by which everyday objects were transformed into archaeological artifacts, they discovered discrepancies between the expectations produced by ethnoarchaeological models and the re­ ality of assemblages in the ground. The theoretical program known as behav­ ioral archaeology, developed at the University of Arizona in the early 1970s, grew out of the need to address such “deficiencies of the New Archaeology.”70 Michael Schiffer, one of behavioral archaeology’s creators and principal pro­ ponents, argued that the archaeological record offered only “a distorted reflec­ tion of a past behavioral system,” a reflection that had been altered primarily by the ways and locations in which items were discarded.71 For Schiffer, the archaeologist’s job was to eliminate that distortion in order to better under­ stand ancient human behaviors. The result was intensive study and descrip­ tion of the natural and cultural processes that could affect the formation of archaeological sites, including a typology of four kinds of discard: primary refuse (things discarded at the location of use); secondary refuse (things dis­ carded away from the area of use); de facto refuse (material abandoned at the use location but still having perceived use value); and provisional refuse (stored refuse having a perceived use or reuse value). Ethnoarchaeological and ex­ perimental studies still provided models for understanding archaeological evidence, but the focus had shifted. Where earlier researchers had solely fo­ cused on deliberate disposal, observers now attempted to trace all processes—­ intentional and unintentional—­involved in the formation of archaeological sites, ranging from trampling to provisional discard and recycling to chil­ dren’s play and simple loss.72 More of a refinement than a revolution, behavioral archaeology shared many of the New Archaeology’s theoretical positions and the underlying as­ sumptions that made them possible. Schiffer’s models, like Binford’s, involved certain universally valid correlations between material objects and human behavior, but Schiffer understood those regularities as the result of individual behaviors and specific interactions with artifacts rather than systemic cultu­ ral responses. The key difference is that behavioral archaeologists viewed ar­ chaeology as a scientific endeavor to study material culture, whereas many

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processual archaeologists saw material objects as merely means to an end, their true object of study being past human culture and history. Once again, a shift in archaeological method and theory emerged as ways of thinking about waste changed. In 1972, the archaeologist William Rathje began the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona. As described by Rathje, its goal was to verify assumptions about the way material culture related to be­ havior in past civilizations by testing those assumptions in “a familiar, ongoing society.”73 The idea came from an educational exercise for Rathje’s anthropol­ ogy students, designed to provide them with the opportunity to explore the relationships between artifact patterns and behavior with materials that they would easily recognize and relate to. As Rathje himself put it, students “didn’t really understand broken pots, charred seeds, and animal bones; they did understand empty beer containers, Hostess Twinkie wrappers, and spoiled heads of lettuce.”74 Rathje arranged to have Tucson’s city sanitation depart­ ment provide household waste collected from specific census tracts for his teams of student volunteers, who surveyed and cataloged the discarded mate­ rials. The basic idea was simple: to use the same archaeological tools and tech­ niques employed in the study of past societies to learn about late-­twentieth-­ century American civilization and, simultaneously, to use twentieth-­century American civilization’s patterns of consumption and waste to learn about past societies.75 Trash in the past and trash in the present were interchangeable in terms of function and meaning: “From Styrofoam cups along a roadway and urine bags on the moon there is an uninterrupted chain of garbage that reaches back more than two million years to the first ‘waste flake’ knocked off in the knapping of the first stone tool.”76 Rathje’s “garbology” highlighted how reactions to economic and politi­ cal events were reflected in consumer activities; unearthed evidence of the surprisingly slow breakdown of materials (even organic ones) inside land­ fills; and, for the first time, exposed America’s propensity for throwing away perfectly good food. Among the most important revelations of the Garbage Project were the broad discrepancies between what people thought they knew about their own garbage and the items and quantities of trash recovered by Rathje’s team. In some cases, actual consumption differed drastically from consumers’ ideas about their own behaviors as recorded in questionnaires and surveys. For example, people underestimated or underreported their consump­ tion of sugar, fat, and alcohol by as much as 94 percent and overestimated or overreported the amount of fresh produce they used in meals prepared from scratch.77 On a larger scale, the Garbage Project demonstrated that the kinds of waste that loom large in the popular imagination—­fast food packaging, ex­ panded polystyrene foam, and disposable diapers—­were not actually making

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significant contributions to American landfills (less than 2 percent of a landfill’s total volume at most). Paper, on the other hand, made up 40 percent of the to­ tal volume of garbage in landfill excavations. Garbage thus not only provided potent clues about people’s lives, but it also offered information that could be found nowhere else, including ethnographically. People themselves were often unaware or incapable of recognizing the real patterns of their daily lives, but archaeology revealed “the truth.”78 Rathje was not the first to seek “the truth” in the trash. In fact, he borrowed the term garbology from A. J. Weberman, an eccentric fan of Bob Dylan’s who used it to describe his investigations of Dylan’s trash. Weberman was a pro­ fessor of “Dylanology” (with a clear penchant for disciplinary neologisms) at New York’s hyperleftist Alternate University, a “walk-­up college on West 14th Street offering free instruction in the revolutionary arts.”79 Weberman published several articles (mainly in underground newspapers like the East Village Other) interpreting Dylan’s song lyrics in light of his trash and, on one occasion, even led his students to Dylan’s home to rummage through the rubbish.80 In 1975, the journalist Jay Gourley used sensitive information gleaned from Henry Kissinger’s trash in an article in the National Enquirer, including the names and work schedules of the security agents assigned to Kissinger and the number and type of arms and ammunition carried in each Secret Service vehicle. The New York Times reported that Gourley’s actions “caused graved anguish to Mrs. Kissinger” and that the secretary of state him­ self was “really revolted by what he consider[ed] a violation of the privacy of his house.”81 Whether practiced by rubbish detectives like Weberman and Gourley or an academic like Rathje, garbology encouraged broad audiences to think archaeologically about waste. The Garbage Project did more than apply archaeological methods to the study of modern behavior. Like Binford’s drop zones and dumping areas, mod­ eled on the needs and solutions of waste management at the time, the Garbage Project also extended its insights and assumptions from contemporary patterns of production, use, and discard to the interpretation of the past. For example, Rathje and his coauthor, Cullen Murphy, argued that there are four basic meth­ ods of garbage disposal: dumping, burning, recycling, and source reduction (minimizing the volume of material goods that come into existence and later become garbage)—­all of which are instinctively human ways of dealing with waste, used to differing degrees for millennia. They go on to imagine and ex­ plain a variety of ancient patterns and practices according to their typology: The ancient Maya, for instance, deposited much of their organic waste in what we would today call open dumps. These dumps probably experienced the oc­

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casional explosion as a result of the methane gas building up inside them, and some of the piles of garbage would have been continually burning or smol­ dering, making room for more garbage to be dumped. The Maya also re­ cycled inorganic garbage—­mainly broken pottery, grinding stones, and cut stone from the façades of old buildings—­by using it as fill in temples or for other building projects. And the Maya were adept at source reduction. In the Late Postclassic period—­after A.D. 1200—­they drastically curbed demand for richly ornamented ceramics, ritual paraphernalia, and body ornaments, and thereby achieved a significant savings in scarce or costly resources. They did so (perhaps in the face of economic decline) by the simple expedient of aban­ doning the practice of burying the dead with new or intact pottery, tools, and jewelry, and burying them instead with objects that were broken. In addition they substituted “fake” for original art—­for example, clay beads covered with gold foil instead of beads of solid gold.82

Although few other archaeologists would attribute changes in ceramic style, technological production, and burial practice to universal concerns over waste management, Rathje and Murphy’s broader underlying assumption—­ that “the obsolescence of material culture is at once inevitable and essential”83—­ remains generally accepted, or at least unquestioned. As one archaeologist recently claimed, “Especially in settlement contexts, nearly every find exca­ vated is, in one way or another, refuse.”84 The Garbage Project used modern garbage analogically to teach archaeological methods; the application of those archaeological methods to modern garbage yielded surprising revelations about contemporary society and behavior. Prehistoric archaeologists, whether in­ tentionally or inadvertently, thus became those who glean insights about an­ cient society and behavior from ancient garbage. Archaeologists, like garbolo­ gists, were after material culture that people didn’t think about. Archaeology, like garbology, revealed things about the past that even the people who lived it would not have known. Rethinking Rubbish: Postprocessual Archaeology Despite the attention dedicated to rubbish, an unstated implication common to Binford’s, Schiffer’s, and Rathje’s work is that how and where an item was discarded in the past did not itself constitute behavior of interest or impor­ tance, but instead was an impediment to understanding such behavior. In other words, middens, toss zones, and garbage dumps were not themselves meaningful—­they merely facilitated the creation of patterns in the archaeo­ logical record reflecting meaningful behaviors (technological innovation, sub­ sistence strategies, trade practices, social organization, etc.).85 That position,

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however, became increasingly untenable in the wake of environmentalist move­ ments. As the sociologist Gay Hawkins has explored in detail, environmen­ talist narratives in late capitalist countries in the 1960s and ’70s required a new kind of reflexivity with respect to waste. Familiar slogans such as “Think globally, act locally” and “Reduce, reuse, recycle” called for individuals to scrutinize their household practices and bodily habits, generating new moral codes, ethical commitments, and social identities defined by waste.86 Collective consciousness around the consumption, use, and disposal of objects is an implicit but requisite element of postprocessual approaches to waste. As waste was reclassified from a by-­product of progress to an environ­ mental pollutant, waste making came to be understood as a self-­aware, self-­ defining act, while trash was transformed into an active and acknowledged means of creating, maintaining, and manipulating social relations. Environ­ mentalist ethics recast ways of generating and managing waste as individual representations of deep cultural logics, echoing and providing evidence for structuralist and symbolic understandings of material culture. Archaeological assemblages once thought to be mere trash dumps were reinterpreted as rit­ ual deposits, purposeful offerings, and even architecture, often without ad­ ditional excavations or new data. m a k i n g wa s t e m a k e s p e o p l e By the 1970s, Euro-­American self-­confidence had begun to wane and the idea of technologically driven progress was viewed with increasing skepticism and pessimism.87 On both sides of the Atlantic, waste shifted in meaning from a sign of prosperity to a source of environmental pollution and a reminder of the finite availability of natural resources.88 In the United States in par­ ticular, at the center of environmentalist discourse was a narrative of loss, of the destruction of both nature and humanity: postindustrial societies, alien­ ated from the natural world, exploit and contaminate the physical environ­ ment on which their survival depends.89 Those sentiments, entwined with a deeply rooted American nostalgia for an imagined, unspoiled past, reversed the predominant postindustrial waste-­making narrative.90 Waste production and management practices became signs of economic, social, and moral fail­ ings. Rather than the culmination of long histories of innovative adaptations to the world, waste making became a distinctive problem of modern capital­ ist societies—­a problem whose solutions might therefore be found in other times, cultures, or places. The pivotal shift in cultural ideas around waste is perhaps best embodied by Keep America Beautiful, Inc.’s 1971 “Crying Indian” public service announce­

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ment. Often deemed one of the best commercials of the century, if not of all time,91 the advertisement features a stereotyped Native American man paddling a birchbark canoe along a river (in reality, the actor was an Italian American, Espera Oscar de Corti, who claimed Cherokee and Cree heritage and went by the name of Iron Eyes Cody92). The seemingly pristine environment is in­ creasingly marred by floating trash as Cody approaches an industrial harbor. As he comes ashore, the narrator’s voice booms. “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country,” he says. The background comes into focus, revealing that Cody has landed alongside a busy highway. Just as one vehicle’s passenger tosses a bag of fast food waste out the window, which lands and explodes at Cody’s feet, the narrator fin­ ishes solemnly with “and some people don’t.” As Cody turns to the face the camera a single tear wells up and trickles down his cheek. Before the scene fades to black, the narrator scolds the viewer: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” As the journalist Heather Rogers has detailed, Keep America Beautiful, Inc.—­a nonprofit organization funded by the giants of single-­use industries, including Coca-­Cola, the Dixie Cup Company, and the American Can Company, among others—­was one of the first of many greenwashing corporate fronts. Keep America Beautiful masked the role of manufacturers in despoiling the earth and convinced the public that environmental degra­ dation was the result of individuals’ selfish disregard for nature, shifting the responsibility for recycling and the blame for pollution away from producers and onto consumers. People were artfully convinced, as Rogers puts it, that “the problem wasn’t the rising levels of waste . . . it was all those heathens who failed to put their discards in the proper place.”93 The success of Keep America Beautiful’s “Crying Indian” campaign was rooted in the widely held perceptions that it cleverly manipulated: the belief that there are fundamental differences between the way Americans of European descent and Indigenous peoples think about and relate to waste and the environment94 and the idea that when and how things are discarded reflects individual identity and col­ lective values. Much like the New Archaeologists had found a past full of efficient, cre­ ative processes of production and discard to mirror postwar American con­ sumerism, in the wake of environmentalist movements, archaeologists found ancient rubbish to be full of symbolic meaning and understood depositional acts to be expressions of social structures and the self. New Archaeologists had used ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological surveys of discard practices to demonstrate universal regularities in culture. Behavioral archaeologists had used them to identify unintentional or overlooked processes responsible for variations in the archaeological record. Ironically, it was those very same

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studies that would upend those assumptions and position rubbish as an ac­ tive force not only in creating and maintaining social relations, but in poten­ tially disguising, inverting, and distorting them. Where practitioners of Americanist “New Archaeology” had found their models in scientific disciplines such as ecology and sociobiology, postproces­ sual archaeologists readily engaged with the theories of sociocultural anthro­ pology, from the structural work of Claude Lévi-­Strauss to the symbolic and interpretive approaches of Clifford Geertz and Mary Douglas.95 Ian Hodder, widely considered the father of postprocessual archaeology, devoted a signifi­ cant portion of his early career to ethnographic fieldwork. As Hodder him­ self reflected, that work was a new type of ethnoarchaeology—­what he called “material culture ethnography”—­“not involving quick visits and measurement, but an ethnoarchaeology steeped in ethnography and involving long-­term study.”96 He spent nearly a decade conducting ethnographic surveys of material culture in Kenya, Sudan, and Zambia that embraced interpretive, hermeneutical analysis, summarized in his 1982 book, Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture. In a chapter focused on the highland Nuba of Sudan, Hodder traced multiple ideologies underlying meat eating, butchery, and the disposal of bone refuse. Specific skeletal elements were retained and/ or displayed for a variety of reasons—­commemoration, fertility, purification, and protection, among others—­revealing the dualisms that structured life among the Nuba as readily as language. Hodder’s analysis of the conceptual and symbolic schemes shaping and shaped by Nuba bone-­refuse disposal di­ rectly (and explicitly) contradicted the New Archaeology’s emphasis on find­ ing explanations in environmental constraints.97 Around the same time that Hodder was examining the underlying struc­ tural logics of bone refuse among the Nuba, the anthropologist Henrietta L. Moore (who also held an archaeology degree) was studying the organiza­ tion of household space and gender relations among the Marakwet of western Kenya.98 Moore argued that archaeologists had long been guilty of assuming that their observations and descriptions of material data were unbiased—­that meaning and relationships were intrinsic to their data, rather than created by the archaeologists themselves. Moore is explicit about this assumption with respect to rubbish: “There has been no investigation of the possibility that all discarded objects may not fall into the same category and that objects so discarded may be organized according to several categories, none of which may be equivalent to our category ‘rubbish.’ ”99 To illustrate her point, Moore detailed the disposal of three distinct types of waste: ash, chaff (mixed with sweepings from houses and compounds), and

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goat feces. Moore noted that the place where each type of rubbish was dis­ carded “reflects” the activities carried out there—­for example, ash is deposited near the woman’s house because all cooking is done in the woman’s house—­ but the positioning of the huts in the compound, in fact, “reflects” the order­ ing of the Marakwet world, which simultaneously governs those activities, the disposal of refuse, the burial of the dead, subsistence activities, formalized ritual, and so on. Rather than discovering fundamental principles underly­ ing their data, Moore argued, archaeologists simply use their own logics to explain their observations—­logics that are then (re)“discovered” in their anal­ ysis. “The activities of hunter-­gatherers are likely to seem rational, logical and logistic,” she wrote, “if those are the principles which the archaeological ob­ server uses to make sense of what he sees going on around him.”100 Moore’s critique recalls hrönir almost eerily—­the objects found, as Borges wrote, are “no less real, but closer to [one’s] expectations” than the original from which they are derived.101 These and other insights into material culture patterning and the active role that could be played by artifacts led Hodder to directly criticize New Archaeologists for separating depositional theory from interpretive theory—­ that is, for imagining that “artefact deposition is adaptively expedient and can be predicted without reference to wider social theories.”102 But how were archaeologists to implement Hodder’s claims that “the meaning of settlement organization and discard can only be derived from the context (present or past) within which settlement use and artifact discard take place”103 when that (past) context was unobservable, perhaps even unknowable? structured deposition, r itual refuse, enchainment In 1984, the archaeologists Colin Richards and Julian Thomas, in a study of artifact patterns at a henge monument in Wessex known as Durrington Walls (excavated in 1966 and 1967), offered what at the time was a radical solu­ tion to the problem of reconstructing meaning from its material remains.104 Durrington Walls had confounded its excavator, Geoffrey Wainwright, who first interpreted its architecture as the remains of roofed buildings used to su­ pervise rituals, then as domestic structures used to house astronomer priests. The problem in understanding Durrington Walls, according to Wainwright, was that “a characteristic peculiar to these buildings and their surrounding earthworks is the great quantity of human refuse. . . . In this respect these sites differ from those with an overtly ritual function.”105 As Richards and Thomas

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noted, however, what was actually peculiar was archaeologists’ common as­ sumptions about what constitutes a site with an “overtly ritual function” and their expectations for how it should appear in the archaeological record.106 Rather than relating ritual activity to the presence or absence of human refuse, Richards and Thomas argued that ritual—­broadly understood as en­ compassing much of human activity—­should be detectable archaeologically as what they called “structured deposition.” Influenced by Moore’s insight that refuse could be actively manipulated by social strategies as well as meaning­ fully constitutive of those strategies, Richards and Thomas reanalyzed the ex­ cavations at Durrington Walls.107 Their work demonstrated that specific types, combinations, and conditions of artifacts were remarkably different at various locations around the site. Pottery sherds with specific design elements, num­ bers of flint tools, parts of animal carcasses, and relative proportions of bones of different animal species all showed spatial and contextual variation.108 As Thomas later recalled, “Once it is accepted that the distribution of material culture within large henges was created through purposeful acts, it is only a short step to arguing that these acts of deposition constituted a signifying prac­ tice, in which artefacts and other materials created or articulated meanings.”109 Subsequent excavations confirmed Richards and Thomas’s analysis while also revealing additional recut pits filled with dense clusters of artifacts in specific sequences: spreads of animal bone covered by layers of knapping waste, atop which individual ceramic sherds were placed.110 Building on the idea that archaeologists had generally failed to treat de­ position as a social and cultural practice in itself, J. D. Hill further refined Richards and Thomas’s claims.111 Richards and Thomas had been prompted to consider the deliberate nature of the deposits at Durrington Walls by the range of included artifacts that seemed, to them, to be out of character for everyday household waste: finished, fresh, unbroken tools; complete assem­ blages of unused tools and waste flakes from a single lithic core; animal bones deposited as articulated joints; pottery vessels of rare and decorated types; and so on.112 Hill, however, argued that varied acts of deposition—­particularly rubbish disposal—­could be patterned and symbolic, without explicitly being considered ritual behavior. For Hill, many of the ethnoarchaeological studies that had been under­ taken to study formation processes revealed primarily the ways that sedentary, agrarian societies practiced refuse maintenance strategies, rather than how materials entered the archaeological record. Sedentary sites, Hill concluded, “probably contain little primary refuse, indeed little refuse of any kind. . . . We should expect to find almost nothing excavating a rural settlement.”113 Hill then, began his analysis of pit-­filling events at later prehistoric sites in Wessex

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with the assumption that all finds had, for some reason, escaped normal pro­ cesses of dispersal and destruction. Hill also paid careful attention to the tem­ porality of those events, which allowed him to recognize how even mundane discard activities, carried out according to cultural classifications (as Hodder, Moore, and others had shown in ethnographic case studies) and repeated over time, produced highly structured patterns in the archaeological record. More­­ over, Hill argued that structured and/or ritual deposits could be individual moments in longer, complex sequences of behaviors. A ritual might involve some structured activities, some unstructured, and other events occurring before or after those, all of which might form a single “event” (ritual or other­ wise) from the perspective of ancient practitioners. While Richards and Thomas, Hill, and others were trying to demonstrate that seemingly understandable prehistoric archaeological deposits in Britain were actually far from straightforward, archaeologists on the other side of the Atlantic were attempting to reconcile Americanist New Archaeology with post­ processualists’ insights that material culture was meaningfully constituted, so­ cially structured, and active, without fully turning to symbolic and structuralist trends in anthropology, hermeneutics, phenomenology, or critical theory.114 Behavioral archaeologists, the “heirs” of the New Archaeology, argued that the postprocessualists created a false dichotomy between either utilitarian or nonutilitarian functions for things, features, and places. According to the behavioral archaeologists, the processualists’ focus on cognitive processes or beliefs too often ignored the fact that those intangibles had to be tangibly mediated by the material world.115 William Walker, drawing on data from the American Southwest, highlighted the ways a seemingly utilitarian item might be an important component in ritual activities or might move in and out of ritual roles throughout the course of its life history. Walker proposed a tripartite typology of deposits of “special” refuse based on the specific be­ haviors responsible for a deposit’s creation, including “sacrificial offerings” of still-­functioning objects, “kratophanous deposits” of powerful items that are deactivated by intentional destruction, and “ceremonial trash” consisting of ritual or sacred objects that are no longer useful but cannot simply be dis­ carded. Walker’s categories allowed for the accumulation of objects associ­ ated with rituals that were not themselves “ritual objects,” further destabiliz­ ing the supposedly commonsense category of trash.116 The archaeologist John Chapman, drawing on evidence from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Copper Age Balkans, proposed that the fragmentation, distribution, and deposition of objects (processes that could easily be conflated with discard) actively sus­ tained ancient social relations. A fragmented object, Chapman noted, stands not only for the rest of the artifact, but also all the persons involved in that

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artifact’s creation, use, and exchange. He argued that fragments served as mne­ monic, metaphorical, and metonymic references in processes of “enchain­ ment,” relating the division and accumulation of objects to mutual relation­ ships among people, things, and places. The social value of those references is then made evident in deliberate forms of deposition.117 For Chapman and the many archaeologists influenced by his fragmentation theory, “ ‘rubbish’ is no more dead than the newly deceased are dead but, like the ancestors into whom the newly dead are transformed, objects that are deposited continue to hold a certain significance for the living.”118 Once again, Borges exposes the archaeologist’s chains of assumption and interpretation: “Curiously, the hrönir of second and third degree—­the hrönir derived from another hrön, those de­ rived from the hrön of a hrön—­exaggerate the aberrations of the initial one.” By the end of the twentieth century, archaeologists were aligning in their aims to understand ancient meaning, if variably understood. Despite other theoretical divisions, both processual and postprocessual approaches con­ verged around a basic agreement: objects out of sight were not necessarily out of mind. More recently, however, some archaeological theorists have actively turned away from anthropocentric processes of meaning-­making altogether. Unplanned and Unruly, Vital and Vibrant: Modern Waste and Contemporary Archaeology By some accounts, archaeology has recently been marked by a new theo­ retical revolution, one even more radical than either processual or postpro­ cessual archaeology.119 That revolution is often described as a “(re)turn to things”120—­an idea that may seem surprising for archaeology, a discipline tra­ ditionally (perhaps even uniquely) rooted in material remains. But the shift is indeed a fundamental one: a distinctly posthumanist turn away from un­ derstanding the material world as consisting of inert physical substances that may be selectively modified or variably invested with symbolic meaning by humans. (Note that this “turn” may be a recent development in archaeology, but ideas about the agency of nonhuman things have deep roots in Indigenous American and other philosophies, many of which have long theorized the very same questions recently posed by Western scholars.121) In contrast to funda­ mental underlying dualisms that shaped culture-­historical, processual, and postprocessual archaeologies (between, for example, subject/object, culture/ nature, animate/inanimate, or mind/matter), several contemporary theoreti­ cal orientations in archaeology emphasize an understanding of matter in its own right, independent of (and on equal footing with) any human involve­ ment. Physical substances need not rely on humans to animate them, trans­

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form them, or make them meaningful, but rather have the power and poten­ tial to act and change on their own.122 Broadly, posthumanist approaches reject unidirectional, anthropocentric subject-­object relations, focusing instead on questioning how material prop­ erties of things condition human relations to them,123 on affording agency to objects, and on recognizing an object’s ability to “act back” on people and cause or allow humans to do certain things that would not otherwise be pos­ sible.124 At their most radical, posthuman orientations attempt a “flat ontol­ ogy,”125 a position from which all objects are subjects (i.e., they affect other objects) and relations among humans or nonhumans as objects/subjects and things and their material properties as objects/subjects are considered equally. Some of those insights have been explicitly rooted in thinking about waste. Twenty-­first-­century archaeology has been influenced by the realization that things supposedly thrown “away” continue to act, undergoing physical, bio­ logical, and chemical transformations with unforeseen and unintended con­ sequences. New and changing materialities of modern garbage and global flows of production, consumption, and disposal directly shape the kinds of evidence, interpretations, and explanations of the past that archaeologists con­ sider viable, even ethical.126 The insidious ability of trash to permeate people and places in unexpected ways, the longevity and ongoing transformations of contemporary waste materials, and the global scale of waste-­management chains and their effects a­ ll serve as both examples and metaphors for an object-­oriented understanding of the world, in addition to presenting every­ day geopolitical, social, and environmental concerns. The current and future physical, biological, and ecological consequences of both waste materials and management strategies have become impossible to ignore, inevitably inform­ ing the possibilities for thinking about the relationships among people and matter, present and past. things are [in] us! Around the turn of the twenty-­first century, archaeologists began to reckon with their discipline’s structuring dichotomies: processualists’ understanding of archaeology as science and postprocessualists’ understanding of archaeol­ ogy as interpretation; subjects and objects (i.e., people and things); nature and culture; even the past and the present. One group of scholars in particu­ lar, heavily influenced by the philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour’s for­ mulation of “actants”—­humans and nonhumans, or some combination of the two, having equal potential to produce effects in the world—­called for a new “symmetrical” approach in archaeology.127 Symmetrical archaeology, according

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to its self-­described manifesto, begins with the fundamental tenet that humans and nonhumans should not be regarded as ontologically distinct, that to con­ sider people and the material world in which they live as somehow separate, detached, or opposed is merely the outcome of the peculiar modern way of dividing the world into discrete entities.128 Rather than seeing artifacts as a means to an end—­whether to identify the specific people or cultures who made and used them, to study the processes by which people had adapted to their environments, or to explore the deeper meanings with which people imbued these objects—­symmetrical archaeologists see artifacts as irreduc­ ibly mixed with other things and people. The things themselves are the very means by which history happens; or, as two proponents, Timothy Webmoor and Christopher Witmore, put it: “Things are us!”129 Symmetrical archaeology involves a conscious shift away from the primacy previously afforded to anthropocentric histories.130 Rather than understand­ ing archaeology as a historical science that deals with the past and what was, the discipline is more precisely repositioned as dealing with what remains of what was and with the ongoing transformations of those materials in the present.131 Symmetrical archaeology, then, “deals in detritus, rags, rubbish, what history passes over, what history cannot convey due to its incoherence, banality, erratic partiality,”132 but does so in a way that explicitly counters the understandings of the past that underlie the arguments behind both the Garbage Project and structured deposition. Where processual and postpro­ cessual archaeologists view the archaeological record as an endpoint, symme­t­ rical archaeologists (and new materialists more generally) see the past as an emerging product of the archaeologist’s engagement with a range of things, substances, qualities, and properties.133 Is it merely a coincidence that symmetrical archaeologists sounded the call that “things are us!” just as it became clear that materials that were thought to have been effectively used and discarded actually make their way back, not only into the environment, but into animal and human bodies? Researchers first demonstrated that food for human consumption was contaminated by plastics during various stages of processing and as a result of packaging in the year 2000.134 Marine biologists coined the term microplastics in 2004, upon the realization that plastic products—­particularly, synthetic rubber tires and polyester or nylon clothing—­were breaking down and slipping, unnoticed, into the environment, onto beaches and into seabirds and marine animals.135 In a 2018 study involving participants from countries across the world, each individual that provided a stool sample tested positive for up to nine different types of microplastics—­around eight hundred to a thousand pieces per sam­ ple.136 If the stuff of archaeology is indeed detritus and rubbish, it is also true

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that the very same stuff is us—­taken up and incorporated into human bodies in ways that are unplanned and uncontrollable.137 Although the unpredictable accumulations of rubbish inside a human being have yet to become the pur­ view of archaeologists, other types of waste have explicitly provided models for contemporary archaeological theory. t h i n g s w i t h p o w e r, t h e o r i e s t h at d r i f t Where the New Archaeology drew directly on the natural sciences for concep­ tual models to apply to the past, and where postprocessual archaeology found inspiration in humanistic analyses that could be extended to material remains, current archaeological theory is characterized by its engagement with philo­ sophical debates shared with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (e.g., actor-­network theory, thing theory, new materialisms, object-­ oriented philosophies).138 One of the key “synergistic developments”139 from which archaeologists have drawn inspiration is the work of the political theo­ rist Jane Bennett (strongly influenced by the philosophers Manuel DeLanda, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari) and her call to consider the vitality of materi­ als and their specific properties, the “vibrancy” of matter, and the ways in which things find themselves in “living, throbbing confederations” as assemblages.140 Bennett’s most commonly cited argument is her use of a 2003 power blackout in North America to highlight the power grid as an emergent assemblage of both human and nonhuman entities and its distributive agency.141 But she ex­ plains the more fundamental concept of “thing-­power”—­the ability of things to “exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness . . . with a certain effectivity of their own”142—­through the illustra­ tive example of litter collected at the entrance to a storm drain in Baltimore, Maryland.143 Bennett enumerates the items blocking the drain: a men’s black plastic work glove, a dense mat of oak pollen, a dead rat, a white plastic bottle cap, and a smooth stick of wood. She describes it further: When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me. . . . In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics.144

In Bennett’s example, it is the temporary and accidental combination of ob­ jects (including the human observer), brought together by their substances and properties, that acts upon her, prompting her disgust and dismay, but

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also provoking her awareness of the things “at one moment disclosing them­ selves as dead stuff and the next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter, then live wire.”145 Bennett compares her experience on the streets of Baltimore to Robert Sullivan’s Thoreau-­inspired travelogue through the Meadowlands, northern New Jersey’s infamously polluted wetlands. Sullivan similarly describes the “garbage hills” of the Meadowlands as living, thriving entities, powered by bil­ lions of microscopic organisms ingesting the detritus of New Jersey or New York and transforming it into a range of biohazards.146 Inhabitants of indus­ trialized cities often think of dumps as places set apart for things to decay, deteriorate, and vanish. In reality, however, sanitary landfills tend to offer ideal conditions for both preservation and production. The Garbage Project once unearthed a nearly pristine serving of guacamole wrapped in a newspaper from 1967, so tightly and anaerobically trapped in Tucson’s landfill that by 1992 it had not yet begun to biodegrade.147 At the same time, landfills are busy cen­ ters of production, constantly generating methane and carbon dioxide, leach­ ate and other substances.148 In addition to biological and chemical transforma­ tions, physical processes set in motion by disposal create entirely new material forms, from microplastics to the formidable gyres of marine debris known as “garbage patches.”149 The supposed “unmaking” of waste management—­whether “disposed of ” or “recycled”—­is being revealed as only a rearrangement or dis­ persal of materials, rather than destruction. Discard is effectively another form of making. The impossibility of unmaking should be a familiar fundamental: the first law of thermodynamics states that matter cannot be destroyed, it can only transform or mutate. The sociologist Nicky Gregson and her colleagues, in­ spired in part by Bennett, have argued this point in the case of demolition (the supposed “unmaking” of the built environment) which they show to be only a transformative state, one in which materials such as asbestos, the haz­ ardous, inextinguishable fibers previously contained in object form, become capable of movement and malice. Materials might become something else through various treatment technologies, morph to conjoin with other materi­ als, or stay in the same state, but they do not disappear.150 There is not, nor has there ever been, an “away” for things to go. Bennett’s specific articulations of “thing-­power” and vital materialism, rooted in her chance and revelatory encounter with trash, have been extended to di­ verse archaeological contexts, including surface surveys, Late Neolithic–­Early Bronze Age burials of the Isle of Man, and networks of Viking-­age walrus ivory objects across the North Atlantic.151 Beyond specific case studies, unin­ tentional entities produced by global waste production have also influenced

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ways of thinking about contemporary archaeological theory in general.152 The archaeologists Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir find both inspiration and a metaphor for theory itself in the “post-­human drift and gathering” of marine debris accumulating along the shores of Arctic Norway. Theory, they argue, “may, much like drift matter, be seen to go through processes of decay, frag­ mentation, and dispersion. . . . Like things, theory doesn’t simply add up and make sense. Rather, much like other things washed up on a beach, theories, such as agency, becomes [sic] polished, nuanced, turned and transfigured.”153 As the archaeologists Assaf Nativ and Gavin Lucas have recently argued, “Waste is a human creation that moved beyond human comprehension. . . . An archaeology working through the prism of waste is not an archaeology of waste. Rather, it is an archaeology that explores the entities produced by the human capacity to alienate its own creations.”154 For culture-­historical archaeologists, deep “refuse heaps” were the equivalents of natural history’s fossil beds: unmediated sequences of cultural emergence and extinction. For processual archaeologists, waste provided models to explain and predict hu­ man behavior and the archaeological patterning that results from it. For post­ processual archaeologists, waste provided clues to the underlying structures and systems of meaning that shaped human social life, including depositional activities. For object-­oriented archaeologists, waste revealed how materials can accumulate, assemble, and act autonomously, exposing the limits of an anthropocentric understanding of events, processes, and relations and chal­ lenging the relative stability often assumed of archaeological entities. Conclusions Commonplace understandings of waste—­of what it is and what it can mean—­ have shaped archaeological practices since the advent of the discipline. As a result, they have actively impacted the kinds of knowledge that archaeology can generate about the past. In the late nineteenth century, new types and quan­ tities of rubbish were on the minds of city planners and sanitary engineers, and they influenced the emerging sciences of the past, especially archaeology. Culture-­historical archaeologists assumed that ancient cultures unthinkingly left behind their rubbish, producing stratified sequences of historical and chronological data. By the mid-­twentieth century, waste management in cit­ ies and suburbs had greatly expanded and was driven by new technologies. Processual archaeologists and other social scientists understood rubbish dis­ posal as an innate adaptation to the economic and environmental factors of human life, one that, in its fundamental aims and approaches, could be traced through time. Late-­twentieth-­century corporations and environmentalists

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shifted the narrative once again, reframing waste as a personal problem and an individual failure. For postprocessual archaeologists, the ways people made and managed their trash revealed their belief systems, their social identities, and their ethical engagements with one another and with other beings on the planet. Extended to the past, ancient refuse became similarly meaningful—­a force capable of shaping social relations rather than merely reflecting them. At the turn of the twenty-­first century, the realization that “waste management” techniques resulted in unforeseen biological, chemical, and physical conse­ quences prompted new considerations about the relations between humans and matter, often blurring the divisions between the two. For object-­oriented archaeologists, lingering materials and their ongoing, often unexpected trans­ formations called into question the fundamental separations between people and things or between ideas and materials on which earlier theories rested. I am not suggesting that archaeology’s major theoretical shifts are wholly explained by changes in cultural understandings of waste. Philosophers and historians of archaeology have established that archaeology was transformed over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-­first centuries by spe­ cific philosophical and scientific trends.155 Rather, I have offered what the his­ torian and sociologist of science Steven Shapin has called “a lowering of the tone”—­an account of a “heterogenous, historically situated, embodied, and thoroughly human set of practices,”156 in which those at the center of archae­ ology’s paradigm shifts are embedded in culturally predominant ways of wast­ ing and their thoughts unconsciously shaped, even restricted, by them. The specific entanglements between what waste is and what waste is thought to have been, however, are not inevitable. As outlined in the book’s introduction, the chapters that follow will shift the history of waste from its traditional academic center (and the focus of the book so far) in Europe and the United States to Mesoamerica, first to the encounters between traditional European and Indigenous Mesoamerican ways of wasting during centuries of colonial control and later to the deeper past of the first millennium CE. Even more than the critical questioning and reframing of historical and archaeo­ logical knowledge outlined in this and the previous chapter, the examples drawn from Mesoamerica’s history reveal that there have always been many and different ways of understanding, relating to, and interacting with waste. Some of those resonate with historical Euro-­American practices and percep­ tions, but others are less easily recognizable from the perspective of what seem to many now to be standard trajectories. The very fact that alternative ideas and histories exist enlarges the possible world of waste, and reveals how to­ day’s assumptions are just a tiny part of its actuality.

3

Cleanliness and Godliness

Every year at sunset on December 7—­the eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception—­the streets of Guatemala are lined with fire. Many families set household trash and piñata effigies of Satan ablaze to mark the start of Christ­ mastime and the end of the previous year. Bonfires, full of fresh, green wood to generate thick clouds of white smoke, consume anything that has become obsolete or exhausted during the year. Newspapers, stained mattresses, bro­ ken furniture, and worn-­out tires feed the flames, as do school textbooks and medications no longer needed. Firecrackers are also abundant—­unpredict­ably whizzing and popping, delighting the children trying to get close enough to toss more of them into the blaze. The Quema del diablo (Burning of the devil), as this annual event is known, serves as a symbolic act of purification and a minor triumph of good versus evil (plate 3). In recent years, the Guatemalan government has expressed growing reser­ vations regarding the safety of the event and its impact on public health and the environment. Not only do so many household bonfires in residential neigh­ borhoods (half a million each year, by some estimates) raise concern, but the billowing, blinding smoke from burning wood and trash causes an annual surge in automobile accidents. The Guatemalan Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources also reports a significant increase in air pollution during and following the Quema del diablo. Advertisements in print and radio media at­ tempt to dissuade the burning of batteries, plastics, aerosol canisters, paints and other solvents, and herbicides or insecticides, but citizens with respiratory problems are still advised to stay indoors until several days after the ritual has taken place.1 In many ways, the Quema del diablo exemplifies how waste, as both mate­ rial artifact and concept, is culturally constructed, historically contingent, and

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socially defined. But the Quema del diablo also brings us into new territory, literally and figuratively. Both the tradition itself—­which took form during the colonial period but incorporates understandings of burning and purification that extend back to pre-­Columbian times—­and the tensions over the regula­ tion of its physical and environmental impacts are contemporary traces of half a millennium of contact and conflict between Indigenous and imported no­ tions of purity and pollution, creation and destruction, and value and waste in Mesoamerica. The meeting between distinct if also occasionally overlapping systems of thought was complex and dynamic. The point is not to try to sepa­ rate a pure, preexisting Mesoamerican way of being from a colonial veneer; by coming into contact, both were radically altered in ways that cannot easily or always be teased apart.2 Thrown into high relief by the religious conversion, forced resettlement, and social and racial hierarchies of the colonial project, waste emerged as one of many points of contestation that produced wholly new perceptions and practices for all those involved. In what follows, much of the information I draw on comes from Central Mexico, northern Yucatán, and highland Guatemala, reflecting the asymmet­ rical survival of texts and imagery, both of Indigenous and European origin, in those regions. This approach runs a risk of minimizing distinctions among specific peoples or blurring variable and varied ideologies and practices across times and places. I am not, however, suggesting that the examples I highlight can be understood as typical of all of Mesoamerica, nor even that they are es­ pecially illustrative or representative samples. Rather, they serve to highlight how engagements with waste have been much more complex and varied than is acknowledged by the standard teleological and Eurocentric trajectory traced out elsewhere. Early modern European notions of civility and Christian discourse trans­ formed and were transformed by Mesoamerican perspectives on bodily and material wastes. Spanish imperial expansion to the Americas in the late fif­ teenth and early sixteenth centuries coincided with sweeping societal changes in Europe. Those changes included, in particular, the reformation of manners and personal conduct, with an emphasis on bodily comportment. In the con­ text of colonialism and Christianization, ways of waste making and managing became key indices of difference, reinforcing newly created identities and hi­ erarchies on both sides of the Atlantic. In the process of religious conversion, Spanish friars’ attempts to translate Christian ideas into native languages often made use of imperfect metaphors, including notions of cleanliness and filth as indices for good and bad. Detailing how those concepts were understood, literally and figuratively, in both European and Mesoamerican traditions high­

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lights points of correspondence and discordance that impacted their expres­ sion and reception in the process of evangelization. It also exposes unintended meanings that were generated by the equation of physical and spiritual purity or impurity in translating Christian doctrine for Mesoamerican audiences. In particular, two mid-­sixteenth-­century sources—­the Franciscan friar Andrés de Olmos’s collection of Nahuatl moral rhetoric included in his 1547 Arte para aprender la lengua mexicana (Grammar for learning the Mexican language) and the Dominican friar Domingo de Vico’s ca. 1550 Theologia Indorum (Theol­ ogy of the Indians), originally written in K’iche’ Mayan—­demonstrate how re­ lying on assumptions about seemingly familiar concepts and universal mean­ ings produced wholly new transformations of preexisting ideas, both Christian and Indigenous. The ideologies and practices of waste making and waste managing that pre-­dated Spanish invasion, that were introduced by colonization, and that re­­ sulted from those encounters are very different from the historical and con­ temporary ways of wasting outlined earlier. Details of those differences expose the limitations of using conceptual categories rooted in one context to try to explain beliefs and behaviors in another. I am not calling for a rejection of those categories altogether, but am simply trying to create space alongside them for additions or alternatives, drawn from other ways of being and systems of thought.3 My aim, in short, is to explore the history of waste from a vantage point that has remained overlooked, but which, when investigated, seems just as natural, logical, and right—­and just as peculiar and complex—­as any other. Uncommon Courtesy The millennium between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Industrial Revolution in Europe has been described as a “Sanitary Dark Age,”4 and the early modern period, likewise, is portrayed as simply an extension of medi­ eval filth. In her “unsanitized history” of cleanliness, Katherine Ashenburg states it plainly: “The sixteenth century had not been notably fastidious, even at the highest level.”5 What Ashenburg’s statement masks, however, is that the sixteenth century was also a particular historical moment in which new ideas about excrement and rubbish were taking shape in Europe, a turning point with respect to both bodily wastes and material refuse.6 The sociologist Norbert Elias famously called this transformation “the civilizing process”: a shift from less regulated to more regulated forms of human practice, especially with re­ spect to “outward bodily propriety.”7 European behavioral ideals shifted away from chivalric and feudal honor described as “courteous” or “courtesy” in

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favor of bourgeois refinement and respectability, expressed in table manners, attitudes toward bodily functions, and the repression of sexuality and aggres­ sion; approved conduct became “civil” or “civility.” Despite critiques of Elias’s oversimplifications and generalizing of “Western” civilization, subsequent works at least partly inspired by Elias have continued to draw on many of his ideas, from his argument that changes in manners ex­ press social and political changes to his basic concept of “civility” as a simulta­ neous sense of a citizen’s belonging to a particular village, city, or kingdom and the archetype of the comportment of those who belong to that village, city, or kingdom, realized through political participation.8 It is worth noting, however, that the meaning associated with “civility” (and its cognates) throughout most of Europe did not exist in Spain until the seventeenth century. Before then, the Spanish word civil was used in opposition to caballero, or “gentleman,” with the implication of “vileness” (vileza).9 As the Italian Hispanist Margherita Morreale noted, Juan Boscán’s 1534 Spanish translation of a popular Italian courtesy book, Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, goes to great lengths to avoid the terms civil or civilidad altogether. Boscán replaces, for example, “la virtù civile” (civic virtue) with “la virtud que compone y concierta el trato humano” (the virtue that makes up and concerns the treatment of humans) or “viver civile” (to live civilly) with “vivir con la orden que se suele tener en las buenas ciudades” (to live with the order that is usually had in good cities). “Thus,” Morreale wrote, “one of the key words of the spiritual legacy of Rome disappears from the translation, the absence of which is not only very signifi­ cant for the time, but also has, in my opinion, centuries of historical repercus­ sion in the self-­consciousness and self-­determination of the Spanish.”10 In a long-­term study of conduct and manners in Spain from the late Middle Ages to the present day, Fernando Ampudia de Haro prefers the term modern courtesy (“cortesía moderna”) over civility (“civilidad”) to refer to the transition from the world of medieval chivalry to that of progressively pacified, fixed urban courts. According to Ampudia de Haro’s definition, however, modern cour­ tesy remains fundamentally similar to what is understood by the term civility in other contemporary parts of Europe: the bond between a person’s good manners—­the outward comportment, instructed from childhood, following a society’s ideal norms—­and their interior moral disposition.11 Sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Spanish sources also make use of the term policía, de­ rived from the classical polis in a sense similar to civility, with the implication of “civilized” or “educated.”12 Explicit rules and guidelines for socially acceptable behavior were formal­ ized in courtesy and etiquette books, which were widely read and frequently

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reissued in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Europe. Some took the form of instructional dialogues; others laid out observations and advice for children about situations they might encounter in society, such as expected behaviors in church, when dining, in meetings, and in going to bed. As a genre, that lit­ erature enumerated codes of behavior learned by all, from commoners to aris­ tocrats, with the aim of fostering civility: new social attitudes that would bring people closer together by transforming all interactions into recognizable and acceptable forms of relating.13 Among many bodily practices ripe for regula­ tion, manuals of conduct were explicitly concerned with the production of hu­­ man waste. Elias provides a range of examples: To hold back urine is harmful to health, to pass it in secret betokens modesty. There are those who teach that the boy should retain wind by compressing the belly. . . . If it is possible t[o] withdraw, it should be done alone. But if not, in accordance with the ancient proverb, let a cough hide the sound. Erasmus’s De civilitate morum peurilium, 1530 It is not a refined habit, when coming across something disgusting in the street, as sometimes happens, to turn at once to one’s companion and point it out to him. It is far less proper to hold the stinking thing out for the other to smell, as some are wont, who even urge the other to do so, lifting the foul-­ smelling thing to his nostrils. Della Casa, Il Galateo, 1558 One should not, like rustics who have not been to court or lived among re­ fined and honorable people, relieve oneself without shame or reserve in front of ladies, or before the doors or windows of court chambers or other rooms. Wernigerode Court Regulations of 1570 Let no one, whoever he may be, before, at, or after meals, foul the staircases, corridors, or closets with urine or other filth, but go to suitable, prescribed places for such relief. Brunswick Court Regulations of 158914

In addition to where, when, and how bodily wastes should be ejected, control over excrement also extended to its traces—­particularly to their miasmic smells, which were understood as both physically and morally threatening.15 Part of the civilizing process thus meant that anything perceived as filth (human ex­ crement, but also decomposing corpses, rotting rubbish, moldy laundry, and stagnant water) required careful and consistent regulation.16 The potential to produce filth was likewise increasingly restricted, hidden both practically and symbolically.

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Reevaluating all forms of bodily and material detritus as negative had far-­ reaching effects, beyond the immediate “rise, elaboration and eventual triumph of the fecal habitus of the bourgeoisie.”17 Waste products, including human excreta, have been valuable resources in many times and many places.18 The cross-­cultural communal use of “night soil”—­human feces as agricultural fertilizer—­has a long history, from ancient Athens and Rome, to medieval London, to early modern Tokyo.19 In Renaissance Europe, human waste was also used for medical purposes.20 In 1527, for example, the Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus promised to reveal the greatest of medical secrets to his fellow doctors at the University of Basel. When a crowd had gathered, he of­ fered up a dish of “steaming human excrement” and began extolling the “mys­ teries of putrefactive fermentation.”21 The sixteenth-­century Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi confidently wrote, “I believe that there is no part of the hu­ man body, no residue which comes forth from it, out of which the doctor can­ not derive enormous advantage on behalf of the sick.”22 An English recipe book offers a treatment for smallpox that calls for “a sheep’s dung, cleane picked,” in addition to a marginal note recommending fecal wine (animal feces dried and mixed with alcohol) for gout and jaundice.23 The advent of “civility” put an end to such potential positive reuses for wastes, which became only filthy, odorous, and contaminating.24 Spanish expansion across the Atlantic coincided with the spread of courtly manners. Laws of civility were at the center of a moral and intellectual world that was suddenly larger and more diverse, situating “the civilizing process” within a wider global context that redefined what “civilizing” entailed. As one’s own bodily conduct became a topic of increasing scrutiny, so too did the bod­ ily conduct of others. Emerging notions of civility—­accepted codes of conduct and manners—­coalesced, in part, as a result of colonial expansion and contact with non-­European societies. Europeans imagined themselves not only in the process of becoming the superior culture in that expanding world, but also as bringing its distant, primitive parts up to their new standards.25 The compulsion to civility and the commitment to Christian conversion went hand in hand. As the historian Euan Cameron has noted, many writers responsible for conduct books of the early modern period, including those cited above, also wrote in an “overtly religious spirit.”26 They believed that re­­ ligion and religious instruction could teach people to show restraint and dis­ cretion and to moderate their passions and excesses—­in short, to become more civilized. Tasked by papal bulls with bringing the unknown peoples of the Americas to the Christian faith, Spanish church and state authorities dove­ tailed to create a program for religious conversion that, as the historian John H.

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Elliott argues, “would slide by sometimes imperceptible stages into widespread hispanicization.”27 Highly regulated forms of personal conduct grew into “a cul­ tural identity of Christian Europe set against the barbarism of other societies.”28 The Spanish (and, later, other European empires too) understood them­ selves to be engaged in a peculiar kind of providential mission: an endeavor to convince the hundreds of thousands now under their domain to convert not only to Christianity, but also to European norms of civility.29 One transforma­ tion could not take place without the other. Although forced conversion was frequently practiced, it was considered empty and, for some, illicit. “To come to the mysteries and sacraments of Christ merely out of servile fear,” wrote the sixteenth-­century theologian Francisco de Vitoria, “would be sacrilege. . . . War is no argument for the truth of the Christian faith. Hence the barbarians can­ not be moved by war to believe, but only to pretend that they believe and ac­ cept the Christian faith; and this is monstrous and sacrilegious.”30 In contrast to post-­Renaissance notions of religion (and especially Protestant forms of Christianity), sixteenth-­century Catholic belief did not prioritize in­ ner spirituality (one’s mind, heart, soul, etc.)31 Rather, interior beliefs and exte­ rior social behaviors were closely, perhaps even inseparably, associated in early modern European thought. Forced introduction to civility was thus consid­ ered a legitimate route to Christianity, civility being a preliminary and neces­ sary condition for “voluntary” conversion.32 Treatises on good manners were, in the words of the historian Jacques Revel, “all making the same point: that physical signs—­gestures, mimicry, postures—­express a person’s inner state in an intelligible fashion, revealing the disposition of the soul.”33 Logically, then, if one’s body and its comportment revealed one’s inner state of being, it was possible to influence and correct the soul by regulating those visible outward corporeal signs. In both Iberia and Spanish America, conversion required seem­ ingly superficial aspects of conformity—­clothing, speech, cooking and eating practices, and so on.34 The soul was disciplined by controlling the body. In order to be made into true Christians, native Mesoamericans had to be habituated to an entirely new way of being, one that would engender both the aptitude and the inclination to receive Christianity. In the words of Tomás López Medel, a Spanish judge (oidor) sent from Guatemala to Yucatán in 1552 to help establish order in that province, native peoples would be “that much more able and ready for Christian doctrine and to receive the preaching of the Holy Gospel, the more they are placed in spiritual and temporal civility.”35 Clerics attending the First Council of Mexico in 1555 similarly argued it to be more appropriate “to make men polite and human first rather than to estab­ lish the faith upon ferine customs,” a position echoed by the Third Council

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of Lima of 1583, which proclaimed: “Hardly can they be taught how to be Christians if we do not teach them first how to learn to be men and live as such.”36 Even Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar known as the “Defender and Apostle to the Indians” who consistently insisted on peaceful conversion, believed that in exchange for having their physical integrity re­ spected, native peoples should submit to assimilation—­renouncing their cul­ tures completely—­in preparation for conversion.37 The Spanish term used for sixteenth-­century evangelizing friars was doctrinero, or “person dispensing (Christian) instruction,”38 emphasizing how the conversion campaign under­ taken by the religious orders focused on educating native peoples in the belief systems, sacraments and duties, and moral code of Christianity, specifically Catholicism.39 Fundamental questions over the nature and rights of Indigenous peoples in the Americas were thus debated not only in terms of classical no­ tions of barbarism or Christian ideals of inclusion,40 but also on the basis of adherence to or departure from behavioral norms in the sixteenth-­century present, including seemingly mundane practices involving filth, refuse, and ex­­ creta. Colonial occupation served to affirm behavioral distinctions between Europeans and Indigenous Americans, whether real or imagined.41 As “contact zones,”42 bodily and material wastes often serve as symbols and material representations of difference in colonial settings, embodying classi­ ficatory distinctions between high and low, sanitary and unsanitary, civilized and barbaric.43 In line with Reinhart Koselleck’s discussion of “progress” be­ coming both the agent and product of change in the nineteenth century (see chapter 1), the historian Keith Thomas similarly argues that the term civiliza­ tion was initially used to characterize the process or action of civilizing but, nearly a century later, also meant the end product of that process.44 “Civilized” nations were understood to exemplify a perfected state of human society, a standard against which new cultures could be determined to be more or less developed by comparison.45 As Dominique Laporte states in his History of Shit, “Civilization is the purview of the conqueror. The barbarian craps where he pleases; the conqueror emblazons his trails with a primordial prohibition: ‘No shitting allowed.’ ”46 Mesoamerican populations in New Spain were forcibly reorganized in ways that not only would facilitate pacification, religious conversion, and ordering, but would actively change their dispositions, everyday social conduct, and lan­ guages to better align with new notions of civility.47 At the same time, civility (policía) was instilled through the teaching of Christian moral codes, sacra­ ments, duties, and beliefs. Translating such abstract ideas was a vexing task for colonial doctrineros. Whether they attempted to create or borrow terms to express newly introduced social and religious doctrines, they transformed

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more than language as imported ideas were tied to or replaced preexisting concepts, including waste.48 The Word(s) of God Among multiple immediate challenges of translation (how do you render “Lamb of God” for people who have never seen sheep?), many of the basic con­ cepts at the heart of Christian doctrine, including God, heaven and hell, good and evil, and temptation, did not have exact equivalents in precontact systems of thought or expression. Such issues presented fundamental theological and philosophical problems.49 Could Amerindian languages be used to express Christian ideas without generating misunderstandings and contradictions, even heresy? Or were theological concepts absolute—­autonomous and detached from linguistic forms? Would it be better to create new terms in Indigenous lan­ guages, employing loan words from Spanish? To use neologisms? Or could the meanings of preexisting terms and images be replaced by Catholic concepts? In order to translate between Spanish and Indigenous American languages, doctrineros had to assume that Christian concepts could be communicated in both, even if the degree of sameness varied from one word to another.50 The selection and formulation of cross-­language correspondences in colonial dic­ tionaries, grammars, and doctrinal texts was guided by three principles, out­ lined by the linguist and anthropologist William Hanks: economy, transpar­ ency, and indexical binding.51 Although Hanks’s study focuses on Mayan and Spanish translations of sixteenth-­century Yucatán, the same principles underlie conversion materials in other languages produced by Spanish friars through­ out Mesoamerica. The principle of economy describes a missionary strategy of learning a small number of polyvalent roots (those with multiple meanings), whose de­ rivatives were then used to express a range of Spanish concepts. As Hanks argues, learning a single root or stem that could be repeated in a number of derived forms was easier both for the missionaries learning Mayan terms and for the Indigenous parishioners learning Catholic doctrine. At the same time, that practice often created wholly new terms or re-­formed existing meanings, effectively enabling the production of neologisms in Indigenous languages in order to express newly introduced concepts. Transparency characterizes how easily the meaning of a gloss can be gleaned from its individual parts and their grammatical relations. The Spaniards’ pref­ erence for transparency is evident in the way Amerindian glosses describe Spanish concepts, explicitly spelling out what is only implicit in the Spanish, such as the manner of executing the act rather than its essence or consequence.

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For example, baptism was rendered as oc ha, “enter water,” in Yucatec, confes­ sion as pul keban, “cast off / tell sin,” and prayer as payal chi, “pulling mouth.”52 Finally, indexical binding refers to the ways Indigenous expressions be­ came tied to particular kinds of colonial objects, effecting a tight narrowing of the semantic range of the original Spanish term. A Spanish term like confe­ sar, for example, can be used to describe any voluntary statement of true acts, ideas, or sentiments, regardless of context, whereas its Yucatec glosses encode only the confession of sins in the context of the sacrament. It is telling that there are multiple glosses, each used according to the aspect of confession on which they focus. For example, one standard term is tohpultah, “straight [true] + cast,” which emphasizes the honest speech act of the person confessing, while choch keban, “untie + sin,” focuses on the priest’s role in absolving (unbinding) the burden of sin. Similarly, Spanish convertir can be used to describe any trans­ formation from one thing or person to another, for religious conversion, and for reconciliation in a grievance. The equivalent term given in Yucatec, ocol ti uinicil, literally translates to “enter into humanity,” referring only to the conversion of God into man.53 Taken together, these principles not only pro­ duced new standardized and simpler versions of Indigenous languages, but also bound them to the colonial universe and the Spanish words and ideas that structured it. The Christian idea of sin is a notoriously difficult concept to express in translation, a fact still bemoaned by missionaries today.54 As the anthropolo­ gist Louise Burkhart has detailed, sixteenth-­century Franciscans evangelizing in Mexico appropriated the Nahuatl term tlazolli to express Christian notions about sin.55 Although friars glossed tlazolli as “rubbish which they throw on the dung heap,”56 the word is derived from a verb (ihzolihu(i)) meaning “for things to get old, wear out,” with the transitive form ihzoloa, “to abase oneself, to mistreat, wear out things like clothes, books, mats, etc.”57 More broadly, tla­ zolli connotes any sort of dirt and little bits and pieces of things that have be­ come formless and unconnected, anything that is “useless, used up . . . has lost its original order or structure and has been rendered loose and undifferenti­ ated matter,” including bodily secretions, rags, dust, disheveled hair, grass, straw, or potsherds.58 Tlazolli was not sin itself, for which missionaries instead employed the term tlatlaçolli, meaning “something damaged, corrupted, or spoiled.”59 Rather, Spaniards used tlazolli as a metaphor for intangible moral pollution, the spiritual state of impurity that was caused by sin. Tlazolli described a broad realm of pollution, but its pre-­Columbian us­ age indeed had moral associations. One phrase in particular, teuhtli, tlazolli (“dust, filth”), was used as a difrasismo—­a paired, often synonymous couplet that together heightens the meaning of the two words to convey a more com­

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plex conceptual whole—­to invoke vice or transgression.60 Teuhtli, tlazolli is used in this way to express sinfulness in the Bancroft Dialogues, a collection of for­ mal conversations and speeches in Nahuatl produced toward the end of the sixteenth century; the English edition translates the couplet as “vice and bad­ [ness].”61 It also appears in Bartolomé de Alva’s seventeenth-­century confes­ sional manual, in an admonitory speech about the sacrament of marriage, warning the couple to be married: “You shall serve God, the devil not setting down between and among you the dust and refuse of sin.”62 Things that were worn out or decaying and physical matter like dust, dirt, mud, or excrement were all categorized as tlazolli, but certain actions also ex­ posed a person to tlazolli, especially sexual transgressions.63 In the Florentine Codex (also known as the General History of the Things of New Spain), a key bi­­ lingual (Spanish–­Nahuatl) ethnohistoric document compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún in sixteenth-­century Central Mexico, a volume devoted to rhetoric and moral philosophy includes a series of difrasismos that evoke physical filthiness specifically for sex, such as teuhtli, tlazolli and in cuj­ tlatitlan, in tlaçultitlan (“in the excrement, in the refuse”).64 Tlazolli derived from proscribed activities was equally as tangible as physical filth, a palpable substance. In the same volume, a passage in the Nahuatl text describes the sin of idolatry as that which a sinner “goeth carrying with him—­that which trou­ bleth him, perverteth him, and that which afflicteth his bones, his body, his mind, his heart; and it eateth, it drinketh, it disturbeth his heart, his body.”65 In the Spanish version, however, those sins are much less active: “Already now he feels pain and discontentment with everything past, and his heart and his body feel great pain and unease.”66 Contact with too much tlazolli—­whatever its source—­could result in real, dangerous consequences for the body. Corruption was contagious. According to Alfredo López Austin’s exhaustive study of Nahuatl body concepts, “Dirti­­ ness is related to an immoral life, and principally with sexual transgressions. Sins radiated filth, and this harmed the innocent.”67 Adulterers or sexually pro­ miscuous persons, thieves, gamblers, or drunkards—­“sinners” who existed in a state contaminated by tlazolli—­could cause various misfortunes. Innocent spouses, a fetus still in the womb, young children carried in the arms of a sin­ ner, friends, and simply anyone who got too close to a polluted person were all endangered. Tlazolli could kill chickens, cause livestock accidents, dry up cultivated fields, ruin offerings made to gods, even keep food from cooking—­ whole communities might suffer economic ruin as a result of forbidden activities.68 Sexual transgressions in particular were blamed for a host of serious phys­ ical sicknesses and harms, misfortunes, and tribulations. Hernando Ruiz de

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Alarcón’s seventeenth-­century Tratado de la supersticiones y costumbres gentí­ licas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (Treatise on the heathen superstitions and customs that today live among the Indians to this New Spain) claims that these “things, from one or another of which, there is no person who escapes” are called “tlazolmiquiztli, which means ‘harm caused by love or desire.’ ” Literally, however, tlazolmiquiztli translates to “filth death.”69 Certain acts were proscribed not solely because they were immoral, but also because they risked physical harm. Indigenous ideas about behavioral transgressions as dirty only seemed to concord with Spanish ones. Friars employed conventional Christian metaphors (e.g., Christ is a shepherd and Christians are his flock of sheep70) as rhetor­ ical devices, but those instructional techniques depended on culturally con­ tingent understandings of the terms being used metaphorically.71 Because metaphors work by employing words outside their normal range in specific linguistic and situational contexts, they are a “pivotal issue in translation.”72 For Indigenous Mesoamericans, the link between moral impurity and physical filth was more literal than the metaphorical connection between the two in Christian doctrine. The distinction is important, because it meant that mis­ sionaries’ translations often failed to achieve their intended effect. As Burkhart makes clear: The trope “you wallow in excrement” might be interpreted by a Christian to mean: “Your soul is as contaminated from your sinful acts as your body would be if you rolled around in a dungheap.” A Nahua interpretation would be: “You are in a state of pollution; there is filth attached to you which is of the same order as excrement.” If the situation were not remedied, this tlazolli might bring with it various other elements of tlazolli: the person might, according to moral discourse, quite literally end up poor, homeless, clad in rags, covered with dust and sweat, lying in a pile of ordure, and oozing from all orifices.73

In expressing ideas about morality and immorality in terms of purity and im­ purity, doctrineros had seized upon concepts that resonated with Indigenous thought, yet Christian and Mesoamerican understandings were imperfect par­ allels. Colonial friars used physical pollution as a metaphor for spiritual cor­ ruption: sin is to the soul as dirt is to the body. That is, a soul in a sinful state is as undesirable and uncomfortable—­but also as avoidable and rectifiable—­as a body in a dirty state. In many Mesoamerican ideologies, on the other hand, moral pollution was actually affected, both positively and negatively, by phys­ ical disorder.74 Friars translated “sin” in Yucatec as keban, literally “a sad or miserable thing,”75 (though it is unclear if the term ever existed independently in pre-­

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Christianized language76). The term used to translate “sin” into many low­ land Mayan languages, mul, is glossed in Domingo de Ara’s sixteenth-­century Tzeltal Mayan–­Spanish dictionary as “submerge under water.”77 Similar to mis­ sionaries’ use of Nahuatl’s tlazolli in Mexico, both keban and mul draw on an imagined Christian experience of sin that would have been unfamiliar to re­ cent converts in Yucatán—­a heaviness of heart, anxiety, and remorse that was conveyed metaphorically by describing physical or emotional discomfort. As in Central Mexico, Classic Maya imagery suggests an understanding of contact with filth, excrement, decay, and death as capable of generating physi­ cal sickness. Death gods are shown emitting a foul stench, often emanating as a fiery, angular flow from the nostrils or rib cage.78 The odor induced miasmic illness in anyone unlucky enough to smell it.79 Kisin, meaning “the flatulent one,” was the name given to the death god in colonial sources and in one Classic-­period example.80 Like tlazolli, kisin was later appropriated to express Christian concepts equated with moral impurity, becoming the preferred term for the devil and/or his minions.81 Christian notions of good and evil, expressed metaphorically as a binary opposition between cleanliness and filth, had unexpected consequences in translation. Although they resonated in some ways with Indigenous ideas about polluting forces, they also lacked certain aspects of pre-­Columbian un­ derstandings of waste. In failing to capture the literal link between physical filth as both a cause and a consequence of moral impurity, Christian meta­ phors also denied waste materials their potential role as sources and solutions to problems of corruption. Purity and Pollution Continuity between the immaterial and material world was not a uniquely Mesoamerican perspective. The historian Martha Bayless, for example, has documented the ways Medieval European sermons, histories and chronicles, biblical commentaries, pious poetry, religious plays, manuscript illustrations, paintings, and popular stories drew on filth and dung as powerful moral and theological material. Excrement was not merely a metaphor, symbol, or con­ sequence of sin, corruption, and moral impurity. Rather, as Bayless argues, “it embodied sin. It was an alternate manifestation of sin, as ice is an alternate manifestation of water.”82 Defecation was a living testament to divine history, a constant reminder of the Fall of Man. Inescapable, foul, and shameful, excre­ ment was both abhorrent and of the utmost importance. It was deadly serious stuff. Indeed, a number of Medieval tales describe sinners suffering physical death in the latrine as punishment for their sins. That such ideas persisted

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into the early modern period and traveled across the Atlantic is suggested by the Florentine Codex’s descriptions of a series of nocturnal omens called the tetzahuitl. One of the tetzahuitl was called Cuitlapanton, or “Little One on the Excrement,” a small, female personification of tlazolli. According to Sahagún, “They said that [the omens] showed themselves only at the latrines, the dung heaps. If someone wished to urinate, and went forth quite alone at night, when, perhaps, the moon shone or it was dark, then they appeared to him. All this now only revealed to him an omen of death. He to whom it appeared thus took it as a portent that now he would die, or something would now befall him.”83 As Burkhart notes, the passage suggests an attempt by friars to merge the tet­ zahuitl with their own, long-­held ideas about the devil.84 In pre-­Columbian Mesoamerica, however, the fact that moral pollution could infect and affect the physical body reciprocally meant that immorality could be removed by concrete remedies. Forms of filth were contaminating and dangerous in excess, but they were also necessary elements in cleansing and purification, embraced for their fertilizing, creative, and renewing roles. Or, as Burkhart succinctly put it: “Filth wards off filth.”85 At once revitalizing and corrupting, purifying and polluting, waste was simultaneously a danger and an important means of countering that threat. For the Nahuas of Central Mexico and the Maya of colonial-­period Yucatán, too, human excrement served as a key source of pollution and purification. The Nahua goddess Tlazolteotl in particular, “Goddess of Filth” or “Divine Filth” (and her Maya parallel, Ix Hun Ahau), was both the patroness of individuals guilty of carnal transgressions—­excessive sexuality, drunkenness, adultery, abor­ tion, incest, and sodomy—­and the goddess who cleansed people of polluting forces and thereby healed them.86 As Sahagún’s Nahua informants reported: “Evil and perverseness, debauched living—­these Tlaçolteotl offered one, cast upon one, inspired in one. And likewise she forgave, set aside, removed cor­ ruption. She cleansed one, she washed one. . . . And thus she pardoned, thus she set aside, she removed [corruption].”87 Tlazolteotl’s methods of purification were inextricably entwined with pol­ lution, with tlazolli.88 She is often depicted carrying a straw broom, with un­ spun cotton in her headdress (plates 4 and 5). The straw (simultaneously un­ derstood as tlazolli and a tool for removing it) and the soft, unformed, and incoherent cotton (a symbol loaded with sexual connotations and with cre­ ative potential) underscore Tlazolteotl’s power to cause immorality, to remove impurities, and to transform disorder into productivity.89 The goddess was also sometimes addressed as Tlaelcuani, meaning “coprophagous” or “one who eats ordure”90 who “receives all organic wastes—­human and animal excre­ ment . . . and so forth—­which when decomposed are transformed into hu­

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mus.”91 When Tlazolteotl/Tlaelcuani heard the confessions of transgressors, penitents had to remove their clothes and expose their “evil odor” to her and, in order to rid themselves of their corruption, swallowed their own stench, their own filth.92 The art historian Cecelia Klein argues that, through a kind of sym­ pathetic magic, “excrement thus not only embodied the cause of an individ­ ual’s bad health and potential demise, but also constituted the means to pre­ vent or cure them.”93 The Codex Telleriano-­Remensis, a sixteenth-­century Central Mexican manu­ script with imagery painted by native artists and accompanying Spanish glosses, includes depictions of offerings of excrement being made.94 In one scene, for example, a priest lets blood from his ear in a self-­afflicted wound of atonement (plate 6). The bone perforator and incense bag used by the priest are both marked with lumps of dung, offerings embodying sexual transgressions and offenses.95 In another, a woman named in the accompanying text as Ixnextli appears, holding a vessel filled with excrement, which is clearly labeled as mi­ erda, or “shit,” by the Spanish gloss (plate 7). She is crying and blinded, which the Spanish commentator notes is a punishment for her excessive sexuality (euphemistically described as “collecting flowers”96): “They paint her the same as Eve, as she is always crying and looking at her husband Adam. She is called Ixnextli, which means ‘eyes blind with ash,’ and she is this after she sinned in collecting flowers, and they say that she can no longer look at heaven.”97 In the same codex, Tlazolteotl is illustrated with her mouth thickly blackened: a visual representation of her dual role as the patroness of transgressive behav­ ior, metaphorically described as “swallowing blackness,” and its removal by means of her “filth-­eating.”98 Offerings of excrement to Tlazolteotl/Tlaelcuani were made in the hopes that the goddess would literally consume the material manifestation of one’s offenses, converting them into a revitalizing, fertilizing soil—­or, as Klein aptly calls it, “holy shit.”99 A late eighteenth-­century Yucatec collection of incantations and medical prescriptions, published as Ritual of the Bacabs, highlights similar under­ standings of purifying pollution. The anthropologist Timothy Knowlton describes one particular prayer aimed at relieving an elderly man suffering from abdominal swelling; it involves an ordered, communicative process by which the healer, starting with the patient’s distended stomach and work­ ing through the body, makes a series of question-­and-­answer associations between the patient’s specific body parts and elements of the goddess Ix Hun Ahau (Lady One Ahau), a deity understood as the Postclassic Yucatecan coun­ terpart to Tlazolteotl.100 Like Tlazolteotl, Ix Hun Ahau was associated with weaving implements. She is also described as the “consort of the lord of Metnal [the underworld]” and associated with the entrance to the underworld in the

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Ritual of the Bacabs. Throughout the incantation, the healer symbolically in­ troduces the goddess into the body of the patient or equates his body with her parts and paraphernalia. The man’s tail[bone] is likened to Ix Hun Ahau’s golden weaving spindle; his rib cage to her golden comb; his bowels pen­ etrated by her pure, unspun cotton tassels; her cotton threads inserted into the nerves or tendons of his back. The ritual continues: What can it be / that was inserted into thy nose? / It must be . . . the golden female stench / of Ix Hun Ahau, “Goddess One Ahau.” /  .  .  . What can be the meaning / of thy throat? / Ah!, it must be / the vagina / of Ix Hun Ahau, “Goddess One Ahau.” / What can be / the symbol / of thy tongue? / It must be the sacred excrement / of Ix Hun Ahau, “Goddess One Ahau.” / What can be the meaning / of thy breath? / Ah!, / it must be the anus of / the spirit of Ix Hun Ahau, “Goddess One Ahau.”101

The “sacred excrement” or “pure shit” (suhuy ta) of Ix Hun Ahau is simulta­ neously the polluting presence that causes illness and the cleansing agent that heals it. The man’s body is understood as permeable not only to pollution, but also to the filthy parts of the deity, parts that purify and transform his equiva­ lent diseased ones as they enter him.102 Although Ix Hun Ahau is identified as a product of Postclassic Nahua–­ Maya intercultural exchange, Knowlton further argues that a series of Classic-­ period vases shows remarkable similarities with the incantation from the Ritual of the Bacabs.103 Their painted scenes, known as “codex-­style” for their similarities to Indigenous bark-­paper screenfold books, show several versions of an elderly man with a distended stomach. He is tended to by a well-­dressed young woman, who is illustrated breathing on the man while she lays her hands on him (figure 3.1, plate 8). Although many elements of the scenes remain poorly understood, they relate to a mythic narrative in which, broadly, a maize, sun, or rain deity dis­ guised as an animal (here, a deer) enters the home of an aged god, charms his wife, daughter, or granddaughter, and elopes with her. The woman is usually killed, but also often resurrected by her lover.104 On the Classic-­period vases, the old man, shown as the hunting god Huk Sip, is usually depicted on a bed surrounded by naturalistic or anthropomorphic deer, with owls and other small birds below. Naked women are shown embracing, caressing, or being carried off by larger-­than-­life deer. The associated text on one vessel states clearly that the deer is “carrying off the wife of Huk Sip.”105 Although the an­ cient iconography is complex, its similarities to the colonial incantation are strong: the old man with his swollen abdomen, the young woman tending to him (perhaps with her breath), the unusually overt female sexuality. The art

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f i g u r e 3.1 A series of Classic-­period Maya vases show several scenes of an elderly man with a dis­ tended stomach. He is tended to by a well-­dressed young woman, whose breath upon the man is depicted as she lays her hands on him. Photo by Justin Kerr (see also plate 8). Source: Justin Kerr, Knumber, Justin Kerr Maya Archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC.

historian Matthew Looper has argued that the scroll motif adorning the deer’s ears in these scenes—­a symbol signifying a strong, musky, animal odor very similar to the central Mexican glyph for excrement—­might indicate that the las­ civious deer are both physically and morally “filthy.”106 The vases depict a spe­ cific mythic story, but they also suggest that the Postclassic goddess who cures with her genitals and excrement may have deep roots—­or, at the very least, early parallels—­that would have facilitated the incorporation of Tlazoteotl’s characteristics into the Maya pantheon. Some pre-­Columbian acts of purification appeared more familiar to the Spanish than did the use of excrement to remove corruption. Bathing rituals, for example, were sometimes taken for Indigenous analogues to the Catholic sacrament of baptism. A chapter in the Florentine Codex describes how a Nahua midwife would bathe a newborn infant after cutting the umbilical cord. The midwife touches the baby’s chest and head with water before washing it, speaking over the child to the goddess of fresh water, Chalchiuhtlicue: May she wash thee, may she cleanse thee! May she remove, may she transfer the filthiness which thou hast taken from thy mother, from thy father! May she cleanse thy heart, may she make it fine, good! . . . Remove the blotch, the filth, the evil of his mother, of his father! And possibly he cometh laden with the vile. May that with which he cometh laden, the evil, the bad, be washed away, be destroyed.107

As the historian Mark Christensen notes, the echoes of a Catholic baptism in this description from the Florentine Codex—­an account penned by a Spanish friar and Christian Nahuas—­emphasize the “Christianizing” of the Indigenous ritual.108 Yet the similarities between the Catholic and Nahua rites were merely

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superficial. Catholic baptism washes away the original sin with which all hu­ mans are born. The original sin is not committed directly by the infant or its parents, but rather physically transmitted to all the descendants of Adam via sexual intercourse (baptism removes the original sin, but the tendency to­ ward sin remains).109 The Nahua bathing rite also removed pollution caused by an infant’s ancestors, but specifically washed away the physical tlazolli—­the semen—­associated with the sexual activity that created the child. Nahuas un­ derstood human beings, like other things that grow, to result from the trans­ formation of fertile filth (sexual fluids) into new life (a fetus). For Christians, original sin was genetically transmitted, but semen itself was not dangerous. For Nahuas, semen was like any other form of tlazolli: sexual fluids were neces­ sary to form a strong fetus, but in excess they could cause it to become coated with filth, adhere to the womb, and kill the mother during childbirth.110 The purification that takes place in Catholic baptism is metaphorical: it is not the physical outcome of washing that removes original sin, but the pres­ ence of the Holy Spirit in the water that makes the ritual effective in cleans­ ing the soul. In Nahua infant bathing, and many other pre-­Columbian tradi­ tions, the relationship was literal: cleansing simultaneously removed physical and moral impurities. Earlier examples include the Classic Maya practice of sweatbathing, but also bloodletting, abstinence, induced vomiting, and forced evacuation by enema, all of which were understood as cleansing processes that restored an individual’s exterior and interior imbalances or disorders.111 The Franciscan friar Diego de Landa, in his sixteenth-­century Relación de las co­ sas de Yucatán (Account of the things of Yucatán), details how priests would cover their bodies in soot and enter into periods of sexual abstinence and fasting during preparations leading up to important calendrical celebrations. When the date arrived, their bodies would be washed and repainted in bright colors—­an external demonstration, from filthy to clean, of the metamorpho­ sis of their internal state from impure to pure.112 The translation of Christian concepts into Mesoamerican languages was an inexact process: metaphors were only partially understood by Spanish gram­ marians and lexicographers, as well as by their Indigenous converts. Semantics were uncomfortably stretched, and rough parallels were made to seem like exact equivalences. The effect was the creation of a new form of moral dis­ course, one that simultaneously appropriated preexisting ideas and associations and recast them. Although specific kinds of dirt and disorder had been con­ sidered morally and physically polluting in precontact Mesoamerica, they had also been considered useful—­even necessary—­in removing the corruption they caused. Colonial Christian usage, on the other hand, employed refuse, excrement, and even potsherds in strictly negative terms. The meeting of the

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two generated a broader category of waste, in which new kinds of materials became dangerous to the health of one’s body and soul, but also lost their power to rectify the sinner’s transgressions. Transforming Trash Two early colonial sources serve to demonstrate not only how filth and refuse were exploited as metaphors for immorality by sixteenth-­century mission­ aries, but also how such usage generated new concepts of waste in colonial Mesoamerica. The first is Franciscan friar Andrés de Olmos’s collection of Nahuatl moral rhetoric included in his Arte para aprender la lengua mexicana (Grammar for learning the Mexican language) in 1547. These texts, known as huehuetlahtolli (discourse of the elderly, or ancient discourse), are orations and exhortations of Nahua elders, a collection of speeches, precepts, and ad­ vice used both for educational purposes and to practice the art of fine speak­ ing on important occasions, such as the death of a king, the election of a new governor, the birth of a child, or a marriage, as well as in lectures delivered by parents or teachers. Olmos collected only samples of the genre and edited them, modifying the huehuetlahtolli for Christian pedagogy and erasing any explicit references to pre-­Columbian deities.113 The huehuetlahtolli make up the eighth chapter of Fray Andrés de Olmos’s grammar: “the ways of speaking that the elders had in their ancient discourse.”114 Olmos states at the beginning that the chapter provides a list of met­aphorical speeches, examples that can be used for their figurative meanings, different from their literal ones, in the hope of presenting Christian morals in a fa­ miliar way and encouraging their acceptance.115 Although the huehuetlahtolli incorporated into Olmos’s 1547 grammar are based on native texts from gen­ erally nonreligious contexts, the friar suppressed “idolatrous” references and added Christian ones, creating a sample set of native linguistic formulas for preaching Christian doctrine and providing a reflection of sixteenth-­century Nahua-­Christian religious dialogue.116 In one example, Olmos includes the phrase “The dirty and obstinate sin­ ner is as a pig is with mud” in Spanish.117 The accompanying Nahuatl transla­ tion, however, reads: “He (or she) plays with filth, dust; puts himself in charge of the ash-­heap, occupies himself with mud, potsherds; thus he mixes himself with mud, thus he mixes himself with potsherds; like a peccary he rolls in excrement and ashes.”118 As Burkhart notes, not only did the equation of sin with mud need to be understood, but the Christian use of the pig as a symbol of gross carnality and the local substitution of the peccary had to be learned as well.119

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Burkhart points to still other examples drawn from Franciscan friar Juan Bautista’s Huehuetlahtolli, where the Nahuatl speeches collected and edited by Olmos were published (as well as possibly amended and augmented) to fur­ ther promote Christianity and its practices.120 A daughter speaking to her mother, deferring to the older woman’s wisdom, claims: “Indeed, I am still a little child, I am still a little kid. Indeed, I still make dirtballs, I play with pot­ sherds. Indeed, I still play with my urine, my feces. Indeed, I still roll in my hand my saliva, my nasal mucus.”121 Such claims of self-­abasement, which would be taken literally by a Nahua listener, appealed to Franciscan friars’ humili­ ation and mortification of the flesh as the symbolic counterpart to an exalted spirit. Similarly, in a heavily Christianized version of an oration, an old man (probably intended to be understood as a priest) says, “So we came to clean, we came to purify your souls, in order that they cast off their sweatiness, their dustiness, their stench, their rottenness, which the black ones, the dirty ones . . . placed within them.”122 The symbolic contamination of the soul would have been understood more literally by a native audience, not only as contamination of the whole self, but as pollution caused by exposure to sweat, dust, stench, and rottenness. The second text is the Theologia Indorum, by the Dominican friar Domingo de Vico, originally written in K’iche’ Mayan between 1545–­1555 and later trans­ lated into Kaqchikel and Tz’utujil, which has been reconstructed, translated, and extensively analyzed by the scholar of religion Garry Sparks.123 Vico’s nearly seven-­hundred-­page work is the first catechism manual to be written in a Mayan language and the first original work written in the Americas to be called a “theology.”124 Where Olmos selectively appropriated existing Nahuatl orations, Fray Domingo de Vico, most likely with the help of Diego Reynoso, a K’iche’ no­ bleman, produced something entirely new in his Theologia Indorum. His 216 “chapters” (thematic sections, each between one and eight pages in length) strategically employ terms and images from local stories, legends, and myths to authoritatively and eloquently present Christian concepts in the highly po­­ etic ceremonial rhetoric of elite K’iche’.125 Moreover, the Theologia Indorum had an enormous impact—­Vico’s writings were widely known and used not only by other missionaries and linguists, but among Indigenous populations throughout colonial times.126 As Sparks has shown, many of the chapters in Fray Domingo de Vico’s massive work use biblical narratives to encode moral dis­ course and claims about daily ethical behavior. They are not attempts to trans­ late the Bible into K’iche’, but rather summaries that establish linguistic and cul­ tural common ground between the mendicants and their intended converts.127

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Still, Vico does not always succeed in finding that common ground. In communicating the story of Cain and Abel, for example, Vico uses the term utz for “good” and itz for “bad” or “evil.” Although utz is a common term in K’iche texts and the modern spoken language, itz is rarely ever used. Morality is instead understood as achieving and maintaining a balance with respect to cosmological patterns, cosmogonic narratives, social structures, and daily activities. Rather than abstract “evil,” an imbalance is expressed in terms of undesirable states and conditions, such as tz’il (dirty), k’ax (difficult), or tzel (ugly), or through paired terms such as q’aq’ (hot) and tew (cold), which refer to essential aspects of an object or activity (not spiciness or temperature) and do not necessarily map onto moral conceptions of “good” and “bad.”128 Maize, for example, is “hot,” while beans are “cold.”129 The ethical goal is to maintain a balance between the hot and the cold, or between the “positive,” which rep­ resents harmony, equilibrium and consensus, respect, humility, and balance, and the “negative,” which represents a betrayal of consensus, disrespect, ex­ tremes, and excesses. All things, from calendrical days to gifts to persons, con­ tain both positive and negative qualities. Imbalance and difficulty result not only from too much negative, but from too much positive as well—­an under­ standing that does not function in the same way as good and evil, where the goal is for good to dominate, conquer, or eliminate evil.130 When Vico recounts the Cain and Abel story in chapter 47 of the Theologia Indorum, he describes Abel’s sacrifice before God as “the goodness of his work,” while Cain offers “only his little bit, only his rotten stuff.” Abel’s more favor­ able offering engenders “the envy of the heart, the temptation thus of Cain toward Abel,” making him want the death of his younger brother. Vico ex­ plains, “Only out of evil in his heart, Cain killed Abel.”131 Sparks notes that, by explicitly using itz to express the flaws in Cain’s desires, “Vico makes clear to his K’iche’ readership that sin is rooted in one’s disposition and character and expressed through one’s behavior. Moreover, Vico’s choice to employ the in­ frequently used K’iche’ term itz in a Christian context allows him to shift its underlying meaning to encode Christian understandings of morality.”132 In a similar vein, chapter 22 of Vico’s work, the “telling of the opulence and richness of God, the great lord,” employs K’iche’ rhetoric and poetics in a series of both cataphatic (describing what God actually is) and apophatic (asserting only what God is not) statements. First, the positive: God’s “splendor,” for ex­­ ample, is described as “the greenness and yellowness of God”133—­an ancient, oppositional couplet found in Classic Maya images and hieroglyphic texts in reference to verdant, new growth (yax, “blue, green”) and dry growth (k’an, “yel­ low”), both required for swidden agriculture, “a totality that comes together

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into a whole of human practice.”134 Vico also draws on Indigenous symbolism in elaborating the “wealth and riches of God” as eternal jade and precious metal, gold and silver, eternal gems and rubies, eter­ nal juice of turquoise, eternal resplendent quetzal and blue-­green feathers, eternal enlarging deed begun, eternal food, eternal water, eternal blowing and motion.135

In describing celestial life with God, however, Vico uses a series of negative statements, evoking its goodness through its contrast to examples of the every­ day “evilness” of life on Earth, which are expressed in terms of filth, stench, rot, and rubbish: Never will there be mud, never will there be dust, never will there be weeds, never will there be trash, never will there be stench, never will there be bit­ terness, never will there be rancidness, never will there be stench, never will there be entangledness, never will there be envy, never will there be burnt smell, never will there be urine smell, no misfortune, no sharp points, never any rain, never any drought. . . . Never will it be like it is here on the face of the earth.136

Although Vico’s intent is to describe God’s indescribable kingdom by analogy to what it is not, the effect is to cast much of K’iche’ daily life as incompatible with Christian ideals—­at least, as Vico presented them in sixteenth-­century colonial Guatemala. K’iche’ morality at the time would have seen such elements or experiences as negative, but also necessary, important for maintaining a balance with complementary “good” things.137 In another example, Vico positions an aversion to filth as an expected hu­ man response. Throughout the chapter, Vico tries to explain why effigies made of wood or stone stelae are unworthy of worship. One of his tactics is to argue that a carved effigy is unable to react or speak out, regardless of the physical damage inflicted upon it: If it would be buried, if one becomes infested with bugs, it is the stick that is made human as an effigy by you all: “Ayy! I have just been buried, I am in­ fested,” it does not say to you all. Are you all still deaf, are you all so blind, are you all in the darkness, in the thick of the night? If it would be shat on by your children, by a dog, by a hen, or by a bird: “Ahh! you all just shat on me, you all just stained me, I have just been soiled by you all,” is not said. It would clean itself up then, it would wash up then.138

The implication is that any rational, volitional being would not only cry out in such a state, but also should immediately seek to cleanse itself. As the bugs

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and filth do not cause the carved effigy to react, this shows that the object has no feelings, agency, or personality.139 The excerpts from Olmos’s orations and Vico’s Theologia Indorum serve merely as illustrative examples of Christian sermons, prayers, and biblical trans­ lations that sought to adopt pre-­Columbian ideas about filth and feces. Burkhart has cataloged numerous others that draw on the Nahuatl tlazolli complex, in­­ cluding descriptions of lust as tlayelpaquiliztli (“foul happiness”), sin as motlilt­ ica, mocatzahuaca (“your blackness, your dirtiness”), and a heart with mortal sin as “a urine-­jar, an excrement-­jar.”140 More recently, the anthropologist David Tavárez has highlighted similar themes in sixteenth-­century translations of Christian doctrine into Zapotec in colonial Oaxaca, such as in Pedro de Feria’s 1567 Doctrina cristiana en lengua castellana y çapoteca (Christian doctrine in the Spanish and Zapotec languages): “What is the body but dung, but putre­ faction? Do you wish to know what our body is? Beware of what comes out of our mouths—­and our noses, and our eyes, and our ears—­of all the things we produced. It is all dung, rancidness, putrefaction, all of it is very dirty and very fetid.”141 Tavárez notes that the caution to “beware of what comes out of mouths” is translated using an unusual verb, canachahuyyobito, which literally compels the Zapotec audience to beware the filth their own bodies produce.142 Conclusions Catholic doctrinal materials, sermons, and sacraments were often adapted by Spanish missionaries in colonial Mesoamerica by appropriating—­and transmogrifying—­pre-­Columbian practices and terms in Indigenous languages. Friars seized on concepts that appeared familiar to them and ones that reso­ nated with their native audiences. Among these were Indigenous understand­ ings of dirt and disorder as polluting forces working on various material and immaterial ontological levels. Yet the Christian dichotomy of good and evil did not have an exact preexisting parallel. Human excreta, everyday rubbish, and dirt were not ontologically “bad” in pre-­Columbian Mesoamerica, but rather powerfully charged in ways that allowed for both negative and posi­ tive qualities. While cleanliness and filth were understood as metaphors for those categories by Christians, they were also interpreted literally by their in­ tended converts. Physical impurities were not tokens of corruption, they were corruption—­dangerous and contagious in very real ways. Indigenous under­ standings of refuse, dirt, and excrement allowed waste materials to serve as both potential sources of and solutions to problems of corruption. Cleansing (bath­ ing, fasting, abstinence, etc.) simultaneously removed both physical and moral contamination, but pollution was a necessary component of purification. Filth

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and decay were potentially corrupting, but also potentially fertilizing; sources of disease and death, but also of renewal. By appropriating seemingly familiar forms, however, Olmos, Vico, and other doctrineros did more than simply translate Christian ideas into Mesoamerican languages or reframe Indigenous rituals as Catholic sacraments. They actively transformed the concepts underlying the words and examples they chose, for their converts and for themselves. The domain of trash, dirt, and disorder be­ came one of many realms of colonial contestation. Recasting notions of moral­ ity in terms of physical purity and pollution, however, stripped them of their positive potential and precluded ambivalent and contextual understandings of waste materials.

4

Dirty Work

In the early hours of the morning of March 19, 1987, Rafael Gutiérrez Moreno, the “garbage czar” of Mexico City, was killed at one of his many homes—­this one a yellow mansion inside the city’s Santa Catarina Yecahuizotl garbage dump—­in an assassination arranged by one of his many wives. In the aftermath of the sudden end to the czar’s reign, “the doors to the ‘Kingdom of Garbage,’ as Mexico City newspapers call[ed] it, [were] thrown open.”1 Gutiérrez’s garbage kingdom was a shifting, expansive one. Made up of some of Mexico’s largest trash dumps (tiraderos) and sorting plants, including Santa Cruz Meyehualco, Santa Fe, Cerro de la Estrella, Bordo de Xochiaca, and Bordo Poniente, Gutiérrez moved his operations to a new site each time an established one was closed by the city, maintaining his control for decades. He also commanded a complex system of tens of thousands of full-­and part-­ time waste pickers who made their living recovering and reselling residential, commercial, and industrial materials from the city’s streets, dumps, and sorting facilities.2 Gutiérrez indeed ruled over his dump sites and the waste pickers within them as a benevolent tyrant, a cacique.3 Despite having thirty-­eight wives,4 whenever a young girl from one of the tiradero communities was getting married, Gutiérrez had the right to take her virginity if he chose; he reportedly fathered over a hundred children (still falling short of his personal goal of 180). Yet he also built homes for waste pickers living at his dump sites, and provided them with electricity, water, and paved streets at no cost.5 Gutiérrez paid for beach vacations for community members twice a year, gave out toys at Christmas, and created a playing field at Santa Cruz Meyehualco known as “Rafael Sports City.” At the peak of his empire, Gutiérrez controlled fourteen

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thousand tons of Mexico City’s trash daily, which his sixteen thousand waste pickers sorted and resold for his profit—­estimated at US $70,000 per day.6 Gutiérrez’s example was sensational enough to make international headlines, but so-­called “informal” economies of reuse or recycling are crucial components of waste-­management systems around the world.7 Not only do waste-­picking industries mirror the complex hierarchies, deeper inequalities, and tangled social and political networks of acknowledged “formal” systems, but they have a long history. In Mexico City today, there are at least ten thousand “volunteer laborers” who sweep the city’s streets and collect and sort thousands of tons of solid waste—­occupations characterized by precariousness, lack of mobility, and social invisibility.8 They are known as pepenadores, a Hispanicized reflex of the Nahuatl term pepenilia, from the verb pehpen(a). Pehpen(a) has several meanings, but Alonso de Molina’s sixteenth-­century dictionary glosses it as “to choose something, to pick up and gather things scattered on the ground.”9 The environmental historian Martin Medina traces pep­ enilia to an official class of scavengers in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, much like the more familiar orders of warriors or traveling merchants that structured Aztec society.10 Unlike modern pepenadores, however, the pepeneliani (as they might have been called) were not denigrated for their role in the cleaning and maintenance of the city. In certain fundamental ways, the ongoing exclusion of pepenadores can be traced to the colonial imposition of European ideas about waste in the sixteenth century, including the negative associations between filth and immorality examined in the last chapter. But the meeting and transformation of Spanish and Mesoamerican ideologies played out beyond the metaphors of conversion, into the practices of daily life. Successful strategies of waste management were employed prior to the arrival of Europeans; many of those strategies were deeply rooted in ambivalent and contextual understandings of waste. Human excreta and daily rubbish were not ontologically “bad” in pre-­Columbian Mesoamerica, but rather meaningful and symbolically charged in ways that allowed for both negative and positive qualities. For most Mesoamericans, waste did not intrinsically carry a stigma, which allowed refuse to be reused for both material and immaterial purposes. Despite the obvious success of Indigenous practices, however, they became taboo when they collided with emerging European ideas about civility and bodily propriety. Moreover, colonial experiments in urban planning created public problems out of individuals’ private bodily and material wastes. In New Spain, waste and its disposal were increasingly regulated, culminating in extensive and specific Bourbon reforms of waste management in the late eighteenth century. Across centuries, Mesoamerican populations were forced into constant proximity with materials

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and spaces that had recently been recast as sources of both physical and moral contamination. Colonial waste-­management systems thus not only exerted control over Indigenous peoples and spaces, but also cemented new social and racial hierarchies. When dirt and disorder were stripped of their precontact positive potential, necessary interactions with trash became markers of immorality and social and economic inferiority. Mesoamerican populations were directly associated with those sources’ physical and moral corruption by means of required tribute labor and forced resettlement. By log­ical extension, Indigenous people were understood as responsible for a host of social problems. Those sixteenth-­century clashes around trash reverberate through time, as Indigenous populations were (and continue to be) blamed for the spread of disease, urban crime, and political failures. Comfort, Beauty, and Order Spanish conquistadors’ awed descriptions of the size and structures of Tenochtitlán convey their wonder at “seeing things never heard of nor even dreamed of ”: the metropolis rising out of the waters of Lake Texcoco like a second Venice; the marketplace larger, busier, and better regulated than those of Constantinople or Rome.11 But the order and cleanliness inside the city were equally shocking. As one of the first twelve priests to arrive in the newly conquered lands of Mexico, the Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente, better known as Motolinía (a name he adopted, meaning “the poor one” in Nahuatl), described the impeccable capital city: The streets and highways of this great city were so clean and well swept that there was nothing to stumble over, and wherever Moteuczoma went, both in this city and wherever else he passed through, the road was so swept and the ground so firm and smooth that even if the sole of the foot were as delicate as the palm of the hand, it would not receive any injury by going barefoot.12

Similarly, many years after his participation in Hernán Cortés’s invasion of Mexico and attack on Tenochtitlán, the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo still recalled how “the court itself [was] paved with large white flagstones, very smooth, and where there were no such stones, it was whitened and polished, everything very clean, so that no dust or straw could be found in all of it.”13 The Spaniards’ surprise is understandable. Early modern European cities were notoriously plagued by garbage-­lined streets, clogged gutters, and indiscriminate dumping of bodily wastes and animal remains.14 Golden Age Spanish poets, such as Lope de Vega and Luis de Góngora, make frequent mention of the foul odors and filth of Madrid and Galicia.15 In sixteenth-­century Seville,

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a trash heap located on the main walkway by the river accumulated so much refuse over generations of careless disposal that the area simply became known as the “monte de malbaratillo,” the “mound of junk.”16 In Tenochtitlán, by contrast, substantial human labor and infrastructure were devoted to waste management. Díaz del Castillo noted an extensive system of public latrines throughout the Aztec capital, remarking: I also want to mention that, speaking apologetically, they also sold many canoes filled with human excrement, which they kept in the creeks near the marketplace, and this was for making salt or tanning skins, for without it they say that they are not well made. I have understood well that some gentlemen will laugh at this, but I say that it is so; and I say moreover that customarily on all the roads they had places of reeds or straw or grass, so that those who passed could not see through them; there they placed themselves when they needed to purge their intestines, so that even that filth would not be lost.17

Curiously, one study suggested that the task of collecting excrement from Tenochtitlán’s public latrines, while certainly odious, might not have been as odorous as one would imagine, thanks to a deficiency in certain chemical compounds produced by the maize-­and bean-­based diet of ancient Mesoamericans.18 In the Florentine Codex, Sahagún provides more explicit references to human bodily waste reused as fertilizer. He describes a soil known as axixtlalli as “land which had been urinated upon, which is greasy,” and another called tlalauiyac, a mellow soil fertilized with human feces (plate 9).19 Archaeologists working in the Maya area similarly argue that human excrement would have been used for agricultural purposes, though they suggest that it would have been collected in ceramic containers for redistribution, rather than in formal latrines or outhouses.20 The collection of excrement for reuse formed only one part of a centralized and effective system. Montezuma’s veritable army of servants—­“as many as the greatest lord in the world”21—­constantly swept the streets, temples, stairways, courtyards, and houses of the island capital, not only removing each day’s detritus, but also renewing their whitewashing and burnishing with every festival. Representatives from each of Tenochtitlán’s city wards gathered at Montezuma’s palace each day to receive instructions regarding the cleaning of the city and the maintenance of the street and canal system.22 Pre-­Columbian waste-­management systems collapsed in the wake of Spanish siege and invasion. Immediately after the fall of Tenochtitlán, “there was such a bad stench in that city. . . . The entire city was as if plowed up. . . . We found no fresh water there, but brackish.”23 The Spanish captains, ill from the odors of death within the capital, quickly left for the southern city of

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Coyoacán. Many of Cortés’s officers strongly urged him not to establish the new locus of Spanish rule amid the rubble and rubbish of Tenochtitlán, ar­ guing that Coyoacán instead offered a healthy, defensible spot with adequate drainage.24 But the Aztec capital had been Cortés’s promised prize.25 Accord­ ing to Díaz del Castillo, Cortés immediately set to cleaning up and reorganizing the city: The first order that Cortés gave to Guatemoc was that they [the Mexicans] should repair the water pipes from Chapultepec in the way they used to be, so that the water should at once come through the pipes and enter the City of Mexico; next, that all the streets should be cleared of the bodies and heads of the dead, and that they should be buried so that the city could be kept clean and free from any stench; that all the bridges and causeways should be thoroughly restored to their former condition, and that they should rebuild the palaces and houses, and within two months they should return to live in them, and he (Cortés) marked out where they were to settle and what part they were to leave clear so that we could settle there.26

Cortés’s orders represent a key moment in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Not only did he arrange for the signs of siege to be swept clean, but he “marked out” the city—­delineating the areas that would be reserved for Spaniards and those that would be available to its native inhabitants. This moment was only the third time (after Santo Domingo and Panama City) that Spaniards had imposed their own predetermined, rectilinear grid atop pre-­ Columbian plans, despite the fact that Spain had been establishing colonies in the western hemisphere for over a quarter century by the time Tenochtitlán fell.27 Tasked with putting the plan into action was Alonso García Bravo. A conquistador and “good geometer” (as Cortés described him), García Bravo was known for walking through the ruins of the former Aztec capital, laying out straight streets and rectangular blocks as well as the sizes of solares (house lots) among them.28 He was also responsible for establishing the area known as the traza in 1523–­1524, the grid pattern around the main plaza of Mexico City that became an area reserved for Spanish occupation.29 In Mexico City and many other urban colonies, the traza demarcated the limits of Spanish populations that were inserted into and insulated within existing cities, separating Spaniards at the center from a periphery of indios.30 Historians have long noted the influence of classical planning ideas, (especially those of the Roman military architect and engineer Vitruvius) underlying various instructions and ordinances issued by Spanish kings.31 The increasingly rigorous mold applied to the Americas culminated in 1573, with the “ordinances concerning discoveries, settlement, and pacifications” issued

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by Felipe II, which directed the processes of city planning with a painstaking degree of detail. As the sociologist Axel Mundigo and the architectural historian Dora Crouch described it: [Felipe II’s] compilation reinforced the unilateral objectives of conquest, emphasized the urban character of Spanish colonization and specified clearly the physical and organization arrangements that were to be developed in the new cities of America. Above all the Ordinances stressed a Christian ideology and a cultural imperialism.32

Issues of refuse and cleanliness were explicitly part of Felipe II’s ordinances. As ordinance 133 directs: They shall arrange the house lots and buildings within them in such a way that the rooms of the latter may enjoy the air at midday and from the north, as these are the best. They shall generally arrange all the buildings and houses to serve as a defense and fort against those who may try to disturb or invade the town. Each house in particular shall be built so that they may keep horses and work animals therein, with yards and corrals as large as possible for health and cleanliness.33

Ordinance 122 states, “The site and building lots for slaughterhouses, fisheries, tanneries, and other things that produce filth shall be placed so that the filth may be easily disposed of.”34 The next, ordinance 123, reads, “It will be considerably convenient if towns that are laid out inland, away from ports, be built, if possible, on the shores of a navigable river; and attempts should be made to have the shore where it is reached by the cold north wind; and that all trades that give rise to filth be placed on the side of the river and sea below the town.”35 This deliberate, mandated movement of refuse “away”—­that is, beyond city limits—­was a distinct contrast to pre-­Columbian practices. It was also a concept foreign to the Spaniards who had emigrated to the Americas. Although some Spanish municipalities, such as Valencia, were equipped with underground sewers, many towns, including Madrid and Valladolid, lacked such established systems. Residents indiscriminately dumped sewage and garbage outside their homes, where pools of urine and feces turned unpaved streets to muck with a horrendous odor.36 Archaeological evidence shows that many sixteenth-­century houses within the limits of the traza in Mexico used their own wells as dumping grounds.37 By the 1560s, the market at Tlatelolco—­once praised for its order and cleanliness by Spanish conquistadors38—­and other areas around the city were described as poorly paved, prone to flooding, and filled with mountains of garbage and human excrement, so much so that it became difficult for people to perform their daily tasks.39

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Spaniards were particularly incautious when it came to Mexico City’s canals, treating them as open sewers (in contrast to pre-­Columbian precedents). Under Aztec rule, freshwater from natural springs at Chapultepec, on the western shore of Lake Texcoco, had been gathered in stucco-­lined tanks and propelled down an ingeniously engineered aqueduct built in the mid-­fifteenth century CE. A pair of pipes made from stone and packed earth ensured that one conduit was always functioning while the other could be cleaned and repaired.40 Water flowed through the raised aqueduct along the lakeshore until it joined with one of Tenochtitlán’s principal causeways, channeling freshwater directly into the center of the city. After the fall of the Aztec capital, the canal system remained in use for centuries, but without the intended practice of periodically opening and closing its sluices to clean the conduits. Some channels were completely abandoned, leaving them to clog until water could no longer flow and they “overflowed with pestilent and deadly waters.”41 According to the historian Donald Cooper, “Much of the city refuse was disposed of by simply dumping it into one of the many canals which crisscrossed the capital. By 1637, there were seven major canals plus innumerable smaller ones, all of which ultimately carried their burdens to the city cesspool—­Lake Texcoco—­ where more things floated than just the gardens.”42 Part of creating colonies of “comfort and beauty, equally reconciled with order”43 involved defining what counted as waste and deciding what should be done with it. Although Spaniards often remarked on and admired the order and cleanliness of cities such as Tenochtitlán, many successful pre-­Columbian strategies clashed with emerging colonial norms concerning not only bodily propriety, but also the use and ownership of space. Nascent governments in Mexico and Guatemala sought to assert their authority over people and places by imposing urban planning and increasingly regulating behaviors.44 In colonial Mesoamerica, waste thus became a primary means of creating and controlling appropriate Spanish subjects, not only through metaphor, but through management as well. Reforming Rubbish Felipe II’s ordinances represent an early but general instance of state-­mandated waste-­management strategies in colonial Latin America. The laws implicitly condemn the sight and smell of rubbish by explicitly defining how and where it should be discarded; but the filth being regulated is viewed as the necessary by-­products of animal husbandry and certain industries, not individuals’ un­­ wanted material and bodily refuse. Local governance in colonial cities, however, increasingly exerted control over everyday excreta.45 Surveying the minutes

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of the semiweekly meetings of Mexico City’s municipal council, the Actas de Cabildo, reveals the growing specificity with which waste and its disposal were regulated. The Actas trace the emergence of waste as an object of disciplinary action alongside the creation of new, surveillant subjects who shared responsibilities for implementing strategies to manage the new problem.46 At partic­ular moments, waste grew into a hazard to public health, fell under the control of specific individuals, or was restricted to certain locations. Such developments dovetailed perfectly with Spain’s larger colonial project, reshaping the daily behaviors of the inhabitants of its colonies and transforming ever larger populations into civilized, ordered, and socially responsible Spanish citizens. Almost from its establishment, Mexico City’s cabildo (municipal council) regularly addressed issues of waste disposal. The 1520s in particular include a number of strict mandates that paint a vivid portrait of a city plagued by filth. In April 1526, the cabildo prohibited pigs from being brought within the city limits, and also declared that those found roaming city streets could be killed on sight. The same day, the council mandated that no person should have a trash heap at the door to their house or on their property, setting a penalty of one gold peso for each offense.47 In September of the same year, the cabildo once again ordered that city residents keep their properties clean and their doors free of discarded rubbish, but in this instance further specified that all garbage and filth should be thrown outside the city and that nothing dirty or foul-­smelling should be cast into the streets (whether wastewater or the dead bodies of cats, dogs, or other things). Moreover, the penalty for such transgressions was raised to three gold pesos. In cases where an individual culprit could not be identified, the four houses closest to the offense would be fined, encouraging residents to keep a watchful eye on their neighbors.48 In a rather shocking example from April 1527, the cabildo was forced to explicitly ban the apparently common practice of dumping the bodies of dead indios in the canals, the streets, or the lake, setting a penalty of ten pesos for transgressors.49 In August 1533, the cabildo continued to bemoan the state of the capital and the disorder caused by dumps within its plazas and streets. The cabildo attempted to put a time limit on efforts to improve the city, giving residents six days to get rid of and clean up any rubbish. The penalty was lowered to two copper pesos, but this time half the fine went to the city and the other half went to the accuser who pointed out the crime.50 The effects of such financial incentives for accusers can be observed just one month later, when the cabildo was petitioned to castigate Pe[d]ro Hernández Nabarrete. On September 12, 1533, a man identified as licenciado Téllez, the owner of the solar adjacent to Nabarrete’s, complained that his neighbor’s barren lot had been used by many

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for dumping rubbish and that the many piles of trash were causing harm to him and other neighbors. Téllez requests that Nabarrete be made to conform to the city ordinances or that his solar be given to another person. The cabildo responded by giving Nabarrete two months to encircle his solar with sticks and prevent trash from being dumped in it.51 In June 1538, the monetary incentives for reporting one’s neighbors to the cabildo increased. Those who lived near the city’s irrigation ditches were fined three gold pesos for dumping trash and sewage into the canals. One-­third of the fine went to the city, while two-­ thirds went to the judge and accuser.52 In the mid-­sixteenth century, Mexico suffered the first of several waves of a deadly epidemic. The disease, possibly hemorrhagic fever, was characterized not only by a high fever but also headache, severe abdominal and thoracic pain, and bleeding from the nose, ears, and mouth. The epidemic was responsible for up to eight hundred thousand deaths in the Valley of Mexico alone.53 Indigenous populations, who were disproportionately affected by the epidemic, called it simply cocoliztli, or “pestilence.”54 The Tira de Tepechpan, a pictorial history from central Mexico created about the same time and annotated with alphabetic writing over perhaps the next two hundred years, records the epidemic as occurring in the year 1 House (1545). The Tira’s lower register illustrates the event with the figure of a dead man, his eyes closed and his arms crossed over his chest, blood spurting from his nose and mouth.55 As the cocoliztli was devastating the population (much like cholera in Europe several centuries later), waste became more than an aesthetic annoyance or a neighbor’s nuisance—­it became a threat to public health.56 In March 1545, the cabildo stated explicitly that the sickness and deaths were caused by the dust and filth of the city’s streets and granted residents only three days to clean up the city’s trash heaps and waste, at their own expense. The orders, the time limits, and the penalties (three gold pesos) put forth in 1545 are similar to earlier mandates, but this time the cabildo charged a single individual with the task of ensuring that “the inconvenience(s) mentioned cease.” The city’s al­ motazen (a clerk generally charged with controlling weights and measures in the market) would be held accountable for the state of the city on the fourth day and charged a whopping twenty gold pesos (half of which would go to the king, the other half to the city) if the problem were not resolved.57 The minutes from the cabildo meetings reveal the challenges of negotiat­ ing the complicated intersections between private waste and public space in early colonial Mexico City. Garbage was a problem, but (at least initially) the responsibility for solving that problem rested with those who had physically created it—­that is, waste itself was not managed, waste makers were. Monetary penalties deterred individuals from going against the cabildo’s orders, while

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financial incentives encouraged neighbors to hold one another accountable to those codes, which, although legally mandated, were only vaguely defined. In the wake of the 1545 epidemic, however, waste and filth became the purview of a local government office and official, even as the city’s method of enforcement (monetary penalties) remained the same. By the 1570s, the cabildo began enacting increasingly specific rules regarding waste disposal: not only that it should be done, but how it should be done. Residents were no longer simply urged to move their trash from their properties or to refrain from littering the city’s canals with refuse. In September 1570, the cabildo, once again lamenting the presence of rubbish heaps and filth in residents’ solares, mandated that all trash and waste inside the limits of the traza be removed within a period of four months. In this instance, however, the cabildo designated a specific pool of water next to the cathedral as the appropriate dumping grounds for all the garbage collected from the solares.58 Soon after, in 1571, the council appointed an official to regulate appropriate use of the water system, who received a salary for his position and was tasked with visiting and inspecting the city’s various canals for twenty-­two days out of every month, preventing residents from washing their clothes or discarding waste in the canals, and fining or even imprisoning transgressors.59 Within the first half-­century of Mexico City’s existence, waste was transformed from a valuable, potential resource, once collected and sold in the Tlatelolco market, to something rejected and unwanted, unceremoniously dumped in both public and private spaces. Getting rid of rubbish became a primary goal: one that at first was each individual’s onerous responsibility, then a problem that involved multiple people and places, and later still a governable object restricted to specific locations, overseen by particular individuals, and a bureaucratic source of income and discipline. Colonial Mexico’s cabildo minutes reveal another element central to the city’s incipient waste-­management system: Indigenous labor. Native inhabi­ tants were made to drive trash carts, clean garbage and feces out of canals, and sweep rubbish from public spaces, while sites for the collection and dumping of refuse were placed in poor, Indigenous neighborhoods (and vice versa). One of the issues discussed at the convening of the cabildo on May 18, 1565, was the need to clean the principal aqueduct from Chapultepec, which was so full of filth that it no longer carried enough water into the city. The council charged an alderman with putting indios to work removing the muck from the canal until it was clean, as well as ensuring that those same indios were not occupied with other tasks until they finished with the canal, as it served the greater public good.60 Portions of Indigenous tribute, both money and labor, were earmarked for the cleaning of the city’s canals.61 Later sources provide

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uncomfortable details of what this task entailed, including the following lengthy description from a report on the history of Mexico City’s drainage and sanitation at the turn of the twentieth century: The cleaning [of the canals] was a repugnant spectacle for neighbors and transients, and a focus of sicknesses for the inhabitants and workers, because in order to extract the muck, the indios or the convicts undressed themselves in plain sight of the public, submerged themselves in those filthy canals, and after they had removed the muck with shovels or buckets, they reappeared covered with the most disgusting unguents; and they threw the muck to one side of the drains, and it remained in the air and the sun until the carts that took it outside of the city came: while humid, it produced the most unbearable smell, and dry it was whipped up by the wind and penetrated the houses, carrying dangerous germs that often produced mortal illnesses. With the aim of avoiding the inconveniences of this imperfect and harmful cleaning system, not a few have concerned themselves with thinking of and proposing means more rapid, less costly, and less dangerous to health, but they were so inefficient that only the memory of one or another is preserved, and unfortunately the primitive and terrible way of cleaning the old drains and canals continued with the construction of the sewers, and still today we have seen in not-­distant neighborhoods the repulsive and disgusting spectacle, no longer of unpaid indio tribute or prisoners with shackles on their feet as before, but now paid workers who strip naked to extract the muck, embed themselves in it disgustingly, and throw their buckets of filthy material to the carts; and we have seen those carts, heavy and slow, travel street after street and infest them with the miasmas that they give off and dirty them with the liquids that spill through their badly sealed slits or spill over their imperfect tops.62

Similar practices were implemented in other Spanish colonies, urban and rural. In the early years of Spanish presence in Guatemala, minutes from the Actas de cabildo of Santiago de Guatemala for March 28, 1528, ordered that all Spaniards “who have indios presently serving them with labor” send those na­­ tive laborers to clean the refuse from their solares, encircle those properties with fences to prevent further waste dumping, and clean the streets, or risk losing both their solares and associated indios.63 After Guatemala’s capital was moved to the Panchoy Valley (present-­day Antigua Guatemala) in 1543, all Indigenous communities were required to supply it with work details (their size in proportion to total population), some of which were responsible for sweeping the city’s streets and government buildings, cleaning latrines, and dredging refuse from the local Pensativo River.64 In one instance, records from the 1570s show that the neighboring community of Jocotenango was ordered to supply, three times per week, thirty indios to clean the palace of the audiencia

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(the regional supreme court) and six indios to clean the latrines of the city jail in Antigua, all without any sort of compensation.65 In Peru, the system of mit’a labor (mandatory service under the Inka Empire) was co-­opted by the cabildo, which tasked local Indigenous leaders with organizing laborers to clean canals and walk through the city of Lima, clean up trash and dung, and cart it outside the city.66 As Mexico City grew and sanitation systems became more complex and controlled, Indigenous residents continued to perform the unpleasant labor associated with waste management. Native drivers conducted the city’s waste carts, collecting and hauling garbage and excrement away from the traza as part of their unpaid annual tribute.67 These carretoneros, refuse collectors using horse carts, are still found in some Mexican cities (though many are better known as burreros, having switched to donkey carts). Throughout most of the existence of the carretonero occupation, it has been associated with poverty, lack of sophistication and education, and even crime.68 Indigenous people were thus constantly associated with the city’s dirt and detritus, easily made responsible and blamed for it. In 1762, a council member and three deputies of the municipal police force known as the Junta de Policía issued a citywide evaluation and subsequent public orders addressing issues of cleanliness. Indigenous garbage collectors were specifically chastised, accused of collecting rubbish and excrement from homes in one neighborhood and dumping it in another, rather than in appropriate sites designated for public dumping. Fines were imposed for failures to adhere to the new orders: six pesos, with an alternative punish­ ment of twenty-­five lashes for indios and servants who did not have the resources to pay. Even as Indigenous street cleaners handled the material and bodily wastes of others, under threat of corporal punishment, residents of the traza described them as lazy and complained of their irregular service.69 The increasing control exercised over the production, placement, and problems of waste culminated in Bourbon reforms of the late eighteenth century. In particular, Don Juan Vicente de Güemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, the second Count of Revillagigedo, who served as viceroy from 1789 to 1794, produced a royal proclamation (issued August 31, 1790) containing fourteen points dedicated exclusively to the dumping and collection of garbage in Mexico City.70 The level of detail in Revillagigedo’s proclamation is impressive in comparison not only to earlier attempts at enforcing sanitary standards, but also to contemporary efforts in Europe and the United States.71 The specifics he provides in attempting to counteract certain practices paint a vivid portrait of the way that rubbish continued to plague Mexico City until the late eighteenth century. Moreover, Revillagigedo’s reforms, more so than any earlier sanctions, focused on changing what it meant to be a Mexican citizen. His proclamation

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articulates his vision of a civilized, ordered, and socially responsible Mexican person and their conduct—­an aim that he did not consider achieved after more than two centuries of colonial rule. Revillagigedo’s proclamation ordered that two different carts would pass through the city every day of the year, including festival days: one for human waste and the other for mixed refuse. Trash needed to be set out by six in the morning from March through September, by seven in the morning from October to February. The carts would canvass the city from a half hour before sunrise until an hour after sunset, then return again until eight-­thirty at night from March through September and until nine o’clock at night from October through February. One additional pass through the city would be made from nine until eleven o’clock from March through September and from eight until ten o’clock from October to February, to collect waste from residents who were unable to take their trash out on time and missed the first carts. After pickup, “all the city must be perfectly clean.”72 If residents missed the carts’ (many) designated pickup times, they were instructed to maintain their refuse within their residences until the following day. The cleaning carts would be equipped with bells to alert residents to their arrival and ensure their clear passage through the city streets. Anyone interfering with the progress of the garbage carts was fined twelve reales, a payment that doubled or tripled with subsequent offenses.73 Additional stipulations prohibited beating dust from clothes or mats from balconies or washing clothes in the canals, as well as cleaning or shearing livestock in public fountains and plazas. Residents were prohibited from leaving dead animals in the streets to rot, but instead were instructed to alert authorities within twelve hours, who would then promptly remove the carcasses to designated dumping sites. Dogs—­particularly “scary” breeds such as Mastiffs—­ were prohibited from running wild and defecating in the streets. Fines were imposed on their owners for such offenses, which increased with each incident. The police would simply kill dogs found in the street at night, with the assumption that the animals “did not have an owner that cared for them.”74 Revillagigedo placed particular emphasis on “the extremely indecent abuse by residents of both sexes, who relieve themselves in the streets and courtyards.” Those who commit “this abominable excess” were placed in the stocks, fined, and, for multiple offenses, jailed.75 Teachers, as an “essential part of a good education,”76 were to create designated places for children to relieve themselves within their schools, to allow them to do so one by one, and to instruct their pupils that they should never use the streets for such purposes. An Italian Capuchin friar who visited Mexico in the late eighteenth century echoed Revillagigedo’s disgust: “There is another very indecent abuse: in the streets,

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plazas, and whatever else, when the need arises for a person, be it man or woman, to have a bowel movement or merely make water, they do their business in total liberty wherever they happen to be—­even if others are present (which is not the practice in Italy, nor in many other countries).”77 Revillagigedo believed that pulque taverns were “the places where men and women, disposed of decency and reason, commit this offense with the greatest frequency.”78 Tavern owners were therefore charged with building latrines, as were masons building new houses. Existing houses with access to the open sewage ditches running along the streets were given three months to construct public toilets and facilities for disposing of excrement collected within homes farther from the drainage system. If the three-­month deadline was not met, the Junta de Policía would construct public toilets, but property owners would be responsible for their costs and upkeep. In 1792, Revillagigedo republished his decree, this time with more specific instructions for the construction of those public latrines as deep pits lined in masonry, with top openings for easy dumping of waste (but also covered to prevent the smells that built up), and covered spouts at the bottom for quick removal by the garbage-­collecting carts and their Indigenous drivers. Revillagigedo’s proclamation highlights the issues of race and class entrenched in colonial Mexico’s refuse problems even more clearly than the city cabildo’s orders. The most comprehensive plans and resources were devoted to the city center, the traza that had initially been reserved for Spanish residence. Those areas—­the Calle and Plaza de San Francisco, the Callejón de la Condesa, and the Calle de Canoa—­were the wealthiest parts of the city, but also the places where elites were forced into direct, daily interactions with what they called “the polluting activity of the poor.”79 The new collection and dumping sites established by Revillagigedo were located strictly beyond the limits of the traza, that is, in areas with mainly lower-­class and Indigenous residents. Major and minor dumps in Mexico City during the 1790s were located primarily in the Indigenous neighborhoods of San Juan and Santiago Tlatelolco (figure 4.1). Poorer neighborhoods became, by state mandate, the dumping grounds of the wealthy. As the historian Sharon Bailey Glasco writes, “City planners gave little thought to pollution in indigenous zones, or its effects on the health of residents there. The greater concern was the potential for this garbage, and the air it infested, to bleed into the traza, where elites lived. City officials viewed Indian barrios as the place where, as Revillagigedo himself put it, ‘all the horrible things of the city originated.’ ”80 As sanitation systems developed, Indigenous people were forced into constant proximity with filth and contamination. As emergent norms of civility

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f i g u r e 4.1 Locations of major (circles) and minor (triangle) dumps in Mexico City, ca. 1790. The out­­ lined area of the city in gray indicates the traza. Drawn by Emily Her after Sharon Bailey Glasco, Construct­ ing Mexico City: Colonial Conflicts over Culture, Space, and Authority (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), map 5.1.

and the missionary messages employed in Christian doctrine stripped such materials of their converting, regenerative powers, waste was transformed into a source of pollution and corruption. Not only were existing traditional waste-­ management strategies made morally reprehensible and dangerous to the health of one’s body and soul, but new colonial systems ensured that Indigenous residents stayed intimately associated with waste—­their own and others’. Mar­ ginalized into constant proximity with sources of contamination and thereby

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as­sociated with both physical and moral impurity, Indigenous Mesoamericans bore the blame for crime, failures of politics and development, and public-­ health scares. Contagion and Control Empire and excrement are closely entwined. Colonial clashes over waste practices are not limited to the early modern period or to European colonization in the Americas. The politics of waste everywhere extend beyond where garbage goes and who deals with it. The geographer Colin McFarlane refers to the “geographies of contamination” of British colonialism in India: new configurations of matter, minds, and bodies “underwritten by a close association with [the British colonists’] disgust at the colonial Other.”81 The historian Todd Henry details Japanese-­led projects to reform Korean hygienic habits and “sanitize” Seoul in the early twentieth century, while Warwick Anderson, a historian of science and medicine, even uses the phrase “excremental colonialism” to describe how American health officers in the early twentieth-­century Philippines “turned their new tropical frontier into a desolate human-­waste land, imagining everything ‘brownwashed’ with a thin film of germs.”82 The anthropologist Ann L. Stoler has traced not only imposed Dutch ideas about “cleanliness” in mid-­twentieth-­century Java, but also the ways in which those associations were internalized by those who they served to control. Stoler describes how one of her informants, Ibu Rubi, “recalled so absorbing these Dutch notions of cleanliness that she became estranged from her own ‘dirty’ neighborhood (an experience also recounted by others). She told of returning to the village and furiously attempting to clean everything, even trying to mop dirt floors, to the surprise of her neighbors. . . . [Ibu Rubi] says: ‘. . . It was for cleanliness, good health.’ ”83 Like these and other colonial settings, differences in perceptions and practices surrounding wastes in colonial Mesoamerica im­­ parted inescapable social, economic, and moral status to Indigenous people, served to maintain ethnic-­and class-­based hierarchies, and enabled elites to blame Mesoamerican populations for wider social problems stemming from dirt and disorder, such as the spread of disease during waves of epidemics that plagued Latin America. Deciding what counts as unwanted is an act of separating and excluding that can begin with physical dirt and end with social denigration. Indigenous American populations were cast as sources of corruption and contagion almost immediately following European contact. In 1530, the Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro published Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (Syphilis or the French disease), a long Latin poem in three books. In the first book,

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Fracastoro describes syphilis as a source of defilement and disgrace and alludes to the suspected origins of the “dreadful plague which has lately come forth into the air.” We must conclude that this plague has been seen on earth not once but often, although up to now has not been known to us even by name. . . . Yet in the great ocean beneath the setting sun, where an unhappy race inhabits a world lately discovered, it arises everywhere and there is not a place where it is not commonly known.84

The third book begins by describing an Amerindian cure for the disease, a tree “they call in the sounds of their native speech Guaiacum,”85 but then slips into an imagined encounter in the New World. Fracastoro describes a scene of syphilitic Native people: “the masses and the aristocracy, boys and old men, all with melancholy hearts and hideous bodies, scaly with scabs, flowing with pus.”86 Fracastoro’s Spaniards witness the diseased being cleansed by a priest with a branch of the guaiacum tree, amid the sacrifice of a bull and a feast of pigs and sheep. When asked about these rituals, Fracastoro’s Indigenous Americans recount a myth in which a Greek shepherd named Syphilis revolts against the sun and in return is punished with “this unmentionable pestilence, which you see feeding on our bodies, which none of us, or, to be precise, few avoid, sent down from heaven because of the Gods’ displeasure and Apollo’s anger, [which] rage violently against all our cities.”87 Although Fracastoro does not explicitly blame syphilis on the Americas, the poem not only implies that the disease’s origin lies in the western hemisphere, but also that it is a physical punishment for moral impropriety. Accounts of Mayan-­speaking communities from the sixteenth century onward similarly equate Indigenous people with contagious and unsightly di­­ seases. A collective report made by the Dominican monks Francisco Viana, Lucas Gallego, and Guillermo Cadena from Cobán, Guatemala, in 1574, recording one of the earliest expeditions into the southeastern Maya lowlands, expresses their distaste for three towns there—­San Andrés Polochic, San Mateo Xocolo, and Puerto de Caballos. The monks wrote, “These three towns swarm with bad vermin—­like toads, snakes that kill people, and many mosquitoes—­ so that the natives can’t work, nor can the women spin or sew. They look like lepers because of the mosquitoes that eat them.”88 During a 1685 missionary expedition into the nearby Manche Chol area of southeastern Guatemala, the friar Agustín Cano wrote: “Huts of the Chols are difficult to find. When found, they are extremely dirty, filled with smoke and domestic insects like fleas, jiggers, and bedbugs, without being free of the innumerable kinds of mosquitoes, snakes, scorpions, and other poisonous animals of the forest.”89 Centuries later,

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the British explorer Thomas Gann similarly described Indigenous peoples’ homes as uniquely unsanitary spaces: The bush is allowed to grow to a considerable height in order to provide a convenient latrine for the women and children. Dogs, pigs, and vultures serve as scavengers. . . . Hookworms and many other varieties of intestinal parasites are prevalent, owing to the earth-­eating habits of the children, the earth being taken usually from the immediate vicinity of the house, where pigs and other domestic animals have their quarters. This disgusting habit no doubt accounts in part for the swollen bellies and earthly color of many of the children.90

The medical and environmental historian Heather McCrea, writing of nineteenth-­century Yucatán, neatly sums up these views of Indigenous bodies and practices as sources of contamination and contagion. She writes, “Public-­ health campaigns conceptualized animals and indigenous residents in terms of the positivistic narrative of antithetical couples: the civilized versus the barbarous, the tamed versus the wild, and the healthy versus the diseased. Given this narrative, it was easy to subsume animals, insects, and the indigenous Maya into negative categories all associated with filth, pestilence, and backwardness.”91 Culturally and historically embedded attitudes toward trash, dirt, and disorder thus became justifications for continued, if not heightened, hierarchies of race and class.92 The emergence of the notion of “public health,” and the perceived threats to it, in turn legitimized continued interventions in and restrictions on the private lives and bodies of Indigenous people. Revillagigedo, in the verbose and exhaustingly detailed style typical of his writings, produced a 353-­page mem­ orandum for his successor, the Marqués de Branciforte, in which he claimed: “If in the government of this New Spain the necessary care of public health had always been taken, the frequent epidemics, to which are attributed and should be attributed in great part the depopulation that exists in the provinces of these kingdoms, would not have been suffered.”93 Although Revillagigedo attributed the epidemics to administrative failings, he saw as the actual causes of disease practices common only among poor, primarily Indigenous populations: reusing or reselling the furniture and clothing of the sick and the dead; going naked (or almost naked) in public; disordered slums, filled with filthy huts and surrounded by trash heaps, which sprang up in the center of the city; and a general lack of respect for hygiene in public places and private homes on behalf of the “lower classes.”94 Although waste was explicitly associated with epidemics from the cocoliztli fevers of 1545 onward, attributing blame for the spread of disease to Indigenous peoples and attempting to control or curtail their hygienic behaviors began

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even earlier. The Franciscan friar Motolinía describes an outbreak of measles during the 1530s in his list of twelve plagues with which God punished Mexico. Although Motolinía notes that it was a Spaniard who originally arrived with the disease, he says: “From him it jumped to the indios, and if it had not been for the great care taken to prevent their bathing, and in using other remedies, this would have been as terrible a plague and pestilence as the former [smallpox], and even with all this many died. They also called this the year of the little leprosy.”95 As causal factors in the spread of disease, Indigenous bodies and habits were subjected to invasion and control. Outbreaks of cholera in particular ap­­ peared to correlate disease and death with poverty and filth, lending weight to the belief (outdated even at the time) that the disease was caused by putrid miasmas, poisonous air rising from stagnant water, cesspools, rotting garbage, decaying animal carcasses, and decomposing corpses.96 Cleaning out unsavory and foul-­smelling areas (and people) thus became a primary solution.97 In highland Guatemala, entire towns were quarantined and goods produced by Indigenous people were considered tainted. All fruit trees were destroyed, the workshops of tanners and potters were closed (their ovens were thought to be harmful), and the slaughter and sale of meat was restricted to three Ladino (non-­elite, non-­indio) butchers.98 As the historian Greg Grandin has made clear, this was increasingly the case as disease became a matter of public health and Spanish governments began to emphasize preventions and cures, rather than Christian resignation, in the face of illness. Grandin explains: Disease was not something that came from without but emerged from within the body politic. Every aspect of the underclass’s living habits—­the clothes they wore, the liquor they drank, the food they ate and eliminated, the manner in which they disposed of their garbage, the way they buried their dead—­was subject to debate, condemnation, and reform. . . . Even the materials that the lower classes used in their daily lives were suspect: the municipality prohibited the use of sackcloth and ordered tanners, whose organic waste was thought to spread the disease, to move their production outside of town.99

Following the development of a smallpox vaccine, thousands of Indigenous people in Guatemala were forcibly vaccinated, despite their attempts to insult vaccinators, hide their children from them, or even flee to the mountains to escape them. Residents were subjected to armed house inspections, in which police not only checked for cleanliness but also forced the infected to seek medical treatment. Riots broke out in response, including one instance in Quetzaltenango in 1837 in which groups of Indigenous residents of the city attacked the quarantine house and freed hospitalized smallpox victims.100

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Coupled to waste, filth, and sickness, Indigenous peoples were viewed as both physically and morally corrupt, as well as socially irresponsible. Public health scares made explicit what had previously only been implicit in the governmental control of waste: that ideals of self-­control, discipline, and containment in relation to personal hygiene could be realized only through massive public, state-­level engagements with the private bodily practices of native Mesoamericans. Conclusions In colonial Mesoamerica, waste not only became a metaphor for moral corruption, but a risk to public comfort, order, and health. It also became governable—­an object through which control was carried out, directly and indirectly. That control was enacted in myriad ways: through penalties and fines, by government overseers, and eventually through citywide changes in daily behaviors surrounding discard and disposal. Indigenous people were tasked with the dirty work of waste management, even as they were being made to form new, abject associations with that refuse. Constantly forced into proximity and interaction with the now wholly negative forces of trash and feces, Indigenous people were seen both as morally contaminated and as the origin of physical contamination, blamed for the spread of epidemics from the mid-­sixteenth century onward. Their daily lives and private spaces became the purview of the state. Public health scares heightened associations among indigeneity, poverty, filth, and disease, creating and justifying ethnic and social hierarchies, many of which persist today. Certain things and people come to be understood as unwanted, obsolete, or polluting in particular historical and cultural settings. Changing norms about waste, whether imposed or emergent, also have a profound effect on the daily practices by which it is constituted: materially (what should be considered waste), temporally (when things become trash), and spatially (where the garbage goes). Further compounded by time and distance, such shifts underscore the illogic of assuming that people in the past shared current widespread notions of what is wanted or unwanted, wasted or valued, carelessly disposed of or intentionally deposited. Anachronistically applying contemporary understandings about trash to archaeological assemblages and artifacts, then, is merely one more clash in a long history of conflicts and contestations.

5

Things Left Behind

In his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Account of the things of Yucatán), in a section devoted to the calendar and the characters of its days, the Dominican friar Diego de Landa wrote: The first day of Pop is the first of the first month of the indios; it was their New Year and, among them, a much-­celebrated festival because it was a general holiday and for all; as such, all the community, gathered together, celebrated all their idols. To do this with the most solemnity, on this day they renewed all their service items, such as plates, cups, benches, mats and old clothing and the garments in which they kept their idols wrapped. They swept their houses and the trash and old junk were thrown outside of the town in a midden, and no one, even if in need of them, touched those things.1

The acts of sweeping, renewal of household objects, and dumping outside the town described by Landa were followed by a public ceremony at a temple. After purifying the temple, four chosen attendants sat at the corners of its courtyard with a newly woven cord stretched between them, demarcating a sacred space which only men who had practiced appropriate abstinence and fasting could enter. At the center of the courtyard, a priest kindled “new fire” and lit a large brazier, into which offerings were made by the entire community.2 As often happens in Landa’s Relación, the description of the New Year celebration is a terse recounting of personal observations (perhaps his own, perhaps those of his informants’).3 Yet that account also hints at layered meanings that the colonial-­period Maya of Yucatán afforded to everyday objects—­plates, cups, mats, and old garments—­as well as the key role they played in celebrations of cosmology. Old, worn-­out, and broken things had meaning and purpose, even after being relinquished to distant waste heaps. The processes of

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collecting, discarding, and avoiding those objects are specific behaviors, activities that are required to properly participate in certain rituals and to ensure the success of particular ceremonies. Landa’s brief description, then, underscores a pattern seen again and again: what people consider to be refuse, the purposes it serves, and the rules by which they approach and manage it are intimately bound to culture and history, social and moral expectations, and the material world. But to what extent does Landa’s sixteenth-­century account capture pre-­ Columbian ideas about waste? What, if anything, did the ancient Maya consider to be “trash”? How was refuse produced and managed, used and reused? What rules governed the processes and people involved in discard and disposal? Although these questions are straightforward, answers to them are complex and need to be discerned using multiple and diverse lines of evidence. The information presented below has been gleaned from an eclectic range of sources: archaeological evidence, historical accounts, contemporary ethnographic observations, and Mayan languages, those spoken today and those recorded in colonial-period dictionaries and Classic-­ period hieroglyphic inscriptions. Languages, historical documents, and contemporary practices—­ refracted through the lens and legacy of colonial transformations (as with the example taken from Landa’s Relación)—­cannot explain ancient behaviors, but these varied sources of evidence do provide useful anal­ogies and encourage alternative ways of approaching the past. They also offer comparative glimpses of continuity, rough frameworks for understanding more distant times and places with some semantic specificity. That evidence invites us to challenge the notion that contemporary categories can be directly transposed and applied to ancient settings or that familiar ways of wasting are recognizable in other contexts. Trash is not a universal concept. Broken pots, bone fragments, worn-­out tools, and crafting debris held different meanings for different people in the past. Terms for Trash The Classic Maya have left us with their words—­hieroglyphs carved in stone and painted on pottery—­but almost no informal inscriptions. Most of the messages those hieroglyphs convey are colored by the pomp and politics of royal courts. There are many terms for noble hierarchies, political entities, and cere­ monial events, for example, but we know far fewer words for mundane aspects of daily life, especially those beyond elite experiences. These instead must be inferred, teased out from living speakers of extant Mayan languages and from colonial and contemporary records.

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An assortment of words and phrases for types of waste and the actions involved in producing, classifying, and managing it can be found in Mayan language dictionaries, many of which were meticulously produced by Christian missionaries as tools for conversion.4 Friars tasked with cataloging Amerindian languages, however, faced several challenges in finding equivalents for their native Spanish terms. In New Spain, colonial dictionaries followed the standard Castilian-­Latin model created by Antonio de Nebrija in 1492. Many of the categories or terms around which later dictionaries were built were simply borrowed from Nebrija’s original, meaning that they have little (or nothing) to do with the Indigenous people or things encountered in the Americas.5 Issues of systematic linguistic asymmetries (e.g., it is difficult to find one-­to-­one correspondences between agglutinizing, polysynthetic Mayan languages and Spanish or Latin) and unabashed ethnocentrism were further complicated by the underlying project of “peaceful conquest,” by which Spanish missionaries sought to convert natives from heathens to Christians by instilling order upon towns and spaces, by controlling bodies and their conduct, and by regulating Indigenous languages.6 Today, nearly thirty Mayan languages, spoken by over six million speakers, can be heard throughout Southern Mexico, Yucatán, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. Those languages are all descendants of what linguists call “proto-­ Mayan,” an idealized reconstruction even older than the language recorded in the hieroglyphs used by the Classic Maya (figure 5.1). Like the biblical geneal­ ogies and later biological models of evolution on which it is based, figure 5.1 draws out diverging branches of those languages—­some living or endangered descendants, some dead ends representing extinction. Languages along the common Cholan branch are most closely related to Classic Ch’olti’an (the language encoded in the Classic Mayan script), especially colonial Ch’olti’ (known from early dictionaries and grammars) and its modern relative, Ch’orti’. Glosses from those languages are most likely to be relevant to this study and to express similar meanings to those conveyed by related words in the Classic period. Ch’ol and Chontal are a bit further removed; still more distantly related are the colonial forms of Tzeltal (Tzendal) and Tzotzil, followed by their modern versions.7 Yucatec, for which sources are the most abundant and comprehensive, is less closely related but can add depth and detail where its words coincide with those of the more proximate languages (terms that are shared widely throughout Mayan languages often have ancient roots and represent basic concepts: earth, sky, water, maize, etc.). Tracing how words cluster, transform, and relate to one another can provide a window into how particular concepts—­including trash—­were defined, distinguished, and, perhaps, thought about in the past.

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f i g u r e 5.1 Classification of Mayan Languages. Drawn by the author after Stephen Houston, John Robertson, and David Stuart, “The Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions,” Current Anthropology 41, no. 3 (June 2000): fig. 1.

There are few extant dictionary entries in Mayan languages that are roughly equivalent in meaning to abstract categorical terms like English’s trash or Spanish’s basura,8 but neither they nor closely related terms make an appear­ ance in Classic Mayan inscriptions. Waste does seem to have distinctive qualities—particularly its smell—in several Mayan languages. The root *xex, for example, refers to “trash”9 in modern Ch’orti’, but also to “having a bad taste” in K’iche’ and Kaqchikel.10 Most Mayan languages, however, share a key root for human and nonhuman bodily waste. That root, *tzaa or *taa, can be traced back to proto-­Mayan, where the linguist Terrence Kaufman glossed its various forms generally as “shit.”11 In Ch’orti’, ta’ carries a broad meaning—­glossed

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both as “plant or animal excretion (as excrement, sap, juice, gum),” but also as “anything left, shed, or cast off (as an egg, fruit, shell, skin, placenta)” and “residue (as scum, a footprint, viscera).”12 In Yucatec, ta is glossed as “shit” (both the act and the result of the act)13 in the ca. 1580 Diccionario Solana, but also as “excrement, manure, shit, chambers, slags, shavings, or any toilet residue” in Juan Pío Pérez’s nineteenth-­century Diccionario de la lengua maya.14 Taa’ also encompasses other forms of excrescence, as in contemporary Ch’ol’s tak’in, translated literally as “excrement of the sun (gold)” and glossed as “metal” or “money.” Ta’ ‘ek’, literally “star excrement,” means “shooting star.”15 Taa’ is thus sometimes glossed generally as “excrement” or “waste,” but more broadly connotes a trace—­any evidence left behind by someone or something.16 Unsurprisingly, waste does not feature prominently in the carved stelae, architectural facades, and courtly accoutrements where Classic Maya texts are found. However, taa’ appears to have held similar connotations in the distant past. The archaeologist and epigrapher Stephen Houston has suggested that the Classic Maya glyphic representation of “buzzard” or “vulture,” read ta’jol, may have quite literally been understood as a “shit-­head.”17 Figure 5.2 illustrates the bird of prey, each with the syllabic preposition ti (read, perhaps, as a logographic ta’) attached to the forehead. Not only do vultures feed on the detritus of rotting carcasses, but they also lack the beak strength necessary to break through skin and bone and so must begin their eating at the body’s most vulnerable spots—­notably the anus. (One of the glyphs depicted in figure 5.2 tactfully shows the bird starting with the eyes of an animal, possibly a dog or a jaguar). In its Classic-­period glyphic rendering, the word KAB, for “earth,” also references taa’.18 The glyph contains an infixed symbol for the specific odor of ex­ crement, often seen in association with animals like peccaries and deer.19 In this way, KAB appears almost a visual euphemism for earth fertilized with taa’, akin to English’s “night soil” (figure 5.3).20 At the ancient site of Palenque, the rich iconography of the seventh-­century-­CE sarcophagus of king K’inich Janaab’ Pakal I includes a line of the ruler’s ancestors, each depicted as a fruit tree rooted in strong-­smelling soil (figure 5.4). In figure 5.5, bean plants and flowers are similarly shown sprouting from pungent KAB glyphs in the much later Madrid Codex, a fifteenth-­century bark-­paper book.21 Those ancient associations are still echoed in some modern languages. In Ch’ol, for example, ta’chäb lum, glossed as “clay, barro,” literally translates as “excrement-­wax-­ earth.”22 In Ch’orti’, lum t’ta’, ulum t’a’, glossed as “produce, yield of the soil, products of a region,”23 similarly combines the term for “earth, soil, land” (lum) with that for “excrement” (ta’). Common contemporary notions of “waste” imagine it as an inevitable product and problem of daily life—­one that must be dealt with in ways made familiar

f i g u r e 5.2 The Classic Mayan glyphic representations of a ta’jol, “buzzard,” and vultures plucking out the eyes of animals. Drawn by Emily Her after Martha J. Macri and Matthew G. Looper, The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs, Vol. 1: The Classic Period Inscriptions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 99–­100.

f i g u r e 5.3 The Classic Mayan KAB (earth) glyph with its infixed symbol for the musky odor of ex­ crement or animal glands, from the Naj Tunich cave in Guatemala. Drawn by the author after Stephen Houston, The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), fig. 11a.

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f i g u r e 5.4 Ancestors sprouting from the pungent earth, marked with KAB glyphs, on the sarcophagus of the king K’inich Janaab’ Pakal I of Palenque. Drawn by Emily Her after Andrea Stone and Marc Zender, Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), fig. 54.2.

f i g u r e 5.5 Bean plants and flowers in the Postclassic Madrid Codex, shown sprouting from fertile KAB glyphs. Drawn by Emily Her after Stone and Zender, Reading Maya Art, fig. 54.1.

by predominantly Euro-­American history and experience. There are no Mayan words for such abstractions. Instead, “waste” is understood as a particular form of taa’. That lingering trace or remnant of someone or something becomes “trash” only if human beings interact with it in specific ways. Mining Mayan dictionaries for trash-­related terms is thus only a starting point. While words provide semantic specificity in relation to how people might have thought or talked about their world, it is actions that leave behind traces of the things people actually did and how they did them.

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Cleansing, Feeding, Transforming Leftovers of ancient Mesoamerican daily life were further connected to fertility and production in practice. Refuse disposal blurred with ritual. Waste, rooted linguistically in agricultural matter and bodily excreta, entwined broadly with regenerative acts of production and purification that permeated the world: the ongoing cycles of clearing/cleansing, seeding/feeding, planting/burying, and growth/decay necessary to maintain farmers’ fields or humans’ bodies. Taa’ had less to do with the finality of trash than with cycles of reinvestment and renewal. Many tropical gardens in the Americas have long been fertilized by opportunistic, unstructured elimination and reuse of human and animal bodily wastes.24 Landa’s Relación, for example, mentions that sixteenth-­century Yucatec Maya homes had a little door in the back, leading to the house’s garden, for “necessary services.”25 Most garden plots were likely fertilized by a combination of crop residues, green manure (plants left to wither and later plowed back into the soil), food waste, and other organic household debris, in addition to excrement.26 Paleoethnobotanical research at the ancient farming community of Chan, in Belize, demonstrates that ash as well as the shells of the genus Pachychilus (jute snails) were selectively collected from household hearths and middens and incorporated as amendments to terrace soils.27 Recent excavations at the city of Mayapán, in Yucatán, have even revealed a kind of local terra preta (a fertile anthrosol best known from the Amazon). That dark-­black anthropogenic soil formed by ancient composting and burning is highly coveted by today’s farmers.28 Trash pits rich in organic material are often used to grow some edible plant species, such as amaranth and squash, in arid regions of northwest Mexico today.29 Production, consumption, and waste were thus equal inputs and outputs in a continual loop of positive feedback. The productivity of taa’ and acts of working with waste provided a basic somatic and material vocabulary through which other kinds of behaviors and intentions could be understood metaphorically. For example, descriptions of royal or palace work in Classic Mayan texts involved a metaphorical equivalence to the manual labor of farmers in the manuring, burning, and tilling of agricultural fields. A hieroglyphic expression read as ukabjiiy (literally “his manuring”) refers to rulers presiding over their territories, but also draws on an agricultural trope of investment and tending, of an overseer who ensures success.30 In fact, it is not clear that a discrete category of ritual action ever existed in Mesoamerica.31 Rather than radically separating faith and practice, ritual and religion were construed as work in active terms in traditional Mesoamerican thought (a more familiar parallel, perhaps, can be found in the

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Benedictine order’s motto “Ora et labora”—­“Pray and work!”32). In Yucatec, Tzotzil, and other Mayan languages, terms glossed as “work” apply equally well to an agriculturalist’s tasks in burning his fields, a shaman’s in performing ceremonies, and a woman’s in cleaning her house.33 Contemporary ritual practitioners are often recognized by the title of j’meen, “one who does ritual”34 or, simply, “doer.”35 As the anthropologist John Monaghan observes, “Instead of officiating at a rite, practicing a ritual, or performing a ceremony, officiants are [described as] ‘feeding’ or ‘straightening’ or ‘sweeping.’ ”36 Thus, activities that a modern analyst might deem unusual or special may have served purely rational purposes from the point of view of individuals or communities in the past, as the archaeologist Severin Fowles has demonstrated with respect to similar “doings” among the Ancestral Pueblo societies of the American Southwest.37 In addition to ritual being understood as one of many forms of work, seemingly ordinary labors could likewise be understood as ritual activities—­that is, mundane acts or objects could serve practical purposes and accomplish metaphorical aims simultaneously. For ancient Mesoamericans, for example, three specific activities traditionally associated with refuse disposal—­sweeping, bury­ ing, and burning—­could be both routine and ritual tasks at the same time. sweeping Sweeping is the verb most often associated with terms and phrases concerned with trash in Mayan languages and was an important productive and purifying act throughout pre-­Columbian Mesoamerica. Like taa’, the word for sweeping in most Mayan languages, miz (also sometimes spelled mis), can be traced back to a proto-­Mayan root, *mis/mes.38 The act of sweeping and the stuff of taa’ (that which is swept up) are insep­ arable in many Mayan languages. In some examples, it is not even necessary to include the term taa’ to describe discarded materials—­the verb for sweeping can be used to convey the idea of waste itself, since the “trash” does not exist without the sweeping. In Yucatec, friar Pedro Beltrán’s eighteenth-­century Arte del idioma maya glosses miz as simply “to sweep” (“barrer”), but the earlier (ca. 1570s) Vienna Dictionary uses the term more specifically, meaning “to pick up the trash” (“coger la basura”) and “they are picking up the trash” (“cogiendo están la basura”). The early eighteenth-­century Diccionario de San Francisco glosses taa miz as “[trash] from sweepings,” “basura (de lo barrido),” but miz itself can also be glossed as “trash in general” (“vasura en general”), as in the sixteenth-­century Diccionario Solana.39 The Yucatec phrase (ah) pul taan mis is defined as “dump, person [who throws out the trash],” but its literal translation would be “(he)-­burn-­excrement-­sweeping,” emphasizing the

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actions required for interacting with refuse, rather than abstract classifications of waste itself.40 Sweeping was not only a means of dealing with literal wastes, but a symbolic act of cleansing as well. In Landa’s Relación, he recounted how the patio or courtyard of a house must be swept clean and scattered with fresh leaves, prior to and once again during the course of a child’s baptism. Certain New Year celebrations similarly required that the chiefs, priest, and men of the town assembled “having the road cleaned and dressed with bows and frills” or how “with the road all cleaned and dressed, they all proceeded together for their accustomed devotions.”41 Specific terms for cleaning roads and paths, as in Yucatec’s miz be, “clean the road by removing the plants” in the Vienna Dictionary; miz beil, “the part of the road that falls to each town to clean” in the Diccionario Solana; and kochol miz beyl / matan miz beil, “the part of the road that each place is obligated to clean,” also in the Vienna, emphasize the centrality of these activities in daily life.42 In the highland community of Momostenango, Guatemala (see chapter 6), not only are open-­air shrines swept before lighting a fire for ritual ceremonies, but the act of sweeping provides one of the terms used for the altar itself: a mesabal, or “swept place.” According to the anthropologists Garrett Cook and Thomas Offit, “The sweeping purifies the altar, removing any vestiges of the offerings or attached sentiments, requests or complaints from the ceremonies of previous users.”43 The linguist and ethnographer Allen J. Christenson likewise writes of the contemporary Tz’utujil Maya of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala: “In Atiteco society, sweeping is a rite of purification that cleanses not only physical surfaces but the body of the sweeper as well.” Or, as one of Christenson’s informants puts it, “sweeping cleanses the soul.”44 “Sweeping the path” is a phrase often used as a metaphor for ritual purification. Examples can be found in the Books of Chilam Balam, a collection of colonial-­period sacred texts from Yucatán, and in Tzotzil creation narratives.45 In the Ch’ol language of Chiapas, Mexico, the gloss provided under misuntel (glossed as “barrer” or “to sweep”) in a recent dictionary includes the following “cultural information”: This is part of a ceremony. It is said that when a man goes to be cured by a healer, the first thing the healer does is to lay hands on him to know the reason for his disease. When finished with this, the healer already knows if the sick man has fallen in the water or in the road, where his spirit stays. Then the healer goes to the site where the man fell to call to his spirit. [The healer] goes by the road, sweeping with branches to bring back the spirit of the man that fell in the road.46

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f i g u r e 5.6 The Classic Mayan glyphic verb mis, “to sweep.” Drawn by Emily Her after Nikolai Grube and Werner Nahm, “A Sign for the Syllable mi,” Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 33 (1990): fig. 9.

Gods also swept. The epigrapher Nikolai Grube and the physicist Werner Nahm have described purifying sweeping rites related to bees and apiculture observed in the Madrid Codex, one of four extant preconquest Mayan-­language books, where the term mis can be seen spelled phonetically in hieroglyphs (figure 5.6).47 The final pages of the document show gods with brooms in their hands (plate 10), alongside the phrase (u) mis kab, “he cleans the bees.”48 The act of bee cleaning has correlates in present-­day rituals in Yucatán, now called santiguar (literally “to make the sign of the cross”—­in other words, to make holy, purify), which are performed in order to prevent the bees from dangerous epidemics or ant attacks. As the bees are cleaned, prayers are recited in which the verb mis is used to describe both the immediate act of sweeping and the broader ritual being performed. Sweeping was widely associated with religious concepts and celebrations throughout Mesoamerica. The anthropologist Louise Burkhart and the art historian Catherine DiCesare, for example, have detailed its importance for the Nahuas of Central Mexico.49 In the Florentine Codex, book 2 (“The Ceremonies”), “The Sweeping” is featured in a section otherwise devoted to modes of shedding and offering blood. The volume’s descriptive entries detail various ritual acts, including “Sacrificial Slaying, etc.,” “The Drawing of Straws [Through Parts of the Body],” “The Cutting of the Ear [Lobes],” and “The Twisting Off of the Heads [of Birds],” as well as “The Sweeping” itself: The sweeping was thus done: much did they constrain, much were constrained the children, whether women [children] or men [children], that there in the homes, in their courtyards, they sweep. And when they had first swept, before dawn, then they made their offerings carried in the palms of their hands, which they laid before the devil. And when they had gone to make the offerings, then they took up their incense ladles that they might offer incense.”50

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Although sweeping was closely associated with women in the Nahua domestic context, the account from book 2 of the Florentine Codex highlights how both girls and boys were instructed in and responsible for the daily ritual chores of sweeping and offering what they had swept up (plate 11). Nahua priests are similarly shown engaged in the constant ritual sweeping of temple spaces, as in the mid-­sixteenth-­century Codex Mendoza (plate 12), while the pure con­ dition of Aztec rulers was maintained by attendants who swept the road before them when they traveled.51 The deity Quetzalcoatl swept the roads for the rain gods, while the patron deity of the Mexica, Huitzilopochtli, was conceived as his mother Coatlicue swept. Toci, a deity sometimes known as the “Mother of the Gods,” was often depicted carrying a broom and shield. During her festival, known as Ochpaniztli, or “Sweeping the Roads,” it was not only roads that were swept, but also houses, baths, and courtyards. The sixteenth-­century Dominican friar Diego Durán noted that everyone was obliged to participate in ritual sweeping during Ochpaniztli, sweeping one’s possessions and house “[in] all its corners, leaving nothing without diligent sweeping and cleaning. Besides, all streets of the town [had to be] swept before dawn.”52 Contemporary Nahuatl-­ speaking peoples in Amatlán, Central Mexico, continue to perform ritual cleansings called ochpantli, which make use of palm brooms and incantations for cleansing and curing.53 bury ing Like sweeping, the act of burying refuse was not a meaningless task. Openings within the earth, whether natural or anthropogenic, could create points of access to communicate with and care for gods, ancestors, and places. In Ch’orti’ Mayan, the term for a “deposit” or depósito is ch’ujb’anib’, while the verb for “deposit” or depositar has the additional Spanish glosses guardar, cuidar, or “keep safe, take care of.” Their roots are related to another term: ch’ujb’ar, glossed in Spanish as cuido, honradez, or “care, honesty or integrity.”54 The conceptual connection between deposition and care is evident in traditional acts of “feeding” that are accomplished through burial. Objects and offerings placed within the earth are understood as necessary nourishment or expected payment for gods, ancestors, structures, or spaces. For the Classic Maya, the space below the surface of the earth was not dense and solid, but rather hollow and empty. Often represented by a quatre­ foil motif in ancient art, openings in the earth served as entrances to the underworld and portals into sacred space—­appropriate places where offerings may be made and received by deities or the dead.55 In some instances, under-

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ground temples and shrines were constructed within natural caves, facilitating direct offerings within those connective portals.56 The archaeologist Marshall Becker suggested that offerings buried in the earth—­not only caches, but human burials as well—­reflect ancient cosmological concerns that require humans to provide their own remains as food for the gods.57 Evidence for Becker’s interpretation can be found in the common ancient practice of burying the bodies of ancestors beneath still-­occupied residences. Ancestors and other valuables were placed in holes dug through house floors as nourishment, a means of merging the material and immaterial power of the deceased (and other important objects) with the home, both physically and socially.58 This conceptual tradition still exists among contemporary Tz’utujil Maya of Lake Atitlán, in highland Guatemala, for whom the primal ancestral element, known as Flowering Mountain Earth, can literally be “fed” through the ground. According to the anthropologist Robert Carlsen, “Some Atitecos will have an actual hole on their land through which offerings are given to the ancestor.”59 Christenson similarly describes the conception of the space beneath the early colonial church in the town of Santiago Atitlán as an access point to the realm of the dead. The Atitecos understand the floor of the church as constituting a thin barrier separating them from the underworld and all the creative and destructive elements inherent in nature that gather together there. A small hole in the nave, called pa ruchi’ jay xib’alb’a (at the doorway of the underworld) or rumuxux ruchuliw (navel of the face of the earth), serves as the most sacred opening into the world of the dead from the church and as the symbolic center point of creation. One of Christenson’s informants explained that the hole links to a network of underground passageways, extending from the fountain in the convento complex adjacent to the church, to Lake Atitlán, to the nearby sacred cave of Paq’alib’al, and to the sea—­all watery features associated with the place of the dead. Although the ancient Atitecos could once enter the tunnels, taking just a few steps and traveling many kilometers away, “now only the dead can go in and out through the world center hole.” Atiteco practitioners today place candles on a stone covering the hole, “feeding” their light to benevolent deities and ancestors.60 Further north, among the Tzotzil-­speaking community of Zinacantán, Chiapas, two specific ceremonies are performed when a new house is constructed, in order to compensate the Earth Lord for the wood, thatch, and mud that have been taken from him as building materials. As described by the ethnographer Evon Vogt, in the first, the hol chuk ceremony, offerings are made before the house is completed, when the walls are already standing and the roof rafters are in place. A rope is hung from the peak of the house to mark the center of the floor, where a hole is then dug. A number of chickens are hung

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from the rope by their feet, with their heads hidden inside the hole. The chickens’ heads are cut off inside the hole, then their bodies are taken and prepared for eating. Afterward, the heads, feathers, and leftover scraps are buried in the hole as an offering to the Earth Lord. When the structure is finished, the ch’ul kantela rite takes place. A black rooster is hung, again at the center of the house, where his neck is wrung by the shaman performing the ceremony. The rooster’s body is buried in the floor below and the spot is sprinkled with liquor. Candles and pine tips are planted in shallow holes at each of the four corners of the house, along with chicken broth poured by the shaman. The shaman’s assistants then climb onto the rafters and “feed” the same meal to the roof by sprinkling liquor and chicken broth onto the beams. Finally, six candles are planted in the center of the house and a formal meal for the (human) participants follows.61 The epigrapher David Stuart has drawn attention to parallels in the past throughout Mesoamerica and beyond: Classic Maya “house-­censing” rituals, an Aztec ceremony called caltlacualiztli, or “feeding the house,” and house-­dedication rites of the American Southwest, where items are similarly placed under the four corners of a newly constructed house and the roof is also fed.62 In addition to feeding and caretaking, depositional acts can also serve as methods of payment or repayment, as in the Zinacantecos’ offerings to the Earth Lord in exchange for house-­building materials. The ethnographer Duncan Earle points to the K’iche’ Mayan term for “life,” k’aslem, as related to the root word k’as, for “debt” or “that which is borrowed.”63 Earle argues that ancestors and deities, having done the work necessary to bring human beings into existence and shared the material world with them, require a debt that must be repaid to the extent possible throughout a human lifetime. As one of Earle’s informants stated, “In death, a lifetime is paid back to the Mundo [world] by the feeding of the body to it.”64 The archaeologist Patricia McAnany, drawing on Earle’s ethnographic work, suggests a juxtaposition between a Christian cosmology of original sin and a traditional Maya cosmology of “original debt,”65 what John Monaghan describes as “a covenant of mutual obligation, phrased in an alimentary idiom.”66 burning Fire was a powerful force of transformation throughout pre-­Columbian Meso­ america. Where burial allowed offerings to pass through underground portals, coming into contact with and feeding gods and ancestors, burning transmuted material offerings into ephemeral smoke and scent that could likewise be consumed by deities and the dead.67 Numerous Classic Maya scenes depict blood-­

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f i g u r e 5.7 Burning offerings, including sacrificed infants, in bowls. Drawn by Emily Her after Karl A. Taube, “The Birth Vase: Natal Imagery in Ancient Maya Art and Ritual,” in The Maya Vase Book, Vol. 4, ed. Justin Kerr (New York: Kerr Associates, 1994), fig. 8.

f i g u r e 5.8 The Classic Mayan glyphic verb EL, “to burn.” Drawn by Emily Her after Stone and Zender, Reading Maya Art, 155.

soaked paper, rubber, tamales, and even sacrificed infants set aflame as offerings in censers or atop altars (figure 5.7), many of which have archaeological correlates.68 So essential was the use of fire to making offerings that the Classic Mayan glyphic verb for “to burn,” EL, consists of a ceramic offering dish, marked with the symbol of the sun (the ultimate source of all heat and fire), with smoke and flame rising from the bowl (figure 5.8).69 Fire was also a cleansing agent. Flaming offerings are sometimes shown with a pair of glyphs, YAX and K’AN. These terms mean “blue-­green” and “yellow,” respectively, but when paired they seem to connote complementary opposites, “ripe” and “unripe,” or new growth and dry growth.70 The art historian

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f i g u r e 5.9 The king of Yaxchilán, Itzamnaaj Bahlam IV, and his vassal, Aj Chak Maax, drill new fire in a mythological cenote. Drawn by Emily Her after Stone and Zender, Reading Maya Art, fig. 64.3.

Andrea Stone and the epigrapher Marc Zender suggest that the paired signs, often shown on “virgin” water as well as burning incense and offerings, “probably serve to suggest a state of purity that is necessary for the successful conduct of ritual.”71 Because of fire’s transformative and purifying aspects, drilling or creating new fire was seen as a divine, generative act, akin to the creation of the sun and the world. Stone and Zender point to a Late Classic carved stone panel, found near the site of Yaxchilán in Chiapas, on which the king of that city and his vassal are shown dressed as wind and water gods, drilling new fire at a mythical watery cave. The text within the cave, marked by two massive centipede jaws, reads johch’aj k’ahk’, “fire is drilled” (figure 5.9).72 Much later, in the Postclassic Madrid Codex, a pair of gods are similarly shown creating fire with a twisting drill (figure 5.10). The Classic Maya domestic hearth—­three simple, large stones set in a triangle to hold a cooking vessel—­was a crucial element both literally and symbolically in the creation of a home (temples too, as houses for gods), as the anthropologist Karl Taube has shown.73 Houses served as metaphorical models

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of the cosmos. The four corner posts represented directional trees supporting the heavens, while the three-­stone hearth at the center of the house serves as the axis mundi from which the directions radiate. David Stuart has argued that in “fire-­entering” dedicatory rites among the Classic Maya (precursors to contemporary house-­dedication rituals), drilling fire in a new building creates a fig­urative hearth, transforming a space into a home and investing it with heat and strength, soul and vitality.74 Another form of ritual burning is described by the transitive verb chok (“to scatter, to sow” or “to throw, to cast”) in Classic Mayan hieroglyphic writing, conveyed with a downward-­pointing hand gently tossing or scattering droplets or circles of some kind of material—­possibly incense, blood, water, or maize seed—­often into flaming braziers or onto sacred stone altars. Stone and Zender write, “The visual parallel between sowing and ritual scattering—­and between the maize seed itself and scattered sacrificial offerings, such as blood—­infused scattering rites with generative powers.”75 Such scattering rites were performed across the Classic Maya realm, though the specific occasions for which they were conducted and the materials “thrown” varied from city to city.76 The ritual is often described literally as u chok-­ow ch’aaj, “(he) scattered droplets,”77 but an example from Hieroglyphic Stairway 1 at the site of El Reinado is recorded unconventionally as u chok-­ow k’ahk’, “he cast [scattered] (into?) the fire.”78 The ritual scattering motion echoes the act of sowing maize seeds, which were tossed into a hole in the ground made with a pointed digging stick

f i g u r e 5.10 A pair of gods drilling new fire, from the Madrid Codex. Drawn by Emily Her after Charles-­Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, Manuscrit Troano, étude sur le système graphique et la langue des Mayas (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1869–­1870), 51, http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/codices/madrid .html, http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/codices/pdf/madrid_rosny_bb.pdf.

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A

B

f i g u r e 5.11 (a) Scattering rites from La Pasadita Lintel 2. Drawn by Emily Her after Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller. The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. Fort Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 1986), fig. III.4. (b) Planting maize seeds from the Madrid Codex. Drawn by Emily Her after Brasseur de Bourbourg, Manuscrit Troano, 34.

(figure 5.11), while the fire into which the offerings were cast recalls the burning of agricultural fields before planting. wa s t e a n d w o r k Sweeping, burying, and burning could thus serve purifying, productive, and practical purposes. Sweeping cleaned the floors of residential or ceremonial spaces, but also purified and protected houses and temples. Burying provided a means of working organic waste into agricultural soils, but also a necessary means of feeding and caring for gods and ancestors. Burning transformed objects into ash, but also transmitted offerings to deities and the dead and generated life, heat, and vitality. Ritual was just one of many forms of work, and many forms of work could serve as ritual. Even the most mundane activities—­ including what might generally be considered waste management—­could be both literal and symbolic, serve practical and immaterial purposes, and accomplish alternative metaphorical or “ritual” work. Assumed distinctions between meaningful ritual acts and everyday forms of waste making and management were particularly blurry in the labors of

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cyclical agricultural production. The clearing away of the remaining traces of a former harvest through sweeping and burning and incorporating those traces and other organic “wastes” into the soil as fertilizer could simultaneously be physical work, dedicatory offering, and political metaphor. As mentioned above, the common Classic Mayan expression for royal agency, ukabjiiy, conceptually linked the agricultural work of burning, manuring, and tilling fields to ensure new growth with the work of rulers presiding over and “cultivating” their territories and subjects.79 The Rabinal Achí, an early fifteenth-­century dramatic dance written in the K’iche’ Mayan language, echoes an equivalent cultivation of plants, power, and people when the single antagonist, Cawek, proclaims, “I’m working the soil / I’m resetting the boundaries of the land / from the place where the day goes out / to the place where the night enters.”80 William Hanks records that in Yucatec, a milpa field that has been cleared of forest but is not yet dry and ready to burn is described as tá ače, “debris wood,” conveying its state as refuse with productive potential.81 Moreover, according to Hanks, a complex series of rituals is required to further transform the milpa into productive space, some conducted by individual farmers in the woods before clearing the field or in the milpa itself, some conducted by j’meen (ritual specialists) before a large public audience and sponsored by multiple families.82 In a comparative example from Central Mexico, the scholar of religion Kay Read examined Nahuatl terms for sacrifice, one of which, tlamana, literally means “to spread something out.”83 That “something” is what Read describes as the “cosmic meal”: the fertile, phagocentric cycles of sacrifice in which both humans and gods were fed, then subsequently fertilized the earth with their excrement.84 Across ancient Mesoamerica, refuse disposal and ritual were not separate kinds or spheres of action. Discard was not a mundane process of “getting rid of ” things, but a meaningful act of careful transformation and deposition. Gath­ ering, burning, and discarding what might be considered waste—­agricultural remains, used and broken things, bodily excreta—­served to cleanse and cure, purify and protect, regenerate and renew. Whether in the dried milpa fields that were burned and cleared or in the garden plots fertilized with excrement and household refuse, maintaining the health and productivity of farmers’ fields and humans’ bodies depended on cycles of destruction and decay, on the work done by the regenerative potential of “waste.” Productive Discard, Valuable Waste What separates Classic Maya taa’ from medieval European night soil or a contemporary composting toilet? That is, what distinguishes the concepts and processes involved in the symbolic, interconnected cycles of destruction,

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purification, and (re)creation in ancient Mesoamerica from seemingly related correlates or comparisons from other times and places? Clearing, cleaning, burning, and burying are all fundamental agricultural practices that serve practical purposes. Yet the Classic Maya often treated other types of trash in similar ways, incorporating refuse of all sorts (not only bodily and agricultural wastes) into rituals of rebirth and renewal. In order to understand why rubbish could be reused in acts of both metaphorical and literal regeneration, it is necessary to consider more specifically how the ancient Maya viewed their interactions with the material world, as well as how they understood the temporality of those relations. As a form of taa’, burned, broken, and used-­up things manifest the manipulation of resources and objects—­they were what remains of investments of human effort and intentionality. Trash, which both is and bears traces of everyday life, was appropriate, perhaps necessary, to ensure the continuation of that life and its constant processes of making and unmaking, discard and destruction, waste and value. The metaphorical understanding of refuse disposal as a conceptual clearing and seeding that allowed cycles to continue and new things to be cultivated is perhaps most evident in “New Fire” ceremonies, a name drawn from colonial Spanish accounts of the ritual as practiced by the Nahuas of sixteenth-­ century Central Mexico. The Central Mexican New Fire ceremony took place at midnight before the first day of the New Year as well as every fifty-­two years, at the completion and restart of the Calendar Round (the pan-­Mesoamerican combination of a 365-­day solar calendar and a 260-­day ritual calendar). The New Fire ceremony is briefly described in a mid-­sixteenth-­century manuscript entitled “Customs, Festivals, Funerals, and Diverse Forms of Behavior of the Indians of New Spain”: They had a long count in which [every] fifty-­two years, they put out all the fires so that none remained in all the land, and they broke all of the jars and pitchers that they had used and the cooking griddles and vessels that they had, they broke everything, and that day they went to a temple. . . . And there they kindled new fire and shared it through all the land . . . and burned before the [idol] incense and paper.85

The Florentine Codex also provides a detailed account of the New Fire ceremony, which bears remarkable similarities to Landa’s contemporary descriptions from Yucatán with which this chapter begins: First they put out the fires everywhere in the country round. And the statues, hewn in either wood or stone, kept in each man’s home and regarded as gods, were all cast into the water. Also [were] these [cast away]—­the pestles and

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the [three] hearth stones [upon which the cooking pots rested]; and everywhere there was much sweeping—­there was sweeping very clean. Rubbish was thrown out; none lay in any of the houses.86

Once all the houses had been cleared of their rubbish and night fell, fire priests made their way to the summit of Uixachtecatl, the highest mountain in Mexico (now known as the Pico de Orizaba): And the one who was the fire priest of Copulco, who drew new fire, then be­ gan there. With his hands he proceeded to bore continuously his fire drill. . . . And when it came to pass that night fell, all were frightened and filled with dread. Thus was it said: it was claimed that if fire could not be drawn, then [the sun] would be destroyed forever; all would be ended; there would evermore be night. . . . Night would prevail forever, and the demons of darkness would descend, to eat men. . . . Everyone was apprehensive, waiting until, in time, the new fire might be drawn—­until, in good time, [a flame] would burst forth and shine out. And when a little came forth, when it took fire, lit, and blazed, then it flared and burst into flames, and was visible everywhere.87

Once the new fire was seen, people watching from Tenochtitlán cut their ears (even those of infants in their cradles) and spattered the blood toward the fire as an act of penance. The new fire was brought first to the temple of the patron deity of the Aztecs, Huitzilopochtli, where “they scattered and strewed white incense [over it].”88 Fire priests, messengers, and runners distributed the flames to temples and priests’ houses, from which it was passed to peoples’ homes. Once the new fire had been spread, “all renewed their household goods, the men’s array, and the women’s array, the mats—­the mats of large, fat reeds—­ and the seats. All was new which was spread about, as well as the hearth stones and the pestles.”89 The New Fire ritual is illustrated by native Nahua artists in book 7 of the Florentine Codex (plate 13). The image depicts a man breaking and throwing away household goods. With arms outstretched, he is surrounded by broken objects as he flings bowls, jars, and footed plates; a reed mat; stones (“the pestles and the [three] hearth stones” from the Florentine Codex description) and a European-­style representation of a demon, presumably contained in one of “the statues, hewn in either wood or stone, kept in each man’s home and regarded as gods.” By extinguishing fires throughout entire villages or cities, New Fire cere­ monies effectively “killed” all the houses that had been made and used—­en­­ livened by the hearths kindled at their center—­during the temporal cycle that was coming to an end. In the liminal and literal darkness between the previous and the next age, priests, often dressed as gods, mimicked the drilling of primordial new fire, the original act of creation. The moment was reenacted

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with each new flame passed to a household, a microcosmic rekindling of the world for the new cycle. Although common throughout Mesoamerica, New Fire ceremonies show significant cultural and regional variation. An annual rite of fire renewal cele­ brated by Ch’olti’-­Lacandon Maya and recorded by the Franciscan friar Antonio Margil in 1695, for example, highlights the local particulars of the ritual in honor of Macom, the god of lightning: The major celebrants of this festival are the caciques and four other officials; the caciques get drunk on a drink they make with pineapple and sugar cane. They enter like lightning into the town and the people flee to the bush, each leaving by the side of the hearth in his house a jar of water. No one stays in the town aside from the drunken caciques in the house of the idols, and the four officials, who are not drunk, go through all of the houses, extinguishing the fire, pouring the water jar on top of it. These four take care to see that a great fire burns continuously in front of the idols, constantly burning a lot of copal, taking care occasionally to ensure the drunkenness of the caciques. They give them the drink they make so that they do not stop being rays of lightning and remain drunk throughout the four days that the solemn feast of the lightning lasts. The next day all four return to their homes, each one cutting a fowl’s throat and dropping the blood over fatwood. They bring [the fatwood] to burn before the idols and ask the caciques (now that their drunkenness has passed) for new fire, and from there the fire passes to all the houses, and they cook their chickens and eat and drink and celebrate their great festival, free of ordinary soot.90

The geographical breadth and temporal depth of the sweeping up and discarding of refuse followed by the ceremonial striking of new fire continues, in varied forms, into the present.91 For example, Allen Christenson observed the remarkable continuity of such practices in the highlands of Guatemala in the late twentieth century: In 1977 I lived in a small community called Kankixaja, located near Momos­ tenango, Guatemala. At the close of the 260-­day ritual calendar, each household ritually smashed its primary cooking vessel used for boiling maize prior to grinding. The larger fragments of the pot were then carried as a family to an ancestral shrine in the mountains and placed atop a great mound of other shards that had accumulated over the years. There an ajq’ij blessed each member of the family in turn to cleanse them from any corruption that they might have accumulated during the previous year. He then called upon various deities, saints, and their own sacred ancestors to give them a healthy and abundant new year. The families then returned to their homes, where they thoroughly washed themselves in the nearby river to remove any taint from

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the bad influences of the final days of the year. Immediately afterward, they swept their homes clean and prepared a new cooking vessel as a token that the world had been reborn and would continue to provide nourishment for them in the coming year.92

New Fire ceremonies are not exclusively known from colonial and contemporary documentary sources, however. They have archaeological correlates, some of which suggest the fundamental ritual to be much more ancient and widespread, appropriated by people of Postclassic Central Mexico rather than particular to them.93 Archaeologists have documented evidence suggesting that similar concepts were at work at the nearby Classic-­period city of Teotihuacan, long before the Aztec practice, as well as further south, at the Early Classic Maya city of Copán, Honduras.94 In fact, the dangers both presented and assuaged by particular ways of interacting with objects made and used by human hands seems to be deeply rooted in Pan-­American mythology. In the Popol Vuh, a colonial transcription of a complex oral history record in the K’iche’ Mayan language, a prehuman race of people made of wood are destroyed by their own dogs, grinding stones, and cooking pots, experiencing the torment of use, breaking, and burning to which they subjected their own creations: Their bones were ground up. They were broken into pieces. . . . Their faces were crushed by the trees and the stones. They were spoken to by all their maize grinders and their cooking griddles, their plates and their pots, their dogs and their grinding stones. However many things they had, all of them crushed their faces. Their dogs and their turkeys said to them: “Pain you have caused us. You ate us. Therefore it will be you that we will eat now.” Then the grinding stones said this to them: “We were ground upon by you. Every day, every day, in the evening at dawn, always you did holi, holi, huki, huki on our faces. This was our service for you who were the first people. But this day you shall feel our strength. We shall grind you like maize. We shall grind up your flesh,” said their grinding stones to them. . . . Then spoke also their griddles and their pots to them: “Pain you have caused us. Our mouths and our faces are sooty. You were forever throwing us upon the fire and burning us. Although we felt no pain, you now shall try it. We shall burn you,” said all of their pots. . . . The stones of the hearth flattened them. They would come out from the fire, landing on their heads and causing them pain. . . . Thus the framed people, the shaped people, were undone. They were demolished and overthrown as people.95

The archaeologist Jeffrey Quilter sees the Popol Vuh legend as a Maya version of a shared Pan-­American myth known as the “Revolt of the Objects.”96

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f i g u r e 5.12 Rollout of the Moche “Revolt of the Objects” as depicted on a painted vessel in Berlin, Germany. Drawn by Emily Her after Donna McClelland, Christopher B. Donnan and Donna McClelland Moche Archive, 1963–­2011, Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC.

In addition to the Popol Vuh account, the Revolt of the Objects theme is also known from three major Moche artworks: a mural from the Huaca de la Luna in Peru’s Moche Valley, and two painted pottery vessels now in museums in Germany. In all three depictions, various objects, weapons, and articles of military regalia are shown with arms and legs, chasing humans or holding them captive (e.g., figure 5.12). Moreover, an early seventeenth-­century document, compiled by Francisco de Ávila in the highland Huarochirí region east of Lima, contains the following description: “In ancient times the sun died. Because of his death it was night for five days. Rocks banged against each other. Mortars and grinding stones began to eat people. Buck llamas started to drive men.”97 The Andean legend and the Moche imagery are remarkably similar to the Popol Vuh account, underscoring wide-­reaching notions of animacy and temporality shared throughout pre-­Columbian Mesoamerica and beyond.98 For many Mayan-­language speakers, the world has long been full of objects with such animating, agitating energies. Yucatec employs the common, ancient term kux to describe the most potent of these: life itself. Kux enables humans, animals, plants, and stones to live, while also refreshing or vivifying special things, such as altars. Ch’u, a word related to kux, means “holy, sacred, or divine entity” and is at the root of the concept of ch’ulel, a term that appears in Ch’ol and the Greater Tzeltalan Mayan languages with a meaning of “vitality” or “holiness.”99 Ch’ulel encompasses the vital force or power that energizes bodies, blood, and a variety of ritual and everyday objects.100 For the Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico, ch’ulel is indestructible and also recyclable. It is an essence that gathers in humans and “domesticated animals and plants, salt, houses and household fires, crosses, the saints, musical instruments, maize, and all the other deities in the pantheon.”101 Ch’ulel can be lost by dis-

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ease, breakage, and wear, but it also returns, ebbing and flowing. The concept of ch’ulel means that objects possessed their own liveliness and, to a certain extent, agency.102 Evon Vogt summed this up succinctly: “The most important interaction going on in the universe is not between persons nor between persons and material objects, but rather between souls inside these persons and material objects.”103 But this was not a romantic or idealized animism. Human interactions with objects were shaped by those energies; various acts and offerings were required to manage such forces. As Stephen Houston writes, “[Objects] show independent resolve, yet, with persuasion, bow to human will. An intense projection of anger, even if unplanned, destroys a useful tool; proper tending will invite it to cooperate.”104 Tzotzil speakers in Chiapas coax musical instruments to perform by plying them with liquor, while among the Q’eqchi’ Maya of Guatemala, houses, brooms, musical instruments, bridges, and sewing machines—­“profane objects”—­must be “fed” in order to calm their intrinsic hostilities. The Mesoamerican archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and epigrapher J. Eric S. Thompson observed this understanding of the potential danger of animate objects with respect to Classic-­period artifacts. He wrote: “The Maya believe that the stelae, as well as other ancient things, notably incense burners, come to life at night, and they deliberately smash them in the belief that they harm the living.”105 In both the K’iche’ Mayan and the Andean accounts of the Revolt of the Objects, the uprising of hostile objects takes place at the end of an era: the death of the sun or the destruction of the earth. Such liminal periods are known as the Wayeb (or Uayeb) in the Maya calendar. These five unlucky days form a short month that falls at the end of the year (the leftover days that result from a solar calendar divided into eighteen months of twenty days each). Ac­­ cording to the ethnographer Vincent Stanzione, the Wayeb is also known as “the sleeping or resting place of the Sun. Since the sun was at rest, the portal from the underworld opened, allowing deathly chaos to roam across the face of the earth.”106 Stanzione further highlights the components of the Classic-­ period glyph for the Wayeb, which is formed by the sign for the 360-­day solar year situated beneath a skeletal maw, the open passage to and from the underworld (figure 5.13). This glyph was probably read in ancient times as u-­WAY-­HA’B, “the sealed chamber/sleeping room of the year.” The dread that accompanies the Wayeb is described in several colonial-­period texts, such as an early nineteenth-­century account by Juan Pío Pérez: “When the days and months that make up a year pass, the five nameless days are counted. These are the bad days of the year, the ill-­fated days in which there is every kind of danger or misfortune; sudden deaths, bites by wild beasts or snakes, wooden

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f i g u r e 5.13 The Classic Mayan glyphic phrase u-­WAY-­HA’B, “the sealed chamber / sleeping room of the year.” Drawn by Emily Her after Vincent Stanzione, Rituals of Sacrifice: Walking the Face of the Earth on the Sacred Path of the Sun (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), fig. 23.

splinters in the feet, and other things. For this reason they are called the painful or ill-­fated days.”107 These deeply uncertain moments and the constantly negotiated, opposi­ tional balance between order and chaos, structure and antistructure both arise out of and provide the basis for traditional Mesoamerican conceptions of time.108 Everything passes through endless cycles of birth, maturation, dissolution, death, and rebirth. Humans, crops, objects, gods, and even the world itself, in the words of Allen Christenson—­“all have their beginnings in a creative act and ultimately weaken and die in an orderly succession of days that is both comforting in its predictability and terrifying in its unwavering finality.”109 Despite the divine ordinance of those cosmic cycles, their execution and the regeneration of the world’s life-­bearing elements remained largely dependent on the agency of human individuals. Disorder and chaos were forces beyond the power of mere mortals, but humans’ role in combating them was an active one. Collective anxiety over the constantly looming threat of destruction could be partially assuaged by the sense of a collective purchase of survival through rites of renewal, which replenish divine energies and maintained the orderly motion of time and the cosmos.110 During the Wayeb period, normal life was suspended and people became susceptible to disease, misfortune, and death. Meanwhile, the world died, to be reborn in the new year. The cleaning, sweeping, and renewal of houses, everyday objects, and personal belongings reflected and ensured the ceremonial rebirth of the world, as well as the things and people within it, at the end of the Wayeb period.

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Like a field lying fallow, taa’, the stuff left behind, was laden with metaphorical potential, both conceptual and temporal. For example, the ethnologist Raphael Girard outlined alignments among agricultural work, astronomical and meteorological phenomena, and communal rituals among the Ch’orti’ of Guatemala.111 For them, the slashing and burning of forested areas to create new milpa fields coincided with calendrical rituals to recreate time and the world, while rites of renewal, such as New Fire ceremonies, were performed in conjunction with controlled burning in preparation for seeding. Through burning and deposition, used, worn-­out, and broken objects were transformed, “fed” to the earth and to the animating forces of houses and temples built upon it. Swept up, piled, and placed directly into those animated spaces, refuse contributed its threatening (but contained) power to the seeding, growth, and maturation of each new iteration of the world. Conclusions In the specific terminology used to define and describe refuse, the processes and practices of disposal, and the significance afforded to broken, used-­up things, modern notions of “trash” fall far short of capturing many ancient Maya practices. When archaeologists today define an assemblage as a midden or rubbish heap, they must assume a certain universality of terminology and meaning: trash is trash, and we know it when we see it. Throughout ancient Mesoamerica, however, discarded materials were more than waste; they were taa’ in its broadest sense—­traces not only of an original object and its maker but also of the people, gods, ancestors, and other animate forces involved in re­­generative cycles and ongoing flows of creation, use, and disposal. Rather than imposing contemporary views on other peoples, times, and places, reconsidering the very idea of waste from within its particular cultural and historical context broadens the possibilities for interpretation beyond the limits of a modern, Western framework.112 In this case, approaching refuse from a different perspective reveals potential value and meaning that might be found in broken, worn, and seemingly obsolete objects and traces of ritual in multiple aspects of daily life. What archaeologists, historians, and others interested in the past might ordinarily dismiss as mundane and meaningless processes of discard and disposal may instead become generative and productive practices, forms of ritual work, and essential processes of cosmic renewal. More than simply unwanted waste, objects and the deliberate ways that they were discarded tied things to people, purification to productivity, and crea­ tion to destruction.

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Instead of seeing disposal as an act of finality, we might understand discarded objects as selectively chosen, specifically arranged, and intentionally incorporated into the earth. Those objects, then, continue to act—­in constructing values, in retaining memories, and in maintaining interactions and relations. Refuse disposal cued appropriate behaviors through the ongoing commemoration of simultaneously practical and ritual acts of deposition, while also recalling the many stages and cycles of human investment and interaction that precede and produce the assemblages that, centuries or millennia later, are too often and too easily dismissed as simple rubbish. Reexamining the established disciplinary categories and paying attention to the physical and conceptual conditions under which things are gathered and buried, allows an approach toward both ancient and contemporary depositional behaviors in terms of their intended experiences and effects prior to, at the moment of discard, and long after.

6

Anamorphic Archaeology

The Musée des Beaux-­Arts in Rouen is home to a peculiar mid-­seventeenth-­ century painting by the Genoese artist Domenico Piola. When Piola’s painting is laid flat, the image is “a confusion of spots where everything appears to be in disorder.” If a cylindrical convex mirror is stood at its center, however, a copy of Peter Paul Rubens’s Elevation of the Cross “leaps up by magic” onto the mirror’s surface (plates 14 and 15). If the viewer moves around the mirror to the opposite side of the composition, an entirely different image emerges: a pair of lovers, revealed “like a demonstration of a secret code.”1 The Rouen painting is a particularly complex example of what is known as “anamorphic art.” More specifically, it is an example of mirror (or catoptric) anamorphosis, in which an image is intentionally distorted and painted on a flat surface so as to appear naturalistic only when viewed with the aid of a cylindrical or conical mirror. The mirror’s convex surface diminishes and thus corrects the curved distortions in the flat image, making it regain its natural appearance. Anamorphosis relies on the same geometrical laws used in more familiar perspective constructions like landscape paintings. Rather than foreshortening objects as they near the vanishing point(s), anamorphic images elongate them. Before mirrors were involved, early anamorphic images were produced to be viewed from very oblique angles; from certain viewpoints, a viewer’s eyes would contract a painting’s elongated, seemingly meaningless forms into a naturalistic image. The term anamorphosis, from the Greek ana (again) and morphosis (a “bringing into form”), refers to the viewer’s active role in re-­forming the object.2 The philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour once employed anamorphosis to illustrate the conflict between early modern religion and

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sci­ence. Latour used the analogy to show how two opposing points of view could coexist, despite their incompatibility.3 As his illustration of anamorphic art, Latour called attention to Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors, painted in 1533 (the same year that Mexico City’s cabildo intervened in the dispute over Pedro Hernández Nabarrete’s rubbish-­filled house lot). In The Ambassadors, a distorted human skull occupies the space between the two eponymous subjects, but at a very oblique angle and in a perspective that is incongruent with them (plate 16). As Latour described it, “If the Ambassadors are straightened up, the skull is skewed. If the skull is rectified, the two Frenchmen are slanted, fleeing away like flying saucers.”4 The elongated perspective of The Ambassadors is quite different from the mirror anamorphosis in Rouen, however. The use of mirrors makes anamorphic distortions and reconstitutions more exact; it also makes the process of viewing them much stranger. In the case of elongated perspective, order and disorder do not appear at the same time; the images come in and out of proper focus as the viewer shifts position. With mirror anamorphosis, however, both the reconstituted and distorted forms of the subject are always visible, from every viewpoint—­that is, one sees the distorted and anamorphically corrected images simultaneously. In what follows, I suggest that processes of archaeological inquiry and interpretation are analogous to the visual experience created by mirror anamorphoses and ask what it might look like (and what might be gained) if such “anamorphic archaeology” were recognized, even embraced. An archaeologist selects and extracts diverse facts from one time (“the past”) and recontextualizes them as enduring, valuable objects in another (the archaeologist’s own). The process of recontextualization depends on an understanding of time as linear and irreversible—­archaeological artifacts are those rescued from otherwise inevitable processes of decay and, eventually, loss.5 An object becomes an archaeological artifact because it somehow indexes a time other than the present and actions other than that of its recovery, analysis, curation, and/or display, even if it must be recovered, analyzed, curated, and displayed in the present in order to index that other time. The archaeologist Gavin Lucas has called attention to this inherent tension within the discipline, which he calls “the faultline of destruction/survival which is so central to the de-­/re-­constituting performance of archaeology.”6 As Lucas notes, that faultline becomes apparent in the extremes of amazement at survival (as in the case of Pompeii, bog bodies, or Andean textiles) or disappointment in destruction (such as the disintegration of organic materials in tropical envi­ ronments), in the processes of alienation by which objects or sites deemed archaeological are inserted into “the past,” an ossified realm distinct and separate from the present; and the irony of museum displays, characterized above

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all else by their apparent completeness and cleanliness, giving the impression that they are unmarked by the passage of time.7 Anamorphic archaeology, on the other hand, is akin to the visual making and unmaking—­the continuous focusing and unfocusing—­that mirror ana­ morphoses inevitably involve. Let me be explicit about how I conceive this analogy. The distorted image on the flat surface is made up of archaeological interpretations and analytical categories—­present ideas about and attempts to explain the past. The material trace is the mirror itself: that trace is what offers the possibility of transforming what at first appears distorted or even meaningless into an intelligible image. Finally, the event or action in the past is the reconstituted image on the surface of the mirror. In order for that image to come into focus, an archaeologist also needs the right surface, the right curvature, and the right positioning—­of both the mirror and the viewer. How­ ever the mirror is positioned, any viewing involves both anamorphosis and distortion: the deformed and re-­formed images are in view simultaneously. A detailed archaeological case study serves to show how an understanding of archaeology as analogous to mirror anamorphosis can be a productive alternative to more traditional disciplinary approaches. Below, I analyze a complex assemblage recovered from the ancient Maya site of El Zotz, in northern Guatemala. That find featured an unusual combination of items characteristic of refuse (such as animal remains, crafting debris, and eroded potsherds), along with intensive burning, intentional destruction, and the deposition of carefully worked and valuable materials, which are generally understood to indicate ritual behavior. Instead of asking how to define or interpret that assemblage according to available archaeological typologies, however, I focus on the physical indicators of objects’ variable histories, some of which require that those artifacts existed (or persist) in multiple times and belong to multiple analytical categories. Anamorphosis not only provides a helpful way of thinking about that kind of simultaneity by imagining traces that reflect and reconstitute seemingly chaotic and incompatible interpretations into intelligible narratives, but it does so in a way that affords primacy to the traces themselves, as the recurrent anchors that enable multiple versions and visions of the past. Anamorphic archaeology incorporates multiple, messy, and slightly distorted interpretations; it understands each interpretation as reconstituting a partic­ ular image of the past, one that is grounded in and by its material traces and that complements, rather than competes with, other possibilities. It emphasizes simultaneous consideration of the assemblage as a whole, the sequence of practices that constituted it, and—­by taking ideas explored in the preceding chapters into account—­the potential significance of histories that continue into the present. In this reframing, disposal and deposition become ongoing

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relationships—­as opposed to end points—­in interactions between people and things, which enables archaeology to expand from a methodology that uncovers “the past” toward a materially grounded anthropological approach to long-­ term, changing ways of understanding the worlds people create and inhabit. .

The Assemblage at El Zotz On December 21, 2012, tens of thousands of visitors, primarily North Americans and Europeans, flocked to well-­known archaeological sites in Mexico and Guatemala. At Chichén Itzá, in Yucatán, tourists dressed in white (some with feathers atop their heads) danced around the iconic “Castillo” pyramid; at Tikal, in Guatemala, they watched over a thousand daykeepers light fires and burn offerings at dawn. Their activities commemorated the end of a major calendrical cycle, an event known as a Period Ending. In 2012, the Period Ending occurred not only at the thirteenth completion of a bak’tun, the largest cycle in the ancient Mesoamerican calendrical system known as the Long Count (consisting of 144,000 days), but also coincided with the winter solstice in the Gregorian calendar. Three bak’tun cycles earlier, on March 11, 830 CE, the inhabitants of the ancient city of El Zotz, about twenty-­three kilometers (just over fourteen miles) to the west of Tikal, celebrated the same calendrical event, albeit a bit differently. Carved stone stelae and altars were commissioned, some recarved from earlier monuments, and major renovations of the central palace complex (the home of the local king and his royal court) were undertaken. Like modern celebrants, the people of El Zotz—­or Pa’ka’n, as they knew their city—­also lit fires and made offerings on a massive scale. Ceramics, figurines, stone, marine shells, plant and animal foodstuffs, incense, bones from humans and animals, and other items were scattered and burned at key points of access to the palace’s interior courtyards and royal residences. Shortly after, all those items were covered by architectural debris and deep levels of construction fill, the beginning stages of the remaking of the palace complex. The end of the tenth bak’tun cycle came late in the history of Pa’ka’n, a kingdom that saw its heyday early on, around 300–­400 CE, when architecture and artifacts point to its control of wealth, people, and trade in the region.8 Still, the Period Ending in 830 CE was elaborately celebrated: a stone stela was carved to mark the occasion, a date that aligns neatly with chronological evidence (ceramics and radiocarbon) from the offerings made in the palace. Not long after, however, the large-­scale renovations were interrupted and the palace was abandoned. By the early tenth century CE, the stela commemorating the tenth bak’tun Period Ending and other stones from the palace compound were cut

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f i g u r e 6.1 Excavation profiles (east and south scarps) of one of the units associated with the deposits from the palace at El Zotz. The assemblage (the lowest stratigraphic layer, shaded in light gray) was intentionally buried beneath deep levels of construction fill. Drawn by the author after Griselda Pérez Robles, Fabiola Quiroa Flores, and Stephen Houston, “Operación 2: Excavaciones en la Acrópolis,” in Proyecto Arqueológico “El Zotz” Informe No. 4, Temporada 2009, ed. Pérez Robles, Edwin Román, and Houston (Guatemala City: Institute of Anthropology and History, 2010), fig. 1.21, https://www.mesoweb.com/zotz /El-­Zotz-­2009.pdf.

down and repurposed as expedient construction materials, a telling sign that the local dynasty that had commissioned those monuments was no longer in power.9 In 2009, archaeologists excavating in the palace at El Zotz hit upon an unexpected wealth of artifacts—­the remains of those Period Ending activities. Dense concentrations of large ceramic sherds, figurines, worked and unworked animal bones, lithic tools, crafting debitage, and human remains were found within a distinctive layer of fine soil mixed with ash and carbon (ranging from twenty-­five to eighty centimeters, or roughly ten to thirty-­one inches, thick), all immediately atop the final phase floors inside and outside of multiple buildings within El Zotz’s central palace.10 The objects were well packed within their soil and ash matrix and covered by a thin, dark layer of mud or clay (plate 17). That dense, dark “cap” resulted in exceptional preservation—­even a burned maize cob survived, with two rows of kernels still intact—­and also created an easily identifiable stratigraphic layer, demarcating a connected depositional event. The upper protective cap was then buried beneath nearly two meters (approximately six and a half feet) of a relatively loose limestone, mortar, and soil matrix of construction fill (figure 6.1), remains of the extensive, but unfinished, renovations of the palace complex.

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“ p r o b l e m at i c a l ” d e p o s i t s The find at El Zotz was uncommon, but it was not unique. Throughout Mesoamerica and in the Maya area in particular, such deposits are familiar, if poorly understood, features of the archaeological record. Superficially, they share many of the material and spatial patterns associated with ordinary refuse, but their unusual contents (e.g., valuable artifacts or human remains alongside burned or broken objects) or the contexts in which they are found (often in prominent locations, such as the floors of elite residences or plazas) impede straightforward conclusions. The difficulty in interpreting such finds is reflected in the wide range of terms archaeologists use to describe them. More than a dozen distinct names exist in scholarly literature, perhaps the most common being the telling descriptor of “problematical deposit.”11 Although few archaeologists working in other regions of the world would recognize that term, let alone use it to label features of the archaeological record, Mesoamerican specialists have employed it for more than half a century, even while continuing to debate its utility (and its precise meaning) at academic conferences and in publications.12 The concept of the “problematical deposit” was initially employed to distinguish what archaeologists saw as artifacts, assemblages, or contexts that did not quite fit other established categories, such as burials, caches, or middens.13 The term was first coined by William Coe, director of excavations at Tikal for the University of Pennsylvania between 1964 and 1970.14 At Tikal, problematical deposits (abbreviated simply as PD) numbered into the hundreds, encompassing any find “when an excavator at last suspects that behavior of an indigenously special order is innate to a particular lot’s background.”15 The archaeologist Hattula Moholy-­Nagy, a member of the Tikal project from 1959 to 1964, has clearly laid out both the original aims and the unintended effects of the problematical deposit category: PDs are etic, site-­specific constructs. They reflect the archaeologist’s state of knowledge and ideas about that particular site, as can be seen, for example, in different interpretations at different sites for identically structured deposits. The category of PD is vague, equivalent to “unclassified” or “miscellaneous.” Its value is in flagging features that require further research. The widespread adoption of the term demonstrates the need for such a category. . . . Although Coe initially only assigned PDs to deposits that appeared to have had a ritual function, the category soon expanded to include any kind of anomalous feature. Tikal PDs, therefore, encompass a good deal of variability. Coe viewed them as a provisional category flagged for future definition and reclassifica-

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tion when excavations were concluded. This step was never taken, however, which has led to a lack of consistency in designating PDs in the field or field laboratory and to a misunderstanding among some researchers that the term refers to some kind of past reality.16

As Moholy-­Nagy notes, what began as a provisional interpretation eventually became an accepted identification of materials on the ground. “Problematical deposit” can now serve as a convenient umbrella for a spectrum of archaeological assemblages and depositional behaviors, many of which are quite different from one another.17 One recently proposed typology of problematic[al]18 deposits, for example, includes a wide range of “activity types” that could be responsible for such accumulations: de facto refuse, squatter activity, dedication or consecration deposits, general termination deposits, desecration deposits, reverential termination deposits, feasting deposits, transposed feasting deposits, and pilgrimage deposits. The material correlates used to distinguish among those activity types, however, can be subjective, relative, and overlapping. For example, “termination deposits: general” are determined by “smashed/broken artifacts in high amounts.” Pilgrimage deposits feature “ideologically charged ritual items [or] ‘ideofacts,’ ” which are not to be confused with the “ritually charged ‘powerfacts’ ” that indicate dedication or consecration deposits.19 Some correlates are shared across multiple activity types, such as “ritual objects (censers and figurines),” which indicate feasting deposits, and “complete ritual objects,” which point to dedication or consecration deposits. “Food” suggests feasting deposits, while “food or items intended for food/use by gods” characterize pilgrimage deposits. Still others are differentiated only in comparison to other activity types, such as de facto refuse, which has the same correlates as squatter activity, “but with more elite activity, food, and paraphernalia.” As might be expected, there are also site-­specific disagreements with respect to the material correlates of activity types. Censers, a sign of feasting deposits for James Aimers and his colleagues, are instead interpreted by archaeologists working at Tikal as indicators of termination ceremonies.20 The indeterminacy of such criteria runs the risk of leading to what Julie Kunen and her colleagues argue “many archaeologists do when faced with special deposits: base their assignment on a common-­sense ‘feel’ for what the deposit represents.”21 Beyond questions about what kinds of archaeological evidence correlate with which types of activities, there are also disagreements among scholars about the nature of behaviors that produce problematical deposits. For example, many archaeologists, drawing on ethnographic and ethnohistoric analogies, consider

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dedicatory or consecration deposits to be “acts of ensouling or engendering built places and made things.”22 However, Moholy-­Nagy argues, at Tikal the positioning of dedicatory deposits suggests that these are acts of veneration aimed at opening portals for communication with deities and ancestors at certain locations, in contrast to the ethnographically informed view that deposits animated built structures.23 Similarly, architectural renovations in which new buildings were constructed over existing, older ones are often marked by the presence of problematical deposits (like the example from El Zotz). Those assemblages are understood as the material traces of rituals intended to cause the death of a structure and allow its life force to be reborn within a new building.24 Although most archaeologists seem to be in general agreement about the kinds and conditions of assemblages created by such rituals conducted at the end of one building phase and at the beginning of another, some emphasize the killing of the earlier structure, thus classifying the ritual as an act of termination, while others emphasize the (re)birth of the next architectural phase or the process as a whole, classifying the ritual as an act of (re)dedication.25 One author cleverly hedges the issue by using the term compound context caches.26 The fundamental issue with the problematical deposit concept, however, is not whether the classification itself or its subcategories are “correct,” nor even whether they are consistent.27 A problematical deposit is not a real object. No problematical deposit existed before excavations were undertaken at Tikal by Coe and his colleagues; no problematical deposit has existed independent of the archaeologist who classified it as such (a problematical deposit may, however, be a real “scientific object,” in the sense that it is a historical, hermeneutic tool28). The same is true of the types of activities or behaviors to which problematical deposits have been correlated: people in the past did not conceive of things they did as “desecratory termination rituals,” less so the products of those actions as “deposits.” Yet such categories easily become re­ ified and taken as past realities rather than analytical constructs, as Moholy-­ Nagy observed.29 The use of ethnographic analogies can further add a sense of empirical validity to such abstract categories. By advancing such analogies, archaeologists run the risk of thinking they can recognize the products and practices of people in the past according to logics and categories of the present, whether Western or otherwise.30 Typologies are useful analytical tools—­they enable organization and comparison, create networks of significance, and can have theoretical ramifications—­ but they are often applied prescriptively and uncritically.31 The strangeness of the term problematical deposit, its clear and relatively short history, and its localized usage by Mesoamerican specialists help make its invented and incon-

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sistent aspects apparent and serve as reminders of its constructed nature. The fact is, however, that all archaeological typologies are historically and culturally specific products. As chapter after chapter of this book has shown, seemingly self-­evident concepts such as “waste,” “trash,” and “rubbish” are no more universal or real than problematical deposits. Rather than focusing on whether assemblages seem to fit a predetermined set of criteria for identification, considering the specific and potentially multiple depositional histories of individual artifacts can reveal how and why particular items were chosen to be included in particular places. Object biographies also highlight conceptual connections between distinct acts of deposition, such as offerings, burials, and discard, and which individual events in an artifact’s history make certain objects appropriate, even necessary, choices for subsequent depositional events or locations.32 Eventual discard or deposition is a phase in the life cycle not only of a material object, moreover, but also of the locations where that material is placed and in the lives of those who dispose of it or later reengage with it. Put simply, examining where things have been, instead of only where they end up, can add new meaning to their deposition. Reassembling Artifact Histories In the field, the dense deposits from the palace at El Zotz were initially iden­ tified and interpreted by excavators as “problematical”: the material evidence of dramatic ritual termination activities marking the symbolic death of the central location of authority when the dynasty at El Zotz collapsed.33 A closer look at the kinds, conditions, and spatial relationships of the objects from the assemblage, however, complicates that assessment. Close analyses of patterns of weathering, breakage, and reworking to reconstruct how and when those objects were used, broken, burned, and buried suggest multiple and different object biographies.34 Many artifacts went through cycles of use, reuse, and even discard prior to their final interment—­meaningful predepositional sequences that are overlooked when archaeological assemblages are classified according to typologies of depositional behaviors, whether as rubbish disposal or ritual activity.35 The approach detailed below—­one that focuses on the multiple moments in the lives and afterlives of objects that eventually transition to the archaeological record over typological categories—­not only allows actions and objects to move fluidly along the continua from the sacred to the profane, but also reveals that they can exist in both categories simultaneously.36

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breakage Refitting the broken bones and ceramic sherds from the assemblage at El Zotz revealed that both kinds of objects were highly fragmented, but not intentionally broken or smashed. Of 377 faunal bones and fragments recovered from the palace excavations, refitting produced 222 distinct identified specimens, primarily from modern breaks (caused by excavation and transport). Only six complete elements were found or reconstituted, however. No refits could be made across the squares of a thirty-­five-­by-­thirty-­five-­centimeter (roughly fourteen-­by-­fourteen-­inch) grid used to control artifact provenance or from different excavation units. Instead, most of the skeletal fragments (65 percent) represented less than one-­quarter of the complete bone from which they came. Such breakage patterns are characteristic of trampling and sweeping, as opposed to intentional fracture.37 Ceramics produced many refits, but, again, the breakage and wear patterns on pottery sherds did not show signs of intentional fragmentation. Very few associations could be made across grid squares, but in the central area of the palace building investigated, refitting produced twenty-­three mostly complete or semicomplete vessels. The reconstructed vessels include a range of forms: tall jars with outflaring necks (commonly referred to as ollas); wide plates with low, sloping sides; deep, globular bowls with restricted orifices (also known as tecomates); and smaller bowls with thin walls and highly burnished slips (plate 18). Although most vessel fragments that could be reunited were found in close proximity, no single vessel could be completely reconstructed. Beyond intentional or accidental breakage, many of the objects were re­­ worked or were in the process of being transformed for reuse. Fifty-­four (14.3 percent) of the 377 fragments of animal remains were modified to some degree—­ cut, sawn, polished, drilled, or shaped, as well as fashioned into blanks, squares, disks, and a variety of implements and adornments. Moreover, the collection of worked animal bones from the palace deposits exhibits the full range of stages and techniques of bone-­craft production.38 The finished bone products found in the assemblage at El Zotz include ornaments, such as beads made from dog and peccary teeth or white-­tailed deer antlers, and tools, such as awls, perforators, spindle whorls, and spatulate objects (plate 19). Many of those show evidence of being used prior to their deposition, including lineal wear within drilled holes from objects being worn or hung, dulling of awls and other pointed objects, or slight polishing and use abrasions on spindle whorls or spatulas.39 Several ceramic vessels also showed evidence of reuse and reworking, much like the bone objects and crafting debris. Pottery fragments with sharp breaks

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on some sides and worn, smoothed edges on others were likely being reused as scrapers, smoothers, or polishers.40 More than thirty sherds were reshaped into circular objects. Some are crude, with the edges roughly chipped to create a rounded edge, while others are evenly smoothed into disks or drilled to create spindle whorls and pendants. One large sherd was reshaped in such a way as to include a portion of the original vessel’s base, creating a weighted side to its elongated form. The abrasions along the edge opposite the base suggest the object may have been used as a scoop.41 A few sherds even show unfinished attempts at reworking, such as holes drilled partway through (plate 20). One particularly intriguing example is a vessel that, although mostly incomplete, was once probably a large, globular tecomate. The sherds have a distinctive deep red, highly burnished slip on both their interior and exterior surfaces and thick walls of a fine but grainy yellow-­brown paste. Three of the fifteen fragments that belong to the vessel make up a reworked circular disk, its edges successively chipped and smoothed to round out the object (plate 21). While ceramic reuse and reworking is not itself uncommon, the inclusion of both the disk and the other, unworked fragments from the same vessel is an unusual find. It means that both the unused and reused portions of a single broken pot were either kept together or reunited, then interred in the palace at the same time. w e at h e r i n g Refitting ceramic sherds from the assemblage also provided important evidence of wear and weathering that took place before and after objects were deposited in the palace at El Zotz. Several vessels were heavily used and showed different kinds of abrasions: scratching and chipping from everyday functions, scouring marks from being cleaned, or wear around their rims from being stored upside down between uses.42 Notably, weathering of individual fragments from a single vessel could vary considerably. Some had smoothed-­over fracture edges (indicating that breakage occurred prior to their deposition in the palace) and others were well-­preserved and sharp, broken in situ. Chem­ical etching marks caused by small roots attaching themselves to interred objects snake their way around the bases, walls, and sometimes even the lips of jars and bowls, providing further evidence for a mix of pre-­and postdepositional breakage. Where the root marks cut across rejoined fragments, it is clear that the fragments were interred as a single, larger piece of a vessel and only broken after some time (long enough for root growth to take place). Rather than intentional breakage, such fractures were more likely caused by the weight of earth and construction fill settling atop the assemblage (plate 22).

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The degree of weathering observed on human and animal bones within the assemblage varied—­some were heavily eroded, some showed signs of carnivore or rodent gnawing, and others showed no signs of surface exposure. The combination and sequence of weathering patterns, however, is key in reconstructing both individual artifact biographies and the history of the assemblage as a whole. Plate 23 shows a bone spindle whorl with telltale signs of rodent gnawing: parallel rows of neatly aligned marks, usually along the edges of bones or bone artifacts, that clearly reflect the paired front teeth of a rodent and are distinct from the cutmarks made by stone tools.43 But the gnaw marks on the spindle whorl are divided by later root marks, indicating that rodent activity took place prior to the object’s deposition (a fact further underscored by the consistency in color of the bone surfaces with and without gnaw marks).44 The remarkable preservation throughout the rest of the tightly packed mud layer further makes it clear that the spindle whorl and other deposited objects must have already been broken, trampled, weathered, and/or gnawed before they were buried in the palace. burning Unlike the breakage and weathering processes, burning appears to have occurred as part of the depositional event during which the assemblage was placed and buried in the palace. Visible effects of heat exposure on bones, ceramics, and chert objects point to localized, intensive burning, including specific spots where fires were lit after materials were distributed across the floors of buildings. Visible burning on bones was quantified using a scale correlating color changes with the degree of heat exposure.45 Of the 377 individual bone fragments from the assemblage, 107 bones showed evidence of varying degrees of burning (approximately 28.4 percent). All burned human and animal bone was burned dry (i.e., when defleshed)—­the color and cracking on the dry-­ burned bone surfaces are distinct from those caused by cooking.46 Burning patterns on the bones are often inconsistent across a single specimen and extend into bone fractures or clear breaks in what were once whole tools or adornments. Such patterns show not only that bones were fractured prior to being exposed to heat and flame (plate 24), but also that they were scattered throughout the palace before it was burned.47 These details shed light on ancient intentions: the purpose of this practice was not to burn the bones and other objects, but rather to burn the offering itself or the spaces in which artifacts were scattered.

p l a t e 1 “Michael, Jason, Annie, and Olivia,” from the series 7 Days of Garbage. Photo by Gregg Segal.

p l a t e 2 Life magazine’s illustration of “throwaway living.” Image by Peter Stackpole, from “Throwaway Living: Disposable Items Cut Down Household Chores,” Life 39, no. 5 (1955): 43–­49.

p l a t e 3 The annual Quema del diablo in Guatemala City, when household trash is burned in a ritual of symbolic purification. Photo 164017353, © Carlos Duarte, Dreamstime.com.

p l a t e 4 Tlazolteotl/Tlaelcuani, the Nahua “Goddess of Filth” and “Eater of Ordure,” from the Florentine Codex. Detail from Mediceo Palatino 218, folio 11r, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence.

p l a t e 5 Tlazolteotl/Tlaelcuani. Detail from the Codex Telleriano-­Remensis, folio 17v, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

p l a t e 6 A priest in the act of bloodletting carries a bone perforator and an incense bag marked with lumps of excrement. Detail from the Codex Telleriano-­Remensis, folio 21r, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

p l a t e 7 Ixnextli, crying and blinded, holds a vessel filled with excrement, clearly labeled as mierda, or “shit,” in the Spanish gloss. Detail from the Codex Telleriano-­Remensis, folio 11r, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

p l a t e 8 A series of Classic-­period Maya vases show several scenes of an elderly man with a distended stomach. He is tended to by a well-­dressed young woman, whose breath upon the man is clearly depicted as she lays her hands on him. Photos by Justin Kerr. (See also figure 3.1.) Source: Justin Kerr, K1182 and K4012, Justin Kerr Maya Archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard Uni­versity, Washington, DC.

p l a t e 9 Fertilizing soil with excrement, from the Florentine Codex. Detail from Mediceo Palatino 220, folio 378v, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence.

p l a t e 1 0 Gods carrying brooms, from the Madrid Codex. Photograph by Joaquín Otero, Museo de América, Madrid, detail from the Madrid Codex, folio 112.

p l a t e 11 A rite described as “the Sweeping” (Tlachpaniztli), depicted in the Florentine Codex. A priest or temple official holds a straw or grass broom, gesturing to or instructing a young boy and two girls (the boy and the younger girl also hold brooms). Detail from Mediceo Palatino 218, folio 177v, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence.

p l a t e 12 A priest shown sweeping, from the Codex Mendoza. The gloss reads, “Head priest, who has the duty of sweeping the temples, or ordering them swept.” Detail from MS Arch Selden A.1, folio 63r, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

p l a t e 13 An image from the Florentine Codex depicts a man breaking and discarding household items as part of the Nahua New Fire ceremony. Detail from Mediceo Palatino 219, folio 247r, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence.

p l a t e 14 Anamorphosis, after Peter Paul Rubens’s Elevation of the Cross by Domenico Piola. Original in the Musée des Beaux-­Arts, Rouen, Normandy. Artchives / Alamy Stock Photo.

p l a t e 15 Piola’s anamorphic image transformed by a cylindrical mirror placed at the center of the canvas. Domenico Piola, Anamorphose au Rubens, inv.1975.4.102 (table). © Agence La Belle Vie / Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie.

p l a t e 1 6 Elongated anamorphosis in The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533. National Gallery, London.

p l a t e 17 Dense concentrations of artifacts uncovered during excavations in the palace at El Zotz. The distinctive color of the matrix in which objects were recovered can be seen along the edges of the exca­ vation unit. Photo by Arturo Godoy, Proyecto Arqueológico El Zotz.

p l a t e 1 8 Vessel types reconstructed from deposits in the palace at El Zotz. Photo by the author.

p l a t e 19 Finished bone artifacts from the deposits at El Zotz. Photo by the author.

p l a t e 2 0 Reworked sherds from the palace at El Zotz, including a probable scoop (left), several circular objects, and half-­drilled disks. Photo by the author.

p l a t e 2 1 Worked and unworked fragments from the same vessel found in the palace at El Zotz. Exterior (left) and interior (right). Photos by the author.

p l a t e 2 2 Variable weathering observed among fragments from a single vessel (left) and chemical root etching across subsequent fracture lines (right) suggest vessels were broken in situ, after deposition. Photos by the author.

p l a t e 23 Root marks crosscut with rodent gnaw marks on a bone spindle whorl fragment, indicating that rodent activity took place before the object was buried in the palace at El Zotz. Image enhanced using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (see Sarah E. Newman, “Applications of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to the Study of Bone Surface Modifications,” Journal of Archaeological Science 53 (2015): 536–­49). Photo by the author.

p l a t e 2 4 Inconsistent burning across a worked bone artifact from the palace at El Zotz. Photo by the author.

p l a t e 2 5 Chert flakes from the palace at El Zotz showing color changes and “potlid” fractures (oval-­ shaped divots) indicative of heat exposure. Photo by the author.

p l a t e 2 6 Variable burning visible across directly rejoined sherds. Photo by the author.

p l a t e 27 Evidence of charred organic materials within broken vessels from the palace at El Zotz. Photo by the author.

p l a t e 2 8 Broken, burned potsherds surround individual altars in Momostenango. Photo by the author.

p l a t e 2 9 Over time, accumulations of potsherds around shrines can reach many meters in height. Photo by Linda A. Brown.

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Just over 17.5 percent of the chert flakes, points, axes, and fragments included in the assemblage were also burned, to varying degrees. Most of those items range from reddish to maroon to deep purple in color and display multiple “potlid” fractures and sinuous, erratic crazing scars, all characteristic signs of intense heat (plate 25). The potlid fractures—­ovate, shallow divots in the artifact’s surface—­result from small, bowl-­shaped pieces of lithic material that are exfoliated from the surface due to rapid temperature changes.48 Experiments have demonstrated that only artifacts that come into direct contact with fire and are heated to a temperature above 300°C (572°F) will show such heat damage.49 Chert or flint materials were often intentionally heated in antiquity, as thermal alterations to the stone can increase compressive strength and reduce point tensile strength, provide more effective control of flaking and fracture, and decrease the occurrence of undesirable breaks while flaking.50 Treating materials with controlled heat also tends to produce sharper edges (though the products are also more brittle, wearing more quickly and breaking more easily during use). The burned lithics therefore might represent curated, worked materials that were intentionally but improperly treated with heat during the process of stone tool production. Heat fractures can be violent, however. Burn­ ing chert in open flame can cause the stone to flare brightly, pop loudly, and explode spectacularly (much like bottle glass), undoubtedly adding to the drama of any burning event.51 As in the case of the human and animal skeletal remains, burning patterns on ceramics were evaluated using a scale to convey the intensity of heat exposure.52 Although burning patterns on ceramics may be caused by cooking activities, the burned vessels from El Zotz include several storage jars or shallow serving plates that would not traditionally be used for cooking.53 Sherds were evaluated individually, but some patterns were best observed and understood once vessels were refit. For example, many reconstructed fragments show different degrees of burning, with blackening extending into the breaks between sherds. Like the bones, the purpose of quantifying the degree and location was to identify whether ceramics were intentionally and directly burned (whether from cooking or the activities in the palace at El Zotz) or incidentally exposed to fire. Although sherds were sometimes only partially burned or exhibited a range of discoloration, they were scored based on the darkest degree of burning observed. Certain kinds of temper, including the crushed limestone or calcite commonly used in pottery from the Maya lowlands, can cause spalling or cracking after heat exposure, but experiments and archaeological case studies suggest that ceramics would need to be exposed

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to sustained temperatures of around 800°C (1472°F ) or higher in order for burning to cause a vessel to fragment.54 Some burned vessel fragments and sherds that showed no signs of blackening, recovered from separate excavation areas (some more than one meter, or just over three feet, apart), could later be directly refit, which underscores the fact that ceramics and other artifacts were fragmented before being burned, rather than as a result of heat exposure (plate 26). Finally, some intensely burned vessel fragments bore evidence of interior charring and burned organic materials (plate 27). This could indicate that the localized burning took the form of offerings such as copal or pine lit in deliberately placed broken vessels, a practice with parallels in contemporary ceremonies in the Guatemalan highlands.55 Taken together, the patterns of weathering, breakage, and reworking show that artifacts in the assemblage from El Zotz were retained, variably exposed, and reused as raw materials before they were swept up, burned, and carefully buried as offerings, an event followed by subsequent large-­scale architectural renovations. The people of Pa’ka’n reused discarded refuse materials to commemorate a once-­in-­a-­lifetime event, protected and preserved their interment, and incorporated them into the rebuilding of their city’s central palace. Trash, Temporality, and Tradition Existing interpretive labels, whether intentionally ambiguous categories like “problematical deposit” or acts of finality described as “termination” or “discard,” fail to capture objects’ multiple pre-­and postdepositional lives. Those labels can also potentially obscure the meanings and motivations at the heart of ancient behaviors. In the case of the assemblage from El Zotz, its contents, context, and condition align with many of the archaeological correlates proposed for termination/rededication rituals, but labeling it as such ignores other equally meaningful aspects of the deposits: the importance of time (the cele­ b­ration of the Period Ending event), the deliberate use of used and repurposed objects, or the intended effects of the offering beyond a singular structural renovation. Classifying the artifacts from the assemblage as reused rubbish is also limiting. Ethnographers and ethnoarchaeologists working in Mesoamerica and elsewhere have long noted that most used-­up and broken things are not immediately discarded, only “provisionally” so, but researchers usually interpret such practices of storing provisional discard according to Western notions of function and efficiency—­that is, as “an investment.”56 Brian Hayden and Aubrey Cannon, for example, explain that, “since almost all implements in sedentary communities are curated and represent some significant investment of time, labor, or money, broken artifacts of all kinds tend to be kept

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around for varying lengths of time in the event that the fragments might still be useful for something.”57 What the example from El Zotz makes clear is that the “something useful” for which broken or worn-­out objects were stored or curated need not be a singular, strictly functional, or perhaps even specific purpose. Objects that might easily be classified as trash could serve as key compo­ nents in specific pre-­Columbian rituals, particularly calendrical ceremonies of renewal undertaken to celebrate and ensure the continuation of time and the cosmos. In particular, the sweeping up and discarding of refuse was an essential element of many New Fire ceremonies celebrated throughout Mesoamerican history. But New Fire ceremonies were not only undertaken at the end of fifty-­two-­year cycles. The art historian Guilhem Olivier, drawing together all known examples of the New Fire ceremony in Postclassic highland Mexico, has noted that the ceremony may be conducted at the birth of a people when leaving a place of origin, the transformation of a people when passing through that place, the foundation of a city or seignorial domain, the foundation of a new house or temple, the accession to power of a new authority, or the foundation of a new lineage after conquest.58 New Fire ceremonies could also be enacted to connote the enthronement of a new ruler, the founding of a new town, and the arrival of a new world order.59 Across Mesoamerica, major events and changes, whether cyclical or unexpected, local or widespread, required preparation, recognition, and respect to achieve success and continuity. Refuse in particular ensured its own continuation in regenerative ritual and agricultural cycles.60 The work of cultivation undertaken by Classic Maya dynasts, moreover, required the full process of the agricultural metaphor: the cutting, clearing, burning, and seeding that ensures renewed growth. The deposits from El Zotz marked an important moment of transition in the Long Count calendar, as well as a period during which the ancient city’s structures of authority were quite literally dismantled and the royal court was displaced. Rituals of renewal harnessed the value and energy still contained within broken, obsolete, or discarded objects to accomplish the ongoing work of transforming and maintaining the royal palace, ensuring success and continuity for its inhabitants on both a local and a cosmic scale. Rather than terminating or rupturing, the deposits made in the palace at El Zotz simultaneously looked to the past and the future, bridging endings and beginnings, seeking to maintain and perpetuate a worldview, as well as the actual world itself. Termination and rededication, rubbish and reuse, renovation and renewal—­ each interpretation of purpose and meaning associated with the assemblage at El Zotz is not quite complete and also not quite incorrect. Rather than refining,

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expanding, or combining those terms until they can effectively label the specific evidence from El Zotz, thinking about archaeological hermeneutics as analogous to the distorted images of a mirror anamorphosis makes room for multiple, occasionally intertwined interpretations. Each slight distortion of a past reality works in tandem with others; each reconstitutes a particular intelligible version of that past through its physical remains. A different position or a focus on different material traces transforms the reconstituted image, but does not negate or erase other possibilities, which remain part of the chaos on the canvas and take shape when viewed from another perspective. A mirror anamorphosis’s cylindrical bending is also helpful in thinking differently about archaeological temporality. Traditional understandings of linear time often paralyze things from the past, creating a long pause between the end of their useful lives as objects and the beginning of their lives as artifacts. Object biographies are never inevitably linear. They are created over and over again by the ways in which things are used and the ways in which they are expected to be used (or to remain useless).61 In the example from El Zotz, the artifacts from the palace are never “finished.” When the objects were made and used; when they were discarded or left exposed as potential raw materials; when they were repurposed and transformed into other objects; when they were collected and transported to the rooms of the palace; when they were scattered, burned, and buried; when they were incorporated into new architectural construction; when they were cleaned, cataloged, and counted by archaeologists—­each of those histories lingers and remains as much as the artifacts themselves. This is perhaps difficult to conceive through an archaeolog­ ical case study, but an example from contemporary highland Guatemala may help to illustrate the ongoing, occasionally overlapping work of refuse disposal and ritual deposition. Momostenango, sometimes referred to as a “traditional community,”62 is a predominantly K’iche’ Maya town in the highlands of western Guatemala. Ancient 260-­day ritual cycles are still maintained there, in tandem with a 365-­day solar calendar. The aptly named “town of altars” is surrounded by outdoor shrines, still put to frequent uses by thousands of practitioners. Some of those practitioners are known as “daykeepers,” shaman-­priests or diviners who, following apprenticeship and initiation, keep track of and maintain ca­­ lendrical cycles through ritual, prognosticate everything from times for planting and harvesting to foreshadowing illness and death, and cure those who are sick. In 2013, I witnessed an influential local daykeeper, Doña Sabina, conduct a ceremony (though she prefers to call it a costumbre, a “traditional practice” or “habitual act”) at one of the altars. Atop Paclom, a hill in the center of Momostenango understood as the heart of the Momostecan world, Doña

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Sabina performed her costumbre in a low, mumbling mix of K’iche’ tinged with Spanish. Occasionally, she would pause to add offerings to a carefully arranged fire.63 Candles, cigars, incense, eggs, cane sugar, rum, and Coca-­Cola bubbled and burned. The fire simultaneously drew bees with its sharp, sweet smell and kept them at bay with its thick, black smoke. The altar where Doña Sabina made her offering is covered in thick layers of ash and soot, a testament to the consistent and ongoing use of Momostenango’s many shrines. Irregular piles of broken and blackened pottery, the result of years of stacking and tumbling, line the edges of many of the town’s altars (plate 28). Those fragments are the remains of other costumbres: the initiations of new daykeepers. In an initiation ceremony, a large cooking pot is broken into pieces. Each piece is used as a vessel to burn small black disks of copal incense and tallow candles.64 At a key moment during the rite, the fragments are placed around the edges of the hearth where the new daykeeper is initiated. Some local shrines have accumulated piles of potsherds over three meters (nearly ten feet) high (plate 29). I tried to ask Doña Sabina why the pots were broken in the initiation ritual, a question that was obviously difficult for her to answer. Her costumbres were just that: traditions. The ceremonies are understood to be based on ancient precedent—­repeating the right words and making the right offerings, in the right sequence, preserves the lives and knowledge of ancestors.65 Doña Sabina had been trained to know the correct performance of prayers and actions and the appropriate times and places that would ensure a ritual’s success. Eventu­ ally, however, she explained that the offering—­which she indicated to mean the complete assortment of candles, incense, Coca-­Cola, potsherds, and a variety of other objects—­was like an egg. One would never offer a guest a raw egg, she chided. One needed to cook it, to prepare it, to make it pleasing and palatable. “El regalo tiene que ser transformado,” she told me in Spanish. The gift has to be transformed. It’s not difficult to imagine the perplexing picture that rituals like Doña Sabina’s might present to future archaeologists. Without the aid of a local interpreter, Momostenango’s shrines—­especially those in more rural areas—­are sometimes mistaken for simple trash heaps today. Scattered among toppled piles of burned and broken pottery, the remains of a well-­used altar easily resemble rubbish, collected and discarded beyond the borders of the modern town. After all, Doña Sabina’s costumbre is carried out with the very same objects she employs for a variety of daily utilitarian purposes. Eggshells, empty Coca-­Cola bottles, and broken water jars are just as often found in backyards, roadside ditches, and actual open-­air dumps as they are at altars.66 The ritual offerings and the piles of potsherds where Doña Sabina stoked

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her ceremonial fire are clear examples of the ways cultural understandings affect what is ordered or disordered, appropriate or inappropriate, valuable or wasted. The materials involved are mundane: sugar, rum, eggs, soda. The burned and broken jar fragments in other circumstances would be considered obsolete, or at best potential raw material for repurposing. Yet all serve as crucial ritual paraphernalia in Momostecan ceremonies. In describing her costumbre, not only did Doña Sabina use the word regalo, “gift,” to describe the assortment of items burned at the altar, but she also emphasized the production of something new by means of her interaction with them, saying, “The gift has to be transformed.” She also explicitly equated the broken potsherds with feeding, analogous to an egg that must be properly cooked before it can be offered to a guest. Conscious and deliberate human interactions with material objects—­including those often assumed to be “waste”—­perform creative, destructive, commemorative, or reciprocal work.67 Acts of disposal and deposition anchor that work in specific locations and provide material cues to incite, express, and remember. What matters is not simply that things are left behind, but the specifics of how, where, and why. Archaeology is usually built around distinct zones of time and action. In Momostenango, however, the continued presence of the potsherds on and in the shrines does more than merely represent rituals and practitioners past. It demarcates the sacred space of the altar and cues and incites proper performances and traditions, which are understood to be based on and continuations of ancient precedent. These assemblages, which include the potsherds again and again, are not matter in or out of place, as in Mary Douglas’s famous phrasing. They are matter that originates from—­and continues to occupy—­a multitude of times and places. Each ceremony is unique, but also reactivates the remains of earlier rituals, creating material continuities that connect the present to multiple pasts.

Conclusions Physical matter is simultaneously indestructible and entirely transmutable. . . . It can swap states drastically, from vegetable to mineral or from liquid to solid. To attempt to hold these two contradictory ideas, of permanence and mutability, in the brain at the same time is usefully difficult, for it makes the individual feel at once valuable and superfluous. You become aware of yourself as constituted of nothing more than endlessly convertible matter—­but also of always being perpetuated in some form. Such knowledge grants us a kind of comfortless immortality: an understanding that our bodies belong to a limitless cycle of dispersal and reconstitution.68

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This quote, from the nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s 2007 book, The Wild Places, is cited as an epigraph to a recent edition of the philosophical poem On the Nature of Things, by the first-­century BCE philosopher-­poet Lucretius. That quote, though written recently, echoes the Roman poet’s ideas about ontology: nothing comes into being out of nothing or can be destroyed into nothing; matter is only amalgamating, permeating, and dissolving as matter. And just as it is with bodies, so too is it with what we call waste: there is nothing but a limitless cycle of dispersal and reconstitution of matter. The quote highlights the difficulty of conceiving the simultaneous processes of change and constancy, deterioration and permanence that produce archaeological assemblages. The contemporary world—­where virtually immortal materials are made and manufactured only to be wasted, and objects are designed to break—­ inculcates particular and, as Macfarlane’s passage suggests, peculiar understandings of things and their materiality.69 The anthropologist Webb Keane has called attention to some of those deeply rooted ways of thinking that haunt the relationships between people and objects in the present. Perhaps, as Keane eloquently writes, we can’t shake them “because they are so deeply part of our metaphysics of presence, or then again, perhaps it’s because we are so entrenched in reified consciousness—­because we have always been heirs of the Greeks or, conversely, because we are now capitalist moderns.”70 From wherever the conceptual genealogies derive, they not only influence how material objects are implicitly understood, but also constrain the possibilities for what those things might have been or might yet become—­effectively making trash a purportedly final and inevitable form. Today, when an object becomes worn out, used up, or obsolete, it reaches the end of its use(ful) life and is available only for reusing, recycling, or discarding. Despite a shallow history, an understanding of waste as the inevitable endpoint of things creeps into visions of how people interacted with objects in the past. This is evident in blanket statements made by archaeologists, such as “99 percent or more of what most archaeologists dig up, record, and analyze in obsessive detail is what past peoples threw away as worthless.”71 The popular perception of the archaeologist as a detective, finding cast-­off clues and discerning or reconstructing human behavior through them, also rests on the idea that people in the past did not think about what they discarded, that their waste was as unintentional as that of the present is assumed to be.72 Even in more nuanced approaches, such as the archaeologist Geoff Bailey’s reflections on the palimpsest-­like nature of archaeological time, “a stone artifact from, say, the Palaeolithic period must represent at least three moments in time, the moment when the raw material was first acquired, the moment

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when it was first shaped into an artifact, and the moment when it was finally thrown away.”73 Subsequent moments—­layers in Bailey’s palimpsests—­take place millennia after discard and do not involve the people who acquired, shaped, and threw away the object, only the archaeologists who recover and illustrate it for publication. Even anthropological attempts to attend to the biographies of things reify the sense that an object’s form, function, meaning, and owner may change through cycles of production, use, discard, and reuse, but the thing itself is nonnegotiable.74 The archaeologist Cornelius Holtorf attributes this tendency to imagine things with singular, exclusive functions to the life-­cycle metaphor itself: “Like human bodies, things that had once been ‘born’ appeared to have to live as what they happened to be until they died. They may have been seen in different ways along the way, but their material identity was deemed to remain unchangeable and continuous all along: a pot was a pot was a pot.”75 As Gavin Lucas bluntly puts it: “In short, what makes objects archaeological is that they are dead.”76 From repurposed stones in ancient constructions to ceramics reused to temper subsequent vessels, taken-­for-­granted ideas about object obsolescence and the inevitability of waste often fail to account for evident relationships between people and things in the past. Take, for example, some of the oldest human-­made artifacts: stone tools. A newly knapped stone tool is made through successive flaking and grinding. Its shape diminishes with each reduction and resharpening; its purpose shifts as it is owned, inherited, and traded; its meaning evolves as it is deposited in a burial, on a midden, or as a votive offering. But, for archaeologists, it is always a stone tool. If used in another capacity, it is a reused stone tool. And yet, in many premodern settings, that stone tool would not have been classified as a stone tool made by human hands at all, but rather would have been identified with certainty by natural historians, philosophers, and farmers alike as a “thunderstone,” an object that fell from the sky with a flash of lightning.77 More often than not, the problems and presence of waste are imagined to be the same across time and space, and the locations and methods of disposal are thought to be motivated by an intrinsic human desire to remove objects that are no longer useful or wanted from everyday living spaces.78 Those a pri­ ori assumptions impose the logic of commodities—­things that are created, acquired, valued, used, and wasted—­on the precapitalist past, fostering the illusion that processes of disposal are and always have been simply about objects and materials, rather than involving relations between people as well.79 They also ignore the deliberate choices made by people in the past during depositional acts, downplaying their intentional selection, transformation, and placement of particular objects in specific locations. Recognizing that trash is not

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a universal concept and that broken pots, bone fragments, worn-­out tools, and crafting debris may have held different and changing meanings in the past requires at the very least a reorientation of how archaeologists approach the objects they find. We need methodological changes in the specific ways of analyzing objects and evaluating their relationships to one another, but we also need new ways of thinking that allow for multiple interpretations rooted in historical and cultural ideas about waste, past and present. Archaeological artifacts are often imagined as the static and partial remains of dynamic events from the past.80 Once incorporated into the archaeological record, those objects are excluded from subsequent events and histories, entering instead into a long period of stasis while they patiently await fortuitous discovery.81 Yet the transformative processes that take place before, during, and after that moment of deposition are not just equally important parts of objects’ biographies, but represent multiple instances of the kinds of human-­ object interactions that shape practice, meaning, and value.82 Attention to the complexities that affect individual archaeological objects offers opportunities not only to reconstruct how those artifacts came or were brought together to constitute an assemblage, but also to detect and describe other events and processes that are of interest in and of themselves.83 It is for that reason that the material trace is the corrective mirror (rather than the distorted image) in thinking analogously about archaeology as anamorphosis. Material traces are recurrent and real—­they are “stubbornly recalcitrant” data, as the archaeologist Robert Chapman and the philosopher of archaeol­ ogy Alison Wylie put it.84 But they are also ambiguous, potentially laden with theories and assumed meanings.85 Following various historians of science, Chapman and Wylie describe the process of building archaeological knowledge using the analogy of “scaffolding”—­building scientific evidence and theory atop various institutional, material, and epistemic supports.86 Yet, as the philosopher of science Adrian Currie has pointed out, scaffolds are meant to be separate from the building under construction and removed at or before completion.87 The analogy of mirror anamorphosis, on the other hand, understands material evidence as positioned in the midst of messy and overlapping institutional, material, and epistemic frameworks in a way that variably brings them and their intersections into focus, but does not rely on them to make sense. Mirror anamorphosis thus also allows material traces to exist in multiple times and places and to have multiple purposes and histories; it embraces the interpretive pluralism and nonlinear narratives that trouble traditional archaeological ways of thinking despite undeniably being part of them. The idea of archaeology as mirror anamorphosis is still only an analogy; it does not fit every case study or explain all archaeological thought. But

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dedicated attention to the intersections of time and matter and the common assumptions about those intersections that underlie archaeological inquiry can illuminate past meanings and motivations that archaeologists have overlooked. Moreover, assumptions about the material continuities and temporal discontinuities on which archaeological interpretations of the past are based often hinge on modern understandings of waste: the paradoxical notion that there are things that remain, despite supposedly having reached an end. As I have argued throughout this book, waste has today become such an integral part of daily life that it is almost impossible to imagine understanding it as something other than inevitable. It is easy, conceptually and ethically, to assume that ideas about what trash is and how it should be managed are self-­ evident, natural, and universal, not to mention that our relationships to things begin and end when and how we want. Troubling those assumptions and how they came to be, as I have done in earlier chapters, forces us to reconsider them, which I hope opens up space for new and different ways of thinking about the material world and how to interact with it. I use the analogy of anamorphic archaeology not only to offer one possible answer to the critique I have leveled against unreflexively applying notions of “waste” to the traces of the past, but also as a productive way of examining how the study of the past has happened. Perhaps it can still happen otherwise.

conclusion

A Weakness in Our Imaginations?

China has long been the linchpin of global recycling efforts, importing nearly three-­quarters of the world’s exports of wastepaper, metals, and used plastic.1 In 2018, however, as part of an antipollution campaign known as “National Sword,” China banned imports of more than twenty types of solid waste, from unsorted paper to the low-­grade plastics used in bottles. The ban’s effect was immediate. Many countries sought out other Asian buyers, particularly in Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. Those smaller importing nations were quickly overwhelmed by the enormous volume of plastics that China had absorbed (10,225 million metric tons per year in 2016) and took their own steps to restrict the number of imports.2 Recyclable wastes began piling up throughout Europe, Canada, Japan, and the United States as hundreds of communities unexpectedly faced skyrocketing recycling costs. Unable (or unwilling) to pay the higher prices, some cities turned to burning recyclables in waste-­to-­energy incinerators. Others simply rerouted recycling collection trucks directly to landfills.3 In 2020, more than 180 nations joined China in placing strict limits on quantities and quality of exports of plastic waste from richer to poorer countries. The United States is one of the few countries in the world that has yet to ratify the Basel Convention (the framework under which the new rules were adopted), which would require Congress to pass legislation accepting its terms. Mean­ while, the Basel rules prohibit member nations from trading waste with countries that have not ratified the convention, meaning that exports of most kinds of plastic waste from the United States to the rest of the world are currently illegal.4 Long after new bans and more stringent rules disrupted the global recycling circuit, many European and American cities continue to encourage residents to sort and separate their wastes as usual.5 At Memphis International

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Airport, a spokesman for the airport argued that maintaining the presence of recycling bins—­even while every can, bottle, and newspaper placed in them was being sent to a landfill—­was important for preserving “the culture” of recycling. “We want to ensure that we are able to have a seamless transition if and when single-­stream recycling returns to the Memphis area,” he wrote.6 The tactic works. When people place their recyclables in the appropriate bin, they feel that they have done their part, that they are good, responsible members of their communities. They do not concern themselves with what actually happens next to their discards, much less so with who makes it happen.7 In fact, China’s stricter requirements are partially intended to reduce the contam­ ination of recycling loads by nonrecyclable materials, a problem due to what waste managers call “aspirational recycling”: people mixing in items they believe or hope are recyclable, even when they aren’t.8 Italo Calvino’s description of Leonia from the introduction seems visionary: “Nobody wonders where, each day, they [the street cleaners] carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely.”9 Practices of making and managing waste obviously carry with them attendant ideas about waste itself, but those ideas affect much more than sanitation services. New techniques of waste management, whether incinerators or sanitary landfills, require social, economic, and political shifts to gain traction and be viable. Their success produces and depends upon normalized disposal practices that not only change what people do with their garbage (and who does it), but also reshuffle social relationships.10 Both the impact of China’s refusal to continue in its role as “the world’s garbage dump”11 and the fact that cities like Memphis still strive to maintain the illusion and performance of recycling, despite the reality of using landfills and incinerators, emphasize how daily practices of waste management are inextricable from many other social processes. Dictating how people are expected to create and discard wastes fundamentally changes the ways they relate to their trash and to one another. Making and Unmaking “Waste” Waste-­management systems work by becoming habitual ways of thinking about (or not thinking about) and interacting with (or not interacting with) waste. They depend on waste-­making and waste-­managing practices appearing natural, eventually becoming so internalized that those practices transform the basic relationships between people and the world around them. Those conditioned actions and relations have the effect of masking what happens downstream, as Memphis Airport’s recycling ruse makes clear. Inculcated habits, the sociologist Gay Hawkins writes, “bind us to the world at the same time as they

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blind us to it.”12 As those habits and practices usually go unacknowledged, it is unnecessary, not to mention very difficult, to imagine ways of creating and interacting with waste in the past, present or future other than those with which one is familiar. This book has focused on those unmarked, conventional perceptions in temporally, geographically, and culturally varied contexts, casting direct light on what is usually unseen. This is only a first step, but an essential one, in re-­marking and rethinking dominant commonsense representations of the world.13 My aim has been to undo modern assumptions about trash. Rather than imposing a perspective on the past and the present that is inseparable from the effects of industrialism, mass production, consumerism, and, more recently, environmentalism, I “take seriously”14 multiple possibilities for understanding the nature of things and the relationships that are built with, through, and among them. “Waste” is neither universal nor self-­evident. It is not only historically and culturally contingent, but synchronically dynamic as well. Peo­ ple in the remote past, more proximate history, and the present have engaged with the world in different ways than those that are often considered commonplace today. Taking seriously that acknowledgment troubles the supposed pivotal points of distinction between an “us” and a “them” (between “Western” and “non-­Western”), and even between “then” and “now.” It requires reconsid­ ering some of the underlying conceptions of temporality and materiality on which archaeological and historical investigations rely—­fundamental assumptions that, in turn, shape concerns over the material remains of the present and the ways they will persist and change in the future. This book is more than a critical unveiling of familiar concepts. Choosing new geographical, cultural, and temporal starting points to trace histories of waste shifts the usual settings that have been the focus of scholarly attention. It also repositions contemporary ways of making and managing wastes as the outcomes of complex and ongoing contestations and unsettles standard linear narratives of development and progress. Taking a long-­term perspective, grounded in archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence, emphasizes that there are no easy distinctions or clear-­cut comparisons to be made between mutable ways of understanding the world, even as they come into conflict synchronically (in emerging colonial systems of waste management, for example) and diachronically (as between people who left things behind in the past and those who continue to live with those things in the present). The specific history and practices of current waste-­management systems give rise to assumptions and illusions about how people everywhere have made waste. As this book has shown, those expectations bias how relationships between people and things in the past are imagined and limit the possibilities for

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interpreting archaeological and historical evidence. To conclude this final chapter, I turn to the implications of imposing particular ways of understanding waste on the present and future. Recognizing waste as a historical, mutable concept and category exposes commonplace taken-­for-­granted truths as fictions, including the idea that waste has always existed, that people everywhere have understood most objects as disposable and expendable (designed for a singular purpose and necessarily losing value over time and through use), or that a desire for separation is how humans instinctively relate to it. Those modern ontologies—­indeed, mythologies—­of trash are not only anachronistic when applied to the past, but also actively mask the realities of contemporary ways of making and managing wastes. They reify an understanding of waste as a predetermined part and problem of human existence. They create waste as a problem that requires a solution, rather than a social construct arising from the relatively recent and culturally proximate systems that have formalized its creation, collection, and disposal. A Crisis of Capitalism Modern, urban understandings of trash and discard are often complicated, unconscious, or unclear, even (or perhaps especially) to those who hold them. Waste has become a familiar disenchantment story, one that simultaneously assumes its existence to be inevitable and its production as universally corrupting of both culture and nature, a narrative steeped in ideas of moral and ecological crisis. The anthropologist Janet Roitman has argued, however, thinking in terms of crisis implies an experiential condition, a protracted state of things gone awry—­a state of affairs that configures, even defines certain problems as allowing for only certain kinds of solutions.15 Roitman notes: “Crisis is a point of view, or an observation, which itself is not viewed or observed . . . an observation that, like all observations or cognitions, does not account for the very conditions of its observation.”16 Deeply ingrained ways of understanding waste as an ongoing crisis allow for certain narratives and enable certain questions while precluding others. Many solutions cannot be envisioned, because approaches are preconditioned, often in ways that escape notice, by the concept of waste and the idea of crisis.17 Energies thus remain focused almost entirely on what can be done to garbage, rather than exploring what garbage can be and how else (beyond a crisis) to think about it. Yet, this book has shown that the idea that things necessarily become waste is a relatively recent phenomenon. The sense of inevitable and increasingly rapid object obsolescence that is commonplace today only came into being in

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the early twentieth century, in specific parts of the world.18 Before then, objects were susceptible to a variety of uses, reuses, and transformations, includ­ ing periods of obsolescence (i.e., disuse) from which they might return to claim new functions.19 Utter object obsolescence is made possible by the logic of capitalism—­a logic that implies that all needs should be satisfied via the consumption of commodities, that new needs are created to be satisfied in the same way, and that those needs and their commodified satisfactions should be renewed in order to secure continual and expanding consumption.20 In economies built around global circulation and turnover, getting rid of things is as necessary as production and consumption.21 As early as 1923, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, cofounders of the London School of Economics, bemoaned the fact that “there are more examples to hand than we have room to describe of the fact that under capitalism it is impossible to create an interest in production that is not also an interest in decay and destruction.”22 Waste serves as a safety valve that allows capital to stay in motion. Never-­ending cycles of consumption and disposal rescue capitalism from its own relentless expansion and the economic risks of capital trapped in commodity forms.23 Indeed, waste making is so essential to the reproduction of modern capitalism that it has become a protected practice. The sociologist Martin O’Brien uses the example of the European Union’s prosecution of dumpster divers to show how market societies regulate not only the production and circulation of goods, but also the abandonment and management of surpluses. “To discard waste is emphatically not to abandon it, divest oneself of it or even throw it away,” O’Brien writes, “it is to situate it in the channels, protocols, and procedures of waste management; to place it positively in a politically regulated regime that orchestrates who can profit from it and what can happen to it.”24 Policies against the “theft” of waste are necessary to ensure that waste stays wasted and that its value is regulated. The anthropologist David Boarder Giles makes a similar argument in recounting episodes from his ethnographic participation in dumpster-­diving communities, not only showing how commodities must be wasted (i.e., not reused or recycled) in order to manufacture scarcity and maintain the pricing structure of the market, but also highlighting how social relations and cultural values are defined and mediated by market forces. In one vignette, Giles recalls how, after retrieving a box of cantaloupes from a dumpster at Seattle’s Pike Place Market and leaving them unattended for a moment, a produce worker angrily threw the melons away a second time, “insisting that on no account should those melons re-­enter our realm of social exchange.”25 It is impossible for the produce worker to allow the melons to be anything other than garbage. The norms of modern capitalism and its

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specific forms of waste making and value control are so ingrained that even though the exchange value of the melons is zero, he makes certain that they should not be free. The unspoken understanding, exposed in the example of Giles’s produce worker, that waste must be made, is particularly salient in the extreme cases of “hoarders”—­those who acquire but fail to discard possessions, even items with arguably little value (old newspapers, rotting food, etc.). Psychologists have explained hoarding as a behavior that allows individuals to avoid the difficult decisions required to throw things away, the worry that accompanies such decisions, and the emotional reactions felt in parting with things.26 Yet this aversion to wasting is abnormal or problematic only under the specific conditions of modern consumerism. As the literary theorist Charmaine Eddy has observed in analyzing the popular reality television series Hoarders, each episode of the show revolves around hoarders’ psychologist-­assisted self-­ transformations, in which the hoarders are disciplined not to acquire less stuff, but instead to produce more waste. Their aberration is underdisposing, not overconsuming.27 Perhaps hoarders simply relate to things in a way that is inappropriate only in their specific context. Jane Bennett—­drawing on an idea from the philosopher of science Ian Hacking, that particular mental illnesses arise in specific times and places between a culture’s celebrated virtues and denigrated vices—­ has suggested that hoarding may actually be a response to modern ways of waste making. As hysteria was the prototypical psychopathology that arose amid the virtues and vices of Victorian England, “perhaps hoarding is the madness appropriate to a political economy devoted to over-­consumption, planned obsolescence . . . and vast mountains of disavowed waste.”28 That is, maybe hoarders are those who, for whatever reason, simply haven’t kept pace with the development of the “throwaway society.” Some scholars even argue that hoarding should be understood not as a deficiency, but rather as a special gift or ability for perception. In a visit to the home of one of his patients, the psychologist Randy Frost was presented with a large plastic bag filled with bottle caps. “Look at these bottle caps—­aren’t they beautiful? Look at the shape and color,” the hoarder, Irene, said with excitement. Frost admitted that he couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the bottle caps—­a fact that seemed to hurt Irene. In mulling over the incident afterward, Frost wrote: “It is possible that people who hoard see and appreciate features of objects that others overlook, perhaps because of their emphasis on visual and spatial qualities. . . . Might this reflect a different way of perceiving the world, one focused on aesthetic pleasures that the rest of us overlook?”29

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Like the possibility of beauty apprehended by the hoarder but overlooked by “the rest of us,” the very existence of the category of waste reflects limitations of ingenuity, knowledge, skill, and imagination. The philosopher Barry Allen has provocatively suggested that the idea of trash can exist only when objects are made for a purpose, in contrast to natural materials: “Nothing in nature is ever used up because nothing is, strictly speaking, used—­that is, existing by design, for a purpose or telos. . . . And what wasn’t made to do anything at all cannot break, malfunction, or become obsolete, spent, or exhausted.”30 Trash begins, according to Allen, at the point where we can no longer make things of things we’ve made. “You have to throw the french fries container away,” he writes. “No one knows what else to do with it since, sadly, it was made that way, made to defeat the very knowledge that designed and manufactured it.”31 The architecture and design critic Karrie Jacobs makes a similar point in an article entitled “The Design of Garbage”: “Our products come in packages that are more beautiful than the contents, more durable than the objects we buy for permanent use, and we throw them away. We’re supposed to throw them away. Every level of infrastructure is set up to encourage us and help us throw things away.”32 Larger Realities In September 2018, the twenty-­four-­year-­old Dutch inventor Boyan Slat launched “System 001” (nicknamed “Wilson,” after Tom Hanks’s volleyball companion in the movie Cast Away) in San Francisco. The six-­hundred-­meter-­long (about 1,970-­foot-­long) plastic boom, attached to a weighted geotextile skirt, was designed to ride the currents of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean, where rotating ocean currents of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre would draw microplastics and other floating objects into System 001’s relatively stable center. Wilson would accumulate and store plastic flotsam, to be transported back to land at regular intervals for recycling. Slat, who founded an organization called the Ocean Cleanup in 2013, raised over $40 million for his project from online donors, charitable foun­ dations, billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Benioff, and major corporations like Maersk. Although environmentalists have attacked the Ocean Cleanup as a distraction from both real problems and real solutions, Slat readily admits to those criticisms. In a 2019 interview with the New Yorker’s reporter Carolyn Kormann, Slat said of the Ocean Cleanup: “We don’t say ‘Ban all the plastic’—­ we sort of provide an alternative that’s exciting, that fits into a world view you can be excited about.”33

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In what seems to have been a surprise to no expert except those working for the Ocean Cleanup, Wilson’s launch was a complete failure.34 Caught in its own effects on the gyre’s currents, it became just one more piece of aimlessly floating plastic. Slat’s capitalist solution to the problems of capitalism is a fitting example of the warning issued by the literary critic and philosopher Fredric Jameson a quarter of a century earlier: “It seems to be easier to us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.”35 However much we may like to think that the existence of things and our engagements with them are on our terms, their flows are beyond our control. The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has pointed out that “those involved in the activity of waste disposal know that one cannot dispose of waste, only convert it into something else with its own life.”36 In 2014, the science-­fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. In her short acceptance speech, Le Guin set herself apart from the “so-­called realists” who usually receive such awards and warned: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voice of [those] who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-­stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need . . . realists of a larger reality.”37 The author, editor, and critic Noah Berlatsky has made a similar argument about envisioning alternative futures in response to present problems. For Berlatsky, sci-­fi “doesn’t just demonstrate future possibilities, but future limits—­the extent to which dreams of what we’ll do remain captive to things we’ve already done.”38 For those who want to change the narrative of crisis, the solutions are not more plastic creations or more conduits for disposal (recycling, composting, etc.). The very concept of trash itself must be questioned and, ultimately, rethought. That is what the shifted histories examined in this book, from the deep past to the present, can offer: the knowledge not only that there might be alternatives, but that there are and always have been.39 Le Guin, again, has made this point eloquently: In reinventing the world of intense, unreproduceable, local knowledge, seemingly by a denial or evasion of current reality, fantasists are perhaps trying to assert and explore a larger reality than we now allow ourselves. They are trying to restore the sense—­to regain the knowledge—­that there is somewhere else, anywhere else, where other people may live another kind of life. The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives, and therefore offers hope.40

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For the anthropologist Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, such endeavors yield both contributions and confessions: “We owe it to ourselves and to our interlocutors to say loudly that we have seen alternative visions of humankind and that we know that this one may not be the most respectful of the planet we share, nor indeed the most accurate nor the most practical. We also owe it to ourselves to say that it is not the most beautiful nor the most optimistic.”41 The past was not necessarily better than the present, and it does not always provide specific substitutes or examples to emulate. But it does offer the certainty that there have been times and places in which people live or have lived different kinds of lives, perhaps in different worlds altogether. I began this book with Leonia, Italo Calvino’s city where nothing is ever used more than once and all the disposable items of daily living are piled into “a fortress of indestructible leftovers,” mountains of garbage that eventually collapse under their own size and weight, destroying the city.42 Leonia is often understood as a straightforward parable warning against modern ways of wasting, much like another of Calvino’s short stories, “The Daughters of the Moon.” Although “The Daughters of the Moon” was written in 1968, it was published in English for the first time in 2009, in the New Yorker. In it, Calvino describes a world “where every object was thrown away at the slightest sign of breaking or aging, at the first dent or stain, and replaced with a new and perfect substitute” and people were “coming and going from the big department stores that were open day and night . . . display[ing] their gratitude toward the god Production, who tirelessly satisfied their every desire.”43 The moon looms over a landscape much like Leonia’s, “an enormous wrecking yard” of refrigerators, magazines, light bulbs, and other disposables.44 In response to the New Yorker’s printing of the English translation, one of the magazine’s readers commented: “The story is a thinly veiled allegory of consumerism and disposable culture. And I suppose that the allegory is so thinly veiled that I found it a little too obvious. Maybe it’s because the story is nearly 40 years old, and the topic is always in discussion now, but it seemed very obvious to me.”45 To contemporary readers, Leonia and the world described in “The Daughters of the Moon” seem not only unsurprising, but clear and present—­barely balanced on an edge between the peculiarly Anglo-­American categories of fiction and nonfiction. But in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Leonia is simply one of many such cities: Thekla never ceases to be built and so its destruction can never begin; in Argia, where there is earth instead of air, the city’s inhabitants must eke out a living in the spaces carved by tree roots; the people of Ersilia stretch strings across the city to mark their relationships—­“of blood, of trade, authority, agency”—­until the web becomes too dense and knotted to pass through, at which point they dismantle their houses, take their belongings, and relocate,

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leaving only the strings behind.46 What if, rather than imagining Thekla, Argia, or Ersilia as less realistic than Calvino’s Leonia, a reader were to instead think of Leonia as only as “obvious” as Calvino’s other cities? What new possibilities might arise if we were to attend now to some of the past perspectives explored in this book, rethinking the very notion of refuse, and perhaps even disposing of the term trash altogether?

Acknowledgments

It took a long time to make Unmaking Waste. The book itself is an example of multiple instances of reuse, reworking, and rethinking. Like the things described within it, every page is marked by the traces of people I have interacted with and places I have been. Several institutions, organizations, grants, and fellowships provided academic and financial support for both research and writing: the Anthropology Department and the Graduate School at Brown University, the Tinker Foundation, the Archaeological Institute of America’s Jane C. Waldbaum Scholarship, a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, a Wenner-­Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Guatemala, the University of Texas at Austin’s Mesoamerica Center and Casa Herrera, a Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund graduate fellowship, a J. M. Stuart Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Gren Foundation Richard Carley Hunt Postdoctoral Library, a Wenner-­ Fellowship, and, at the University of Chicago, a Monograph Enhancement Award from the Center for International Social Science Research and the Lichtstern Fund of the Department of Anthropology. The University of Chicago’s Micro-­Metcalf Program also provided funding for two diligent and talented research assistants, Emily Her and Kristen Noble. I am grateful to the many people who turned my manuscript into an actual book, especially Mary Al-­Sayed, Fabiola Enriquez Flores, and Stephen Twilley at the University of Chicago Press, copy editor Johanna Rosenbohm, and indexer Ayla Çevik. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Stephen Houston, who, in addition to being an exceptionally attentive PhD advisor while I was at Brown, continues to teach me through his own untiring example how to ask new and different kinds of questions, how to think more widely and more deeply, and how

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to pursue academic life and its labors with kindness, generosity, and friendship. I also wish to thank other committee members and readers—­John Cherry, Andrew Scherer, Scott Hutson, and Christina Halperin—­for their many and meticulous readings, corrections, and provocations. Many people made the archaeological research at the heart of this book possible with their support, hospitality, and hard work. In Guatemala, I thank the Instituto de Antropología e Historia (IDAEH), especially Ana Lucía Arroyave, Rita Casas, and Monica Urquizú, for granting permissions and facilitating access to archives and collections; Juan Carlos Meléndez and Daniel Aquino at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología (MUNAE) for sponsoring my Fulbright grant; and the directors of the Proyecto Arqueológico El Zotz (Phase I), Stephen Houston, Thomas Garrison, and Edwin Román, for allowing me to take part in their project. I have drawn on the insights and efforts of many collaborators who directed investigations in and around the palace at El Zotz, including Ernesto Arrendondo, Pedro Aragón, Kate Blankenship, Jose Luis Garrido, Stephen Houston, Elizabeth Marroquín, Varinia Matute, Juan Carlos Meléndez, Dámaris Menéndez, Griselda Pérez, Fabiola Quiroa, and Caitlin Walker, as well as the analyses of material specialists, especially Ewa Czapiewska-­Halliday, Yeny Gutiérrez, Zachary Hruby, and Andrew Scherer. Colleagues from Dolores and Cruce Dos Aguadas are the literal movers and shakers responsible for much of the evidence presented in this book, especially Héctor Aak, Felipe Alvarado, Roger Alvarado, Byron Amaya, Héctor Cervantes, Giovanni Escobar, Amilcar Génis, Alberto Heredia, Luis Gonzalo Ic Pan, Alberto López, Raul Caal Pan, Catalino Ramos, Francisco Ventura, Rony Ventura, and Pablo Zabala. In addition to those already mentioned, other members of the Proyecto Arqueológico El Zotz made fieldwork educational, exciting, and enjoyable, including Omar Alcover, Octavio Axpuac, Timothy Beach, Boris Beltrán, Fernando Beltrán, Rafael Cambranes, Nicholas Carter, Mary Clarke, William Corleto, Alyce de Carteret, Davíd del Cid, James Doyle, Laura Gámez, Arturo Godoy, Danilo Hernández, Santos Hernández, Melanie Kingsley, Joel López, Rony Piedrasanta, and André Rivas. I have been fortunate to find a warm welcome in many places, both near and distant, over the course of this project. At the Harvard Zooarchaeology Lab, Richard Meadow and Ajita Patel offered frequent advice, guidance, and support, not to mention many late-­night dinners and lots of laughter. Long stretches of research and writing in Guatemala passed quickly thanks to the companionship and humor of Milady Casco, Catherine Docter, José Madrid Galván, Juan Manuel Martínez, Jade Mishler, Rene Ozaeta, Rodrigo Palermo, Grete Pasch, Martín Rangel, Astrid Runggaldier, and Rhonda Taube, and passed easily thanks to the always-­amiable support of Kathleen Guerra at the

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US Embassy. My fellow fellows at the John Carter Brown Library first pushed me to expand the scope of my work, and I am especially grateful to Kathryn Burns, Jake Frederick, Bérénice Gaillemin, Tricia McAnany, Justin Pope, Neil Safier, Tatiana Seijas, Tanya Tiffany, and Nancy van Deusen for their advice and encouragement. Many friends and colleagues have helped me refine the ideas or (re)write the chapters of this book. Andrea Flores and Luiza Silva read most of the manuscript (often more than once), while Claudia Brittenham, Jonny Bunning, Mary Clarke, Caitlin Earley, Nikki Grigg, Stephen Houston, Steve Kosiba, Bob Preucel, Kelsey Rooney, Franco Rossi, and Peter van Dommelen read individual chapters or provided advice. At the University of Chicago, partic­ ipants in the Fishbein Workshop in the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Sciences and the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge’s Cultures and Knowledge Workshop also read or discussed portions of the manuscript. Sarah Thomas and Thea Riofrancos in Providence and Julie Iromuanya in Chicago were steadfast coworking companions. My family, immediate and extended, but especially my mother, Kathleen, and my sisters, Alex and Katherine, are an unceasing source of love, support, and inspiration. Felipe Rojas talked through, read, and refined every page of this book, many times over, and I cannot express how grateful I am for his insights and advice, his patience, and his humor and kindness. There is no unmaking. As this book was coming together, my father’s body was slowly breaking down. I often think about and take comfort in the idea that he is not gone, just endlessly dispersed and reconstituted in the world around me.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Introduction 1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1974 [1972]). 2. Calvino, Invisible Cities, 114. 3. Calvino, 115. 4. Calvino, 115. 5. Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–­1985, trans. Martin McLaughlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 471. 6. Max Liboiron, “Modern Waste as Strategy,” Lo Squaderno: Explorations in Space and Society, no. 29 (2013): 10. 7. This pervasive perspective has been documented in interviews with both consumers and those who work within the waste-­management industry. Edd de Coverly et al., “Hidden Mountain: The Social Avoidance of Waste,” Journal of Macromarketing 28, no. 3 (2008): 293. 8. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish Ecology,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (March 2008): 338. 9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 10. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (New York: Berg Publishers, 1986). 11. Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 12. See, e.g., Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (New York: North Point Press, 2007); Sabine Barles, L’invention des déchets urbains, France, 1790–­1970 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005); Barles, “History of Waste Management and the Social and Cultural Representations of Waste,” in The Basic Environmental History, ed. Mauro Agnoletti and Simone Neri Serneri (Basel: Springer, 2014); Mira Engler, Designing America’s Waste Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); H. Lanier Hickman Jr., American Alchemy: The History of Solid Waste Management in the United States (Santa Barbara: Forester Press, 2003); Dominique Laporte,

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History of Shit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Giusy Lofrano and Jeanette Brown, “Waste­­ water Management through the Ages: A History of Mankind,” Science of the Total Environment 408, no. 22 (2010): 5254–­64; Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Envi­­ ronment (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005 [1981]); Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present (Pittsburgh: Uni­­ versity of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); Martin O’Brien, A Crisis of Waste? Understanding the Rubbish Society (New York: Routledge), 2008; Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Henry Holt, 1999); and D. G. Wilson, “A Brief History of Solid-­Waste Management,” International Journal of Environmental Studies 9, no. 2 (1975): 123–­29. For a notable counterpoint to the usual areal and temporal foci of histories of waste and waste management, see Zsuzsa Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 13. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002 [1966]), 44. 14. Earlier work by Marcel Mauss on the Kwakiutl potlatch feast laid the anthropological groundwork for the idea that getting rid of something can play a key role in the maintenance of a recognizable social order, but Douglas showed that the systems of classification used to define dirt are relative. See Mauss, The Gift (London: Routledge, 1991). 15. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 44. 16. Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 14–­15. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Post­­ colonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 16–­17; and Chris Wickham, “Problems in Doing Comparative History,” in Challenging the Boundaries of Medieval History: The Legacy of Timothy Reuter, ed. Patricia Skinner (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 6. 17. For Pellow, “global North” and “global South” are social (rather than strictly geographic) designations, so that there exist both “global North nations” like the United States and privileged communities in poor nations, which he calls the “Norths in the South.” David Naguib Pellow, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 3. See also Peter Newell, “Race, Class, and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality,” Global Environmental Politics 5, no. 3 (2005): 70–­94. 18. On culturally, geographically, and historically varied understandings of and interactions with contemporary waste, see, e.g., Lucy Bell, “Place, People, and Processes in Waste Theory: A Global South Critique,” Cultural Studies 33, no. 1 (2019): 98–­121; and Min’an Wang, “On Rubbish,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 7–­8 (2011): 340–­53. 19. Nongbri, Before Religion, 153. The archaeologist Severin Fowles has similarly critiqued the application of modern ideas of religion to the premodern past in the American Southwest. Fowles, An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research, 2013). 20. Peter N. Miller, History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 15. 21. Felipe Rojas, “Archaeophilia: A Diagnosis and Ancient Case Studies,” in Antiquarianisms: Contact, Conflict Comparison, ed. Benjamin Anderson and Rojas, Joukowsky Institute Publica­ tion 8 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2017), 11. 22. See, e.g., Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997); and Schnapp et al., eds., World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013).

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23. Paul Kirchhoff, “Mesoamerica: Its Geographic Limits, Ethnic Composition, and Cultural Characteristics,” in Heritage of Conquest: The Ethnology of Middle America, ed. Sol Tax (New York: Cooper Square, 1968), 19. 24. Rosemary A. Joyce, “Mesoamerica: A Working Model for Archaeology,” in Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice, ed. Julia A. Hendon and Joyce (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 3. See also Robert M. Carmack, Janine L. Gasco, and Gary H. Gossen, The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of a Native American Civilization (London: Routledge, 2007), 6. 25. See, e.g., Byron Hamann, “The Social Life of Pre-­sunrise Things: Indigenous Mesoamer­ ican Archaeology,” Current Anthropology 43, no. 3 (2002): 351–­82; and John Monaghan, “A Retrospective Look at the Ethnology Volumes of the Handbook of Middle American Indians,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians, Supplement 6, Ethnology, ed. Monaghan (Austin: Uni­ versity of Texas Press, 2000), 1–­6. 26. Hamann, “Social Life of Pre-­sunrise Things,” 332. Some scholars have argued for employing comparative temporal horizons (e.g., “medieval Mesoamerica) to better emphasize the global connected histories linking Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. See, e.g., Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “The Middle Ages, Middle America, and the Book,” in Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. Bryan C. Keene (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019), 71–­72. 27. Jon Schackt, “The Emerging Maya: A Case of Ethnogenesis,” in Maya Survivalism, ed. Ueli Hostettler and Matthew Restall (Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein, 2001), 11. 28. See, e.g., Jill L. McKeever Furst, The Natural History of the Soul in Ancient Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 173–­84. 29. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “trash, n.1,” accessed July 2, 2020, www.oed.com /view/Entry/205217. 30. H. de B. Parsons, The Disposal of Municipal Refuse (New York: John Wiley, 1906), 19. 31. See Strasser, Waste and Want, 29; and Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York: New Press, 2005), 56–­57. 32. Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka, Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics across Domains, Languages, and Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9. 33. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “learn, v.,” accessed July 2, 2020, www.oed.com /view/Entry/106716. 34. Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day’s Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (New York: Berkley Books, 2012), 10. 35. See G. E. R. Lloyd, Analogical Investigations: Historical and Cross-­cultural Perspectives on Human Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 16. 36. Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). Chapter One 1. Gregg Segal, 7 Days of Garbage, Gregg Segal (website), accessed July 3, 2020, https://gregg segal.com/P-­Projects/7-­Days-­of-­Garbage/1/caption. 2. Segal, 7 Days of Garbage. 3. Liboiron, “Modern Waste as Strategy,” 9. In fact, even the idea that consumers “make” garbage is a false assumption, an attempt to insert agency where none exists, as individuals today do not make trash materially, nor do they have much choice in which materials they buy and

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thus turn into surplus stuff. See Zsuzsa Gille, “Actor Networks, Modes of Production, and Waste Regimes: Reassembling the Macro-­social,” Environment and Planning A 42, no. 5 (May 2010): 1050. 4. See, e.g., María José Zapata Campos and Patrik Zapata, “The Travel of Global Ideas of Waste Management: The Case of Managua and Its Informal Settlements,” Habitat International 41, no. 1 (2014): 41–­49. Max Liboiron further demonstrates how the worldwide distribution of waste products and processes is not only an effect of globalization or “development,” but an integral part of ongoing and evolving land relations rooted in colonialism. Liborion, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 5–­6, 11. 5. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 5. 6. Lofrano and Brown, “Wastewater Management through the Ages,” 5254–­64. 7. Edward Orton, “The Relation of the State to Public Health,” in Transactions of the Thirty-­ Sixth Annual Meeting of the Ohio State Medical Society, Held at Columbus June 14th, 15th, and 16th, 1881 (Columbus: Ohio State Medical Society, 1882), 97–­99 (emphases in original). 8. Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean, 65. On bathing culture in the Levant and Anatolia, see Nina Ervin, ed., Bathing Culture of Anatolian Civilizations: Architecture, History, and Imagination, Ancient Near Eastern Studies Supplement 37 (Leuven: Peeters, 2011). 9. The chronological scheme used here is taken from Steven J. Burian and Findlay G. Edwards, “Historical Perspectives of Urban Drainage,” Global Solutions for Urban Drainage, (September 2002), 1–­16. Giusy Lofrano and Jeannette Brown similarly divide the development of wastewa­ ter management systems into fits and starts, from “Early History” (encompassing the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Egypt, and Greece), the “Roman Period,” the “Sanitary Dark Age” (from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution), and the “Age of Sani­ tary Enlightenment and the Industrial Age” (ca. 1800–­1965) through the current “Age of Stringent Environmental Standards.” Lofrano and Brown, “Wastewater Management through the Ages,” 5254. 10. David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-­Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 78. 11. Neville Morley, “The Salubriousness of the Roman City,” in Health in Antiquity, ed. Helen King (London: Routledge, 2005), 193. 12. Caroline Garrahan Wazer, “Salus Patriae: Public Health and the Roman State” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2017), 13–­14, https://search-­proquest-­com.proxy.uchicago.edu/docview /1987556293?accountid=14657. 13. Alex Scobie, “Slums, Sanitation, and Mortality in the Roman World,” KLIO 68, no. 2 (January 1986), 410–­13. See also Ann Olga Koloski-­Ostrow, The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 83. 14. Scobie, “Slums, Sanitation, and Mortality,” n111. 15. Koloski-­Ostrow, Archaeology of Sanitation, 67. 16. Koloski-­Ostrow, 49. 17. Arjan Zuiderhoek, The Politics of Munificence in the Roman Empire: Citizens, Elites, and Benefactors in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 28–­29. 18. Wazer, Salus Patriae, 37. 19. Koloski-­Ostrow, Archaeology of Sanitation, 65. 20. Walter Scheidel, “Germs for Rome,” in Rome the Cosmopolis, ed. Catherine Edwards and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 158. 21. Morley, “Salubriousness of the Roman City,” 198.

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22. Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft, trans. Alfred Richard Allinson (Whithorn: Anodos Books, 2019 [1939]), 46n32. 23. Lynn Thorndike, “Sanitation, Baths, and Street-­Cleaning in the Middle Ages and Renais­ sance,” Speculum 3, no 2 (1928): 192–­203. 24. See Ernest L. Sabine, “Butchering in Mediaeval London,” Speculum 8, no. 3 (1933): 335–­53; Sabine, “Latrines and Cesspools of Mediaeval London,” Speculum 9, no. 3 (1934): 303-­321; and Sabine, “City Cleaning in Mediaeval London,” Speculum 12, no. 1 (1937): 19–­43. 25. Sabine, “City Cleaning in Mediaeval London,” 19. Half a century later, the historian Fernand Braudel effectively made the same argument from a different angle, critiquing not the lack of evidence regarding medieval sanitation, but the poor explanatory power of Europe’s supposed filthiness. Braudel wrote: “Historians who persist in the old way of explaining Western demographic movements by the fall in urban mortality, the advance in hygiene and medicine, the decline in smallpox, the numerous water-­drinking supply systems, the decisive fall in infant mortality, plus a general fall in the mortality rate and a younger average age of marriage, should abandon it as inadequate and outmoded.  . . . It was more consequence than cause.” Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–­1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper Colophon, 1973 [1967]), 16–­18. 26. Dolly Jørgensen, “Modernity and Medieval Muck,” Nature and Culture 9, no. 3 (2014): 225–­37. For similar critiques against the imagined filth of medieval cities, see Guy Geltner, “Pub­lic Health and the Pre-­modern City: A Research Agenda,” History Compass 10, no. 3 (2012): 231–­45; and Roberta J. Magnusson, “Medieval Urban Environmental History,” History Compass 11, no. 3 (2013): 189–­200. 27. Jørgensen, “Modernity and Medieval Muck,” 227. 28. Jørgensen, 229. 29. Dave H. Evans, “A Good Riddance of Bad Rubbish? Scatological Musings on Rubbish Disposal and the Handling of ‘Filth’ in Medieval and Early Post-­medieval Towns,” in Exchanging Medieval Material Culture: Studies on Archaeology and History Presented to Frans Verhaeghe, ed. Koen de Groote, Dries Tys, and Marnix Pieters (Flanders: Vlaams Instituut voor het, 2010), 268. 30. Evans, “Good Riddance of Bad Rubbish?,” 274. See also Derek J. Keene, “Rubbish in Medieval Towns,” in Environmental Archaeology in the Urban Context, ed. A.  R. Hall and H. K. Kenward (London: CBA Research Report 43, 1982), 29. 31. Sabine, “City Cleaning in Medieval London.” 32. Louis Francis Salzman, Building in England Down to 1540: A Documentary History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 280–­85. 33. Ernest L. Sabine, “Latrines and Cesspools of Mediaeval London,” Speculum 9, no. 3 (July 1934): 314. 34. Evans, “Good Riddance of Bad Rubbish?,” 273. 35. Sabine, “Latrines and Cesspools,” 317. 36. Evans, “Good Riddance,” 274. 37. Dolly Jørgensen, “Cooperative Sanitation: Managing Streets and Gutters in Late Medieval England and Scandinavia,” Technology and Culture 49 (2008): 546–­67; Goronwy Tidy Salusbury-­ Jones, Street Life in Medieval England, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Pen-­in-­Hand, 1948). 38. Geltner, “Public Health and the Pre-­modern City,” 231. 39. Magnusson, “Medieval Urban Environmental History,” 193. 40. Thomas Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism, and Power in the Nineteenth Century,” in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Rationalities of Gov­ernment,

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ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 102. 41. Barles, “History of Waste Management,” 203–­4; James C. Riley, “Insects and the European Morality Decline,” American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (1996): 838–­39. Growing antipollution movements also called for relocating existing cemeteries, on account of the “dangers of insalubrity” presented by rotting corpses. Marie-­Hélène Huet, “Deadly Fears: Dom Augustin Calmet’s Vampires and the Rule over Death,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 21, no. 2 (May 1997): 227. 42. Valeska Huber, “The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary Conferences on Cholera, 1851–­1894,” Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006): 454. 43. William F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the 19th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 55. 44. Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984 [1842]). 45. On the implementation of Chadwick’s infrastructural changes in Europe, see Dieter Schott, “Urban Development and Environment,” in The Basic Environmental History, ed. Mauro Agnoletti and Simone Neri Serneri (Basel: Springer, 2014), 186. For North America, see Melosi, The Sanitary City, 50–­68; and Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 39–­48. 46. Roy Porter, “Cleaning Up the Great Wen: Public Health in Eighteenth-­Century London,” Medical History 35, no. S11 (1991): 65. Donald Reid notes that Chadwick’s ideas were very similar to those of contemporary French public health pioneers, such as Alexandre Jean Baptiste Parent-­ Duchâtelet and Louis-­René Villermé, but “their British pedigree gave them added weight.” Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 28. 47. Daniel Eli Burnstein, Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 400. 48. Andrew Young, Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of Chicago for the Year Ended December 31, 1894 (Chicago: Department of Health of the City of Chicago, 1895), 186. 49. Margaret Garb, “Health, Morality, and Housing: The ‘Tenement Problem’ in Chicago,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 9: 1420–­30. 50. Oscar De Wolf, Report of the Department of Health of the City of Chicago for the Year 1879–­80 (Chicago: George K. Hazlitt, 1881), 22. 51. Daniel Eli Burnstein, “Progressivism and Urban Crisis: The New York City Garbage Workers’ Strike of 1907,” Journal of Urban History 16, no. 4 (1990): 391. 52. Barnes, Great Stink of Paris, 6. 53. Burnstein, “Progressivism and Urban Crisis,” 391. See also Bruno Latour, The Pasteur­ ization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 [1984]), 13–­58. 54. Barnes, Great Stink of Paris, 67. 55. David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-­Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Ann F. La Berge, Mission and Method: The Early-­Nineteenth-­Century Public Health Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 56. Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination (New York: Kiosk, 1992), 20–­25. 57. Melosi, The Sanitary City, 82. 58. Osborne, “Security and Vitality,” 115.

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59. Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 57. See also Laporte, History of Shit, 46–­47; and Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 74. 60. Barnes, Great Stink of Paris, 68. 61. David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–­1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 71. 62. Pike, Subterranean Cities, 244. See also David L. Pike, “Sewage Treatments: Vertical Space and Waste in Nineteenth-­Century Paris and London,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), fig. 3.4. 63. Pike, Subterranean Cities, 214. 64. D. Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen, 103. 65. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861), 2:152. 66. Barnes, Great Stink of Paris, 13. Barnes contrasts British and French reactions to their respective “Great Stinks.” In London, the stench quickly prompted investments in public works projects to rid the city of its wastes, while Parisians primarily finger-­pointed and fought, with little concrete action (and multiple subsequent “stinks”). David S. Barnes, “Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 103–­32. On “Great Stinks” in London and the Netherlands, see Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital (Stroud: Sutton, 1999); and Roos van Oosten, “The Dutch Great Stink: The End of the Cesspit Era in the Pre-­industrial Towns of Leiden and Haarlem,” European Journal of Archaeology 19, no. 4 (2016): 704–­27, respectively. 67. John McGraw Woodbury, “The Wastes of a Great City,” Scribner’s Magazine 34 (1903): 388–­90. 68. Strasser, Waste and Want, 12. 69. Strasser, 25–­31. 70. Nicholas Goddard, “ ‘A Mine of Wealth’? The Victorians and the Agricultural Value of Sewage,” Journal of Historical Geography 22, no. 3 (1996): 274–­90. See also Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 32–­36; and Lina Zeldovich, The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 54–­58. 71. Henri Napias, Manuel d’hygiène industrielle, ed. G. Masson (Paris: Libraire de L’Académie de Médecine, 1882), 196: “En industrie il ne doit plus y avoir de rebut proprement dit, et tout doit servir soit à l’industrie elle-­même, soit à l’agriculture.” 72. Barles, “History of Waste Management,” 205–­8; Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 36–­37. 73. Strasser, Waste and Want, 117. 74. J. M. Woodbury, “Wastes of a Great City,” 400. 75. Martin Medina, The World’s Scavengers: Salvaging for Sustainable Consumption and Pro­ duction (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007), 35. 76. Strasser, Waste and Want, 117–­18. 77. Larry S. Luton, The Politics of Garbage: A Community Perspective on Solid Waste Policy-­ Making (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 93; Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 34–­ 35. 78. “Needed Reforms in the Collection and Disposal of City Refuse,” Engineering News 59, no. 17 (1908): 462. 79. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 79; Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 61, 70–­72.

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80. Reduction and cremation were heralded as “the only methods worth consideration for any city.” Reduction was considered the most economical form of disposal, cremation the most sanitary. N. E. Wordin, “A Plea for the Domestic Disposal of Garbage,” Public Health Papers and Reports 22 (1896): 79. See also Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 56. 81. Luton, Politics of Garbage, 93. 82. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 39. 83. S. S. Kilvington, “Garbage Furnaces and the Destruction of Organic Matter by Fire,” Public Health Papers and Reports 14 (1989): 156–­70. 84. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 155–­56. 85. Quitman Kohnke, “Disposal of Garbage,” Municipal Journal and Public Works 5, no. 2 (1898): 66–­67. 86. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 161–­62; Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 55. 87. Melosi, 41. 88. On English rubbish: Barles, “History of Waste Management,” 215; on American trash: Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 176. See also Martin V. Melosi, “The Fresno Sanitary Landfill in an American Cultural Context,” Public Historian 24, no. 3 (2002): 17–­35; and Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 86–­92. 89. On the costs of municipal waste services: Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 192. On the “suburban century”: Mark Clapson, Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the USA (New York: Berg, 2003). For an overview of the distinct nature of suburbanization in other Western European cities, see Michael Wagenaar, “Conquest of the Center or Flight to the Suburbs? Divergent Metropolitan Strategies in Europe, 1850–­1914,” Journal of Urban History 19, no. 1 (2003): 60–­83. 90. Melosi, “The Fresno Sanitary Landfill,” 24; Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 92–­94. Sanitary landfills also largely put an end to scavenging and salvaging. The compression process not only crushes items beyond repair or reuse, but sanitary engineers have often felt scavenging is incompatible with the modern, technological achievement of the landfill and have prohibited scavenging. Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 97. 91. Youngchul Byun et al., “Thermal Plasma Gasification of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW),” in Gasification for Practical Applications, ed. Yongseung Yun (London: InTechOpen, 2012); Randy Leonard, “Plasma Gasification Raises Hopes of Clean Energy from Garbage,” New York Times, September 11, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/science/plasma-­gasification -­raises-­hopes-­of-­clean-­energy-­from-­garbage.html. Pyrolysis is a similar approach in which heat is applied with­out oxygen, generating oils and/or combustible synthetic gas that might be used as fuels. Neil Tangri and Monica Wilson, Waste Gasification & Pyrolysis: High Risk, Low Yield Processes for Waste Management (Berkeley, CA: Gaia, 2017), 2, https://www.no-­burn.org/wp -­content/uploads/Waste-­Gasification-­and-­Pyrolysis-­high-­risk-­low-­yield-­processes-­march-­2017 .pdf. 92. For New York City: New York City Department of Sanitation, NYC Residential, School, and NYCHA Waste Characterization Study, 2017, https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-­content/up loads/2018/04/2017-­Waste-­Characterization-­Study.pdf. For Portland: Oregon Department of En­­ vironmental Quality, 2016 Oregon Material Recovery and Waste Generation Rates Report, 2017, https://www.oregon.gov/deq/FilterDocs/mmmgwgRep2016.pdf. 93. Soheila Sadat Majidi and Hamidreza Kamalan, “Economic and Environmental Evalu­ ation of Waste to Energy through Gasification; Case Study; Tehran,” Environmental Energy and Economic Research 1, no. 1 (2017): 113–­24.

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94. Ben Messenger, “Caution Warned over $650m Plasma Gasification Waste to Energy Proposal,” Waste Management World, January 26, 2017, https://waste-­management-­world.com /a/caution-­warned-­over-­650m-­plasma-­gasification-­waste-­to-­energy-­proposal. 95. Joshua Reno, “Managing the Experience of Evidence,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 36, no. 6 (2011), 856–­57. 96. Tangri and Wilson, Waste Gasification & Pyrolysis, 5–­9. 97. Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996). 98. Adam W. Rome, “Coming to Terms with Pollution: The Language of Environmental Reform, 1865–­1915,” Environmental History 1, no. 3 (1996): 6–­28. 99. Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), 2. 100. Jorge Otero-­Pailos, “The Ambivalence of Smoke: Pollution and Modern Architectural History,” Grey Room 44 (2011): 100. 101. Otero-­Pailos, “Ambivalence of Smoke,“ 102. 102. Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink, 10. 103. Benjamin Lee, “The Cart before the Horse,” Papers and Reports of the American Public Health Association 20 (1895): 34–­36. 104. Jonas Hallström and Martin V. Melosi, “History of Technological Change in Urban Wastewater Management, 1830–­2010,” in Routledge Handbook of Urban Water Governance, ed. Thomas Bolognesi, Francisco Silva Pinto, and Megan Farrelly (London: Routledge, 2022), 167. 105. Joel A. Tarr and Francis C. McMichael, “The Evolution of Wastewater Technology and the Development of State Regulation: A Retrospective Assessment,” in Retrospective Technology Assessment, ed. Tarr (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1977), 171–­73. 106. Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink, 13. 107. John T. Cumbler, “Whatever Happened to Industrial Waste? Reform, Compromise, and Science in Nineteenth Century Southern New England,” Journal of Social History 29, no. 1 (1995): 151. 108. Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), 118. 109. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring 117. 110. Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), 49. 111. Lynne Page Snyder, “ ‘The Death-­Dealing Smog over Donora, Pennsylvania’: Industrial Air Pollution, Public Health Policy, and the Politics of Expertise, 1948–­1949,” Environmental History Review 18, no. 1 (1994): 117. 112. Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 65–­66; Strasser, Waste and Want, 199–­201. 113. “Throwaway Living: Disposable Items Cut Down Household Chores,” LIFE 39, no. 5 (1955): 43. 114. “Throwaway Living,” 44. 115. Melosi, The Sanitary City, 172–­76. 116. William E. Small, Third Pollution: The National Problem of Solid Waste Disposal (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1971), 7. 117. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd S. Presner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 219.

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118. Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 35. 119. Geltner, “Public Health and the Pre-­modern City,” 234. 120. On medicine: George Rosen, A History of Public Health (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015 [1958]). On astronomy: David Pingree, “Hellenophilia versus the History of Science,” Isis 83, no. 4 (1992): 554–­63. On archaeology: Rojas, “Archaeophilia,” 11–­12. 121. Wiktor Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination, and Conjecture, trans. Mary Turton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1995]), 26. 122. Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins, 27. 123. Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, 49. 124. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 47. 125. Tom Farley and Deborah Ann Cohen, Prescription for a Healthy Nation: A New Approach to Improving Our Lives by Fixing Our Everyday World (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 27. 126. Joseph Heinrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–­3 (2010): 61. Chapter Two 1. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), 29. 2. Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 29. 3. Borges, 27. 4. Philip Phillips, James A. Ford, and James B. Griffin, Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940–­1941, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 66. 5. Cristóbal Gnecco, “On Hybrids Recently Unleashed,” in Against Typological Tyranny in Archaeology, ed. Gnecco and Carl Langebaek (New York: Springer, 2014), 170. 6. Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 30. 7. In brief, culture-­historical archaeology emphasized the accumulation of archaeological facts: describing, identifying, and typologizing material remains in order to trace the timing, spread, and interactions of human cultures. Processual archaeology shifted focus from cataloging cultures toward asking why and how they had changed through time, drawing heavily on models from the natural sciences to reconstruct and even generalize those processes. Postprocessual archaeology again expanded the purview of inquiry by asking both how people adapted to the world in which they lived, as well as how that world was created and maintained by those people—­the multiple ideas, beliefs, meanings, and intentions that influence material remains and the ways they become part of the archaeological record. See, e.g., Oliver J. T. Harris and Craig N. Cipolla, Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium: Introducing Current Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2017); Matthew Johnson, Archaeological Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2010); and Bruge G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 8. See, e.g., Harris and Cipolla, Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium; and Julian Thomas, “The Future of Archaeological Theory,” Antiquity 89, no. 348 (2015): 1287–­96. 9. See, e.g., Dennis Harding, Rewriting History: Changing Perceptions of the Archaeological Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 17–­35; Harris and Cipolla, Archaeological Theory

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in the New Millennium, 3–­4; David J. Meltzer, “Paradigms and the Nature of Change in American Archaeology,” American Antiquity 44, no. 4 (1979): 644–­57; and Alison Wylie, “Introduction: Philosophy from the Ground Up,” in Thinking from Things: Essay in the Philosophy of Archaeology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1–­22. 10. In making this argument, I focus primarily (though not exclusively) on Americanist ar­­ chaeological traditions and particularly on archaeological approaches to prehistory. Those traditions are the most relevant to the spatial and temporal scope of this book, as well as to the specific archaeological methods and theoretical orientations I aim to reconsider in it; but they may be distinct from other practices within the same discipline. The archaeologist Anthony Snodgrass, for example, has claimed that classical archaeologists continued to direct their attention and energies toward specific aspects of the ancient world available in textual sources for more than a century after prehistorians began exploring unwritten human history. Snodgrass, “A Paradigm Shift in Classical Archaeology,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 12, no. 2 (2001): 183. See also Ian Morris, ed., Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Stephen L. Dyson, In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 11. Although my argument is focused on the influence of ideas of waste on archaeological thought, it is inspired in part by the archaeologist Margarita Díaz-­Andreu’s study of the impacts of nationalism and colonialism on nineteenth-­century archaeology. Díaz-­Andreu calls attention to the fact that the history of archaeology has been written about almost exclusively by archaeol­ ogists themselves (unlike other disciplines, such as geology or medicine). This “internalist perspective” can often result in “a narrow, almost positivistic understanding” of the development of archaeological thought, one that ignores the sociopolitical and economic frameworks in which the discipline’s practices and theories were formulated. See Díaz-­Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-­Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2007), vii, 1. 12. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), xii, xv, xxii. 13. William Viney, Waste: A Philosophy of Things (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 56; Chris Gosden, Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 29; William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (Tucson, AZ: HarperPerennial, 2001), 10. 14. Rojas, “Archaeophilia,” 17. See also Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 21; and Glyn Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962), 18. 15. Alison Wylie, “Mapping Ignorance in Archaeology: The Advantages of Historical Hind­ sight,” in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 189; Alison Wylie, “How Archaeol­ ogical Evidence Bites Back: Strategies for Putting Old Data to Work in New Ways,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 42, no. 2 (2017): 204–­5. 16. See, e.g., Barles, “History of Waste Management,” 205–­8; N. Goddard, “ ‘A Mine of Wealth’?,” 274–­90; Luton, The Politics of Garbage, 93; Melosi, Garbage in the Cities; Melosi, The Sanitary City; and Strasser, Waste and Want. 17. See P. N. Miller, History and Its Objects, 15. 18. Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory; Peter Rowley-­Conwy, From Genesis to Prehistory: The Archaeological Three Age System and Its Contested Reception in Demark, Britain, and Ireland

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 235; Clive Gamble, Making Deep History: Zeal, Perse­ verance, and the Time Revolution of 1859 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 19. Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins, 4. See also A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 20. Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geology in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Rudwick, Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 21. Kaspar Risbjerg Eskildsen, “The Language of Objects: Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s Science of the Past,” Isis 103, no. 1 (2012): 28. See also Tim Murray, From Antiquarian to Archae­ ologist: The History and Philosophy of Archaeology (South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Archaeology, 2014). 22. Cf. Martin J. S. Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 1–­2. 23. See, e.g., Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 121–­29. 24. Rowley-­Conwy, From Genesis to Prehistory. 25. Eskildsen, “The Language of Objects,” 34. 26. Quoted in Rowley-­Conwy, From Genesis to Prehistory, 2. 27. Eskildsen, “The Language of Objects,” 36. 28. Bo Gräslund, The Birth of Prehistoric Chronology: Dating Methods and Dating Systems in Nineteenth-­Century Scandinavian Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 35; Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 132. 29. “Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “midden, n.,” accessed April 7, 2020, www.oed .com/view/Entry/118135. 30. Felix Riede, “The Scandinavian Connection: The Roots of Darwinian Archaeology in 19th-­Century Scandinavian Archaeology,” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 16, no. 1 (2006), 6; Søren H. Andersen, “ ‘Køkkenmøddinger’ (Shell Middens) in Denmark: A Survey,” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 66 (2000): 361; Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 132, 315. 31. Bruce G. Trigger, introduction to Native Shell Mounds of North America: Early Studies (New York: Garland, 1976), xi–­xxiv; Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 14, 133–­38. 32. Trigger, introduction to Native Shell Mounds, xi. See also, e.g., Adolphe Morlot, General Views on Archaeology, trans. Philip Harry (Washington, DC: Congressional Globe Office, 1861); J. M. Jones, “Recent Discoveries of Kjökkenmöddings,” Anthropological Review and Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2 (1864): 223–­26; Charles F. Rau, “Artificial Shell-­Deposits in New Jersey,” in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1864 (Washington, DC: Gov­ ernment Printing Office, 1865), 370–­74; Daniel G. Brinton, “Artificial Shell Deposits of the United States,” in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1866 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1867), 356–­58; and Jeffries Wyman, “An Account of Some Kjœkkenmœddings, or Shell-­Heaps, in Maine and Massachusetts,” American Naturalist 1, no. 11 (1868): 561–­84. 33. On nineteenth-­century global scientific networks, see, e.g., Simon Schaffer, James Delbourgo, and Kapil Raj, eds., The Brokered World: Go-­Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–­1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009). On the spread of shell-­mound excavations, see Díaz-­Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-­Century Archaeology, 198–­99; Fumiko Ikawa-­Smith, “Co-­traditions in Japanese archaeology,” World Archaeology 13, no. 3 (1982): 296–­309; Hermann von Ihering, “A civilisação pré-­histórica do Brasil meridional,” Revista do Museu Paulista 1

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(1895): 1–­55; and George Windsor Earl, “On the Shell-­Mounds of Province Wellesley, in the Malay Peninsula,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 2 (1863): 119–­29. 34. Trigger, introduction to Native Shell Mounds, xviii. 35. Morlot, General Views on Archaeology, 3–­4. 36. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 142. 37. R. Lee Lyman, Michael J. O’Brien, and Robert C. Dunnell, The Rise and Fall of Culture History (New York: Plenum Press, 1997), 21–­22, 44–­46. 38. Irina Podgorny, “Revivir de la basura: Las extinciones históricas, la experiencia del pasado y la arqueología de los fósiles recientes de la década de 1860,” in Otros pasados: Ontologías alternativas en el estudio de lo que ha sido, ed. Felipe Rojas, Benjamin Anderson, and Byron Hamann (Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes, in press), 309–­36. 39. Podgorny, “Revivir de la basura,” 327–­28: “El modelo de las excavaciones arqueológicas danesas se expandió así al Atlántico norte y a otras colonias británicas. . . . [Se] activó las redes administrativas de Mauricio, Rodrigues, y Seychelles para que buscaran restos de dodo y del solitario, especies que se habían extinguido dejando aún menos restos que el alca. . . . Su pedido fue un éxito: poco después, el magistrado de Rodrigues mandaba una caja a Mauricio repleta de huesos de tortuga y de pájaros obtenidos en las excavaciones de unos basurales.” 40. David L. Browman and Douglas R. Givens, “Stratigraphic Excavation: The First ‘New Archaeology,’ ” American Anthropologist 98, no. 1 (1996): 87. 41. See Richard B. Woodbury, “Nels C. Nelson and Chronological Archaeology,” American Antiquity 25, no. 3 (1960): 400–­401; see also Nels C. Nelson, “Chronology of the Tano Ruins, New Mexico,” American Anthropologist 18, no. 2 (1916): 159–­80. 42. Quoted in Richard B. Woodbury, “Nelson’s Stratigraphy,” American Antiquity 26, no. 1 (1960): 98. 43. Lyman, O’Brien, and Dunnell, The Rise and Fall of Culture History, 28; Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 280; Woodbury, “Nelson and Chronological Archaeology,” 400; Riede, “The Scandinavian Connection,” 5–­7. 44. Woodbury, “Nelson and Chronological Archaeology,” 401. 45. Alfred Vincent Kidder, “Archaeological Explorations at Pecos, New Mexico,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2, no. 3 (1916): 120. 46. Leslie Spier, “An Outline for a Chronology of Zuni Ruins,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 18, no. 3 (1917): 252; Paul Reiter, The Jemez Pueblo of Unshagi, New Mexico, Monograph Series 1, no. 5 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1938), 100. 47. For a specific discussion of the role of antiquarians and the comparison of ancient material culture to contemporary objects (like fossils to living organisms) in articulating the project of modernity, see Gavin Lucas, “Modern Disturbances: On the Ambiguities of Archaeology,” Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 1 (2004): 109–­11. 48. A. L. Kroeber, “Historical Reconstruction of Culture Growths and Organic Evolution,” American Anthropologist 33, no. 2 (1931): 149–­50. See also Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 313. 49. See R. Lee Lyman and Michael J. O’Brien, Measuring Time with Artifacts: A History of Methods in American Archaeology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 243; and Lyman, O’Brien, and Dunnell, The Rise and Fall of Culture History, 77–­78. 50. See Gordon R. Willey, “Archaeological Theories and Interpretation: New World,” in Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inquiry, ed. A. L. Kroeber (Chicago: University of Chicago

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Press, 1953), 365–­69; and Willey and Philip Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archaeology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 5–­6. 51. Kidder, “Archaeological Explorations at Pecos,” 122, emphasis added. 52. George C. Vaillant, Excavations at Zacatenco, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 32, part 1 (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1930), 18. 53. Mortimer Wheeler, Archaeology from the Earth (Baltimore: Penguin, 1954), 244. 54. Andersen, “ ‘Køkkenmøddinger’ (Shell Middens),” 362. 55. Lyman, O’Brien, and Dunnell, The Rise and Fall of Culture History, 121. 56. Stuart Needham and Tony Spence, “Refuse and the Formation of Middens,” Antiquity 71 (1997): 80. 57. As just one example, Kevin Johnston and Nancy Gonlin, working in rural residences of Mesoamerica, describe shallow but horizontally extensive “sheet middens” as those having an average density of 210 artifacts per square meter (roughly twenty artifacts per square foot) along the edges of a house’s clear area. Johnston and Gonlin, “What Do Houses Mean? Approaches to the Analysis of Classic Maya Commoner Residences,” in Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, ed. Stephen D. Houston (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998), 169. 58. For simple posthole methodologies, see, e.g., Annabel Ford, “Economic Variation of Ancient Maya Residential Settlement in the Upper Belize River Area” Ancient Mesoamerica 2 (1991): 37; and Robert E. Fry, “Ceramics and Settlement in the Periphery of Tikal, Guatemala” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1969). For more intensive, technology-­driven methods for detecting middens, see, e.g., Christina T. Halperin and Antonia E. Foias, “Pottery Politics: Late Classic Maya Palace Production at Motul de San José, Petén, Guatemala,” Journal of Anthro­ pological Archaeology, 29 (2010): 398. 59. Wylie, “Mapping Ignorance in Archaeology,” 189. 60. Podgorny, “Revivir de la basura,” 329; see also chapter 1. 61. Strasser, Waste and Want, 15. 62. Wyman, “An Account of Some Kjœkkenmœddings,” 561–­62. 63. Lewis R. Binford, “The ‘New Archaeology,’ Then and Now,” in Archaeological Thought in America, ed. C. C. Lamberg-­Karlovsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 50–­ 62; Alison Wylie, “How New Is the New Archaeology?,” in Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 25–­41. 64. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 396. 65. See Lewis R. Binford, “An Archaeological Odyssey,” in In Pursuit of the Past: Decoding the Archaeological Record, ed. John F. Cherry and Robin Torrence (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1983), 100–­104. 66. See Maxine R. Kleindienst and Patty Jo Watson, “ ‘Action Archaeology’: The Archeological Inventory of a Living Community,” Anthropology Tomorrow 5, no. 1 (1956): 75–­78. For an overview of the history and (primarily processual) applications of ethnoarchaeology, see Nicholas David and Carol Kramer, Ethnoarchaeology in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 67. Kent V. Flannery, “Culture History v. Culture Process: A Debate in American Archaeol­ ogy,” Scientific American 217, no. 2 (1967): 120, emphasis added. 68. Diane Gifford-­Gonzalez, “Constructing Community through Refuse Disposal,” African Archaeological Review 31, no. 2 (2014): 341.

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69. Melissa Canady Wargo, “The Bordes–­ Binford Debate: Transatlantic Interpretative Traditions in Paleolithic Archaeology” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Arlington, 2009), 64; Thomas C. Patterson, Toward a Social History of Archaeology in the United States (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College, 1995), 142. 70. J. Jefferson Reid and James M. Skibo, “Introduction to Assessing Michael Brian Schiffer and His Behavioral Archaeology,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18, no. 4 (2011): 274. 71. Michael B. Schiffer, Behavioral Archaeology (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 12. See also Schiffer, “Archaeological Context and Systemic Context,” American Antiquity 37, no. 2 (1972): 156–­65; and Schiffer, Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972). 72. See, e.g., Philip J. Arnold III, “The Organization of Refuse Disposal and Ceramic Pro­ duction within Contemporary Mexican Houselots,” American Anthropologist 92, no. 4 (1990), 915–­ 32; Michael Deal, “Household Pottery Disposal in the Maya Highlands: An Ethnoarchaeological Interpretation,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 4 (1985): 243–­91; Diane P. Gifford-­ Gonzalez et al., “The Third Dimension in Site Structure: An Experiment in Trampling and Vertical Disperal,” American Antiquity 50, no. 4 (1985): 803–­18; and Brian Hayden and Aubrey Cannon, “Where the Garbage Goes: Refuse Disposal in the Maya Highlands,” Journal of An­ thropological Archaeology 2, no. 2 (1983): 117–­63. 73. William L. Rathje, “The Garbage Project: A New Way of Looking at the Problems of Archaeology,” Archaeology 27 (1974): 237. 74. William L. Rathje, “William L. Rathje and Michael Shanks, with Christopher Witmore,” in Archaeology in the Making, ed. Rathje, Shanks, and Witmore (London: Routledge, 2013), 353. 75. J. Jefferson Reid, William L. Rathje, and Michael B. Schiffer, “Expanding Archaeology,” American Antiquity 39, no. 1 (1974): 125–­26. See also Joshua Reno, “Waste,” in The Oxford Hand­ book of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, ed. Paul Graves-­Brown, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 261–­72. 76. Rathje and Murphy, Rubbish!, 10. 77. Rathje and Murphy, 70–­7 1. 78. The journalist Edward Humes quoted William Rathje saying: “People forget, they cover, they kid themselves, they lie. But their trash always tells the truth.” Humes, Garbology, 129. 79. Gail Sheehy, “The Men of Women’s Liberation Have Learned Not to Laugh,” New York 3, no. 20 (1970): 32. 80. Claudia Dreifus, “Bob Dylan in the Alley: The Alan J. Weberman Story,” Rolling Stone, March 4, 1971, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-­news/bob-­dylan-­in-­the-­alley-­the-­alan -­j-­weberman-­story-­189254/. 81. “Paper Says Kissinger’s Garbage Had Secret Service Documents,” New York Times, July 21, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/21/archives/paper-­says-­kissingers-­garbage-­had-­secret-­ser vice-­documents.html. 82. Rathje and Murphy, Rubbish!, 33. 83. Rathje and Murphy, 216. 84. Greta Civis, “Rubbish and Regulations in the Middle Ages: A Comparison of Urban and Rural Disposal Practices,” in Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation: Between Text and Practice, ed. Barbara Hausmair et al. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 61. 85. The archaeologist Kent Flannery explicitly critiqued Rathje (and the Garbage Project) for attempting to develop universal laws that would explain human behavior regardless of time,

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region, or cultural context. See Flannery, “The Golden Marshalltown: A Parable for the Archeol­ ogy of the 1980s,” American Anthropologist 82, no. 2 (1982): 269. 86. Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, 5–­6. 87. Randall H. McGuire, Archaeology as Political Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 107. 88. Brendan Prendiville, “Political Ecology and Environmentalism in Britain: An Overview,” in Political Ecology and Environmentalism in Britain, ed. Prendiville and David Haigron (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), 24–­30. 89. Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, 8. 90. On the nostalgia for an imagined unspoiled past, see Candace Slater, “Amazonia as Edenic Narrative,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. W. Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 117. 91. Wendy Melillo, How McGruff and the Crying Indian Changed America: A History of Iconic Ad Council Campaigns (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2013), 104. 92. David Rich Lewis, “American Indian Environmental Relations,” in A Companion to Amer­ ican Environmental History, ed. Douglas Cazaux Sackman (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 192. 93. Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 143. 94. Krech, The Ecological Indian, 15–­16. 95. Mary C. Beaudry, “Reviewed Work: The Meaning of Things: Material Culture and Sym­ bolic Expression,” Journal of Field Archaeology 18, no. 2 (1991): 240. 96. Ian Hodder, “Looking Back at Symbolic and Structural Anthropology,” Cambridge Ar­ chaeological Journal 17, no. 2 (2007): 201. 97. Ian Hodder, Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 155–­61. 98. Henrietta L. Moore, “The Interpretation of Spatial Patterning in Settlement Residues,” in Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, ed. I. Hodder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 74–­79. 99. H. L. Moore, “The Interpretation of Spatial Patterning,” 75. Moore’s argument stands on its own, but it is worth noting that it appeared as a contribution to Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, a volume edited by Hodder and a seminal contribution to postprocessual archaeology. Hodder, “Looking Back,” 199. 100. H. L. Moore, 76. 101. Borges. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 29. 102. Ian Hodder, “Theoretical Archaeology: A Reactionary View,” in Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, ed. Hodder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 6. 103. Ian Hodder, “The Meaning of Discard: Ash and Domestic Space in Baringo,” in Method and Theory for Activity Area Research: An Ethnoarchaeological Approach, ed. Susan Kent (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 424. 104. See the review in Duncan Garrow, “Odd Deposits and Average Practice: A Critical History of the Concept of Structured Deposition,” Archaeological Dialogues 19, no. 2 (2012): 85–­115. 105. Geoffrey Wainwright, “Religion and Settlement in Wessex, 3000–­1700 BC,” in Recent Work in Rural Archaeology, ed. P. J. Fowler (Bradford-­on-­Avon: Moonraker, 1975), 67. 106. Colin Richards and Julian Thomas, “Ritual Activity and Structured Deposition in Later Neolithic Wessex,” in Neolithic Studies, ed. Richard Bradley and Julie Gardiner, BAR British Series 133 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1984), 189. 107. Hodder, “Looking Back,” 202.

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108. Richards and Thomas, “Ritual Activity and Structured Deposition,” 197–­214. 109. Julian Thomas, Understanding the Neolithic (London: Routledge, 1999), 81. 110. Julian Thomas, “The Internal Features at Durrington Walls: Investigations in the South­ ern Circle and Western Enclosures, 2005–­6,” in From Stonehenge to the Baltic: Living with Cultural Diversity in the Third Millennium BC, ed. Mats Larsson and Mike Parker Pearson, BAR International Series 1692 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007), 151. 111. J. D. Hill, Ritual and Rubbish in the Iron Age of Wessex: A Study on the Formation of the Archaeological Record, BAR British Series 242 (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1995). See also J. Thomas, Understanding the Neolithic, 62. 112. J. Thomas, Understanding the Neolithic, 66. 113. Hill, Ritual and Rubbish, 3–­4, emphasis in original. 114. Wylie, “Introduction: Philosophy from the Ground Up,” 16. 115. Michael Schiffer later reminisced, however, that he “did concede that postprocessualists were asking a wide range of interesting, sometimes profound, questions on anthropological subjects that, formerly, had been neglected by most processualists and behavioral archaeologists, such as ritual and religion, symbolism, social power, and ideology.” Schiffer, Behavioral Archaeology: Principles and Practice (London: Routledge, 2010), 154. 116. William H. Walker, “Ceremonial Trash?,” in Expanding Archaeology, ed. James M. Skibo, Walker, and Axel E. Nielsen (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995), 75–­77. 117. John C. Chapman, Fragmentation in Archaeology: People, Places, and Broken Objects in the Prehistory of South Eastern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2000), 26. 118. J. C. Chapman, Fragmentation in Archaeology, 5. See also Marcus Brittain and Oliver Harris, “Enchaining Arguments and Fragmenting Assumptions: Reconsidering the Fragmentation Debate in Archaeology,” World Archaeology 42, no. 4 (2010): 581–­94. 119. Bjørnar Olsen, “After Interpretation: Remembering Archaeology,” Current Swedish Archaeology 20 (2012): 18. See also Thomas, “The Future of Archaeological Theory”; but cf. Robert W. Preucel, “The Predicament of Ontology,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2021). 120. B. Olsen, “After Interpretation,” 20. 121. See, among others, Jerry Lee Rosiek, Jimmy Snyder, and Scott L. Pratt, “The New Ma­­ terialisms and Indigenous Theories of Non-­human Agency: Making the Case for Respectful Anti-­ colonial Engagement,” Qualitative Inquiry 26, no. 3–­4 (2020): 332; Kim TallBear, “An Indigenous Reflection on Working beyond the Human/Not Human,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2–­3 (2015): 233–­34; Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–­22; and Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-­Thought & Agency amongst Humans and Non-­humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20–­34. See also chapter 5. 122. E.g., Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 10; Harris and Cipolla, Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium, 5; and Thomas, “The Future of Archaeological Theory,” 1288. See also the review in Manuel Fernández-­Götz et al., “Posthumanism in Archaeology: An Introduction,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 31, no. 3 (2021): 1–­5. 123. Ian Hodder’s notion of “entanglement” explains such relations in terms of “dependences” (relations in which humans use things to accomplish new tasks) and “dependencies” (relations in which things themselves or their properties constrain human actions). Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Oxford: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2012), 18.

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124. See, e.g., Chris Gosden, “What Do Objects Want?,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12, no. 3 (2005): 191–­211; Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, Thinking through Things: Theorizing Artifacts Ethnographically (London: Routledge, 2007); Carl Knappett, Thinking through Material Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and Knappett and Lambros Malafouris, eds., Material Agency: Toward a Non-­anthropocentric Approach (New York: Springer, 2008). Many of these archaeological applications of objects’ agency and ability to act draw from the works of Alfred Gell, Bruno Latour, and Daniel Miller. See, e.g., Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 125. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London, Continuum, 2002), 47. 126. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 2010); Penny Harvey, “Anthropological Approaches to Contemporary Material Worlds,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, ed. Paul Graves-­ Brown, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 54–­65; Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1; Ben Jervis, Assemblage Thought and Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2019), 56–­57. 127. Bruno Latour, “On Actor-­Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Soziale Welt 47, no. 4 (1996): 373. 128. Christopher L. Witmore, “Symmetrical Archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto,” World Archaeology 39, no. 4 (2007): 546. See also Bjørnar Olsen, “Material Culture after Text: Re-­ membering Things,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 36, no. 2 (2003): 89. 129. Timothy Webmoor and Christopher L. Witmore, “Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/Things Relations under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 41, no. 1 (2008): 61, emphasis in original. 130. Witmore, “Symmetrical Archaeology”; Þóra Pétursdóttir, “Small Things Forgotten Now Included, or What Else Do Things Deserve?,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16, no. 3 (2012): 577–­603. 131. Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks, et al., Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Michael Shanks, The Archaeological Imagination (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012). 132. Christopher L. Witmore, “Archaeology and the New Materialisms,” Journal of Contem­ porary Archaeology 1, no. 2 (2014): 10. 133. Witmore, “Archaeology and the New Materialisms,” 11–­12. See also Gavin Lucas, Under­ standing the Archaeological Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 74–­123. 134. Oi-­Wah Lau and Siu-­Kahy Wong, “Contamination in Food from Packaging Material,” Journal of Chromatography A 882, no. 1–­2 (2000): 255–­70. 135. Richard C. Thompson et al., “Lost at Sea: Where Is All the Plastic?,” Science 304, no. 5672 (2004): 838. 136. Philipp Schwabl et al., “Assessment of Microplastic Concentrations in Human Stool—­ Preliminary Results of a Prospective Study,” United European Gastroenterology Journal 6, no. 8S (2018): A127. 137. Much like the posthuman turn, the idea that we (humans) are things and that things are us has a genealogy that extends far deeper than archaeology as a discipline. Take, for example, the extreme materialist philosophy of the first-­century-­BCE Roman author Lucretius outlined

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in his De rerum natura (see chapter 6). For a detailed discussion, see Don Fowler, Lucretius on Atomic Motion: A Commentary on “De Rerum Natura”, Book Two, Lines 1–­332 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002). 138. As archaeologists take care to note, the approaches encompassed by the general label of “posthumanism” are diverse: not only do they variably draw inspiration from a wide range of fields (from animal studies to quantum physics), but they also express significant dissonance between an emphasis on relational approaches, a focus on materials without humans, or an explicitly feminist orientation. See, e.g., Fernández-­Götz et al., “Posthumanism in Archaeology”; and Preucel, “The Predicament of Ontology.” 139. B. Olsen, Michael Shanks, et al., Archaeology: The Discipline of Things, 158. 140. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23. In addition to Indigenous philosophies of nonhuman agency that are often elided by this intellectual trajectory, Yannis Hamilakis and Andrew Meirion Jones have highlighted thinkers beyond Bennett and her lineage—­particularly Bruno Latour—­who have been important to new materialist scholarship and understandings of things-­as-­assemblages in archaeology. Hamilakis and Jones, “Archaeology and Assemblage,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 27, no. 1 (2017): 79–­81; see also Jervis, Assemblage Thought and Archaeology, 35–­72. My purpose in this chapter, however, is to highlight the intersections between the changing cultural and historical understandings of waste and archaeological thought, not to provide a complete account of related object-­oriented/posthuman developments in archaeological theory. For more comprehensive reviews, see B. Olsen, Michael Shanks, et al., Archaeology: The Discipline of Things; and Harris and Cipolla, Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium. 141. See Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 20–­38. 142. Bennett, xvi. 143. Bennett uses the same example of the storm drain litter in both her 2010 book and in an earlier article. See Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4; and Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 349–­51. 144. Bennett, “The Force of Things,” 5, emphasis in original. 145. Bennett, 6. 146. Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 96–­97. 147. William Grimes, “Seeking the Truth in Refuse,” New York Times, August 13, 1992, https:// www.nytimes.com/1992/08/13/nyregion/seeking-­the-­truth-­in-­refuse.html. 148. See, e.g., Nickolas Themelis and Pricilla A. Ulloa, “Methane Generation in Landfills,” Renewable Energy 32, no. 7 (2007): 1243–­57. 149. See, e.g., Anthony Andrady, “Microplastics in the Marine Environment,” Marine Pollu­ tion Bulletin 62, no. 8 (2011): 1596–­605; Max Liboiron, “Redefining Pollution and Action: The Matter of Plastics,” Journal of Material Culture 21, no. 1 (2016): 87–­110; Charles J. Moore, “Synthetic Polymers in the Marine Environment: A Rapidly Increasing, Long-­Term Threat,” Environmental Research 108 (2008): 131–­39; and Erik van Sebille, Matthew H. England, and Gary Froyland, “Origin, Dynamics, and Evolution of Ocean Garbage Patches from Observed Surface Drifters.” Environmental Research Letters 7, no. 4 (2012): 1–­6. 150. Nicky Gregson, Helen Watkins, and Melania Calestani, “Inextinguishable Fibres: De­ molition and the Vital Materialisms of Asbestos.” Environment and Planning A 42, no. 5 (2010): 1065–­83. 151. On surface surveys: Rodney Harrison, “Surface Assemblages: Toward an Archaeology in and of the Present,” Archaeological Dialogues 18, no. 2 (2011): 141–­61. On burials of the Isle of

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Man: Rachel Crellin, “Changing Assemblages: Vibrant Matter in Burial Assemblages,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27, no. 1 (2017): 111–­25. On networks of Viking-­age walrus ivory objects: Sara Ann Knutson, “Itinerant Assemblages and Material Networks: The Application of Assemblage Theory to Networks in Archaeology,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (2021): 1–­30. 152. See, e.g., Michael Shanks, David Platt, and William L. Rathje, “The Perfume of Garbage: Modernity and the Archaeological,” Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 1 (January 2004): 61–­83. 153. Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir, “Theory Adrift: The Matter of Archaeological The­ orizing,” Journal of Social Archaeology 18, no. 1 (2018): 102, 113. 154. Assaf Nativ and Gavin Lucas, “Archaeology without Antiquity,” Antiquity 94, no. 376 (2020): 857. 155. See esp. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought; and Wylie, “How New Is the New Archaeology?” 156. Steven Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science As If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Au­­ thority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 14. Chapter Three 1. P. L. Hemeroteca, “Historia de la tradición de la Quema del Diablo,” Prensa Libre, December 7, 2019, https://www.prensalibre.com/hemeroteca/historia-­de-­la-­tradicion-­de-­la-­quema -­del-­diablo-­guatemala/; Radio Infinita, “¿Cuánta contaminación genera la Quema del Diablo?,” Radio Infinita, December 4, 2018, https://radioinfinita.com/2018/12/cuanta-­contaminacion-­genera -­la-­quema-­del-­diablo/. 2. Focusing on Nahua-­Spanish relations in colonial Mexico, James Lockhart calls this phenomenon the process of “Double Mistaken Identity.” According to Lockhart, “Each side was able to operate for centuries after first contact on an ultimately false but in practice workable assumption that analogous concepts of the other side were essential identical with its own, thus avoiding close examination of the unfamiliar and maintaining its own principles.” Lockhart, “Sightings: Initial Nahua Reactions to Spanish Culture,” in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 219. John and Jean Comaroff, writing of British attempts at evangelization in South Africa, make a similar point, while emphasizing the generative nature of intercultural contact: “Far from a simple exercise in domination and resistance—­though both occurred in more or less explicit, more or less intentional forms—­colonial encounters everywhere consisted in a complex dialectic: a dialectic, mediated by social differences and cultural distinctions, that transformed everyone and everything caught up in it, if not in the same way; a dialectic that yielded new identities, new frontiers, new signs and styles—­and reproduced some older ones as well; a dialectic animated less often by coercive acts of conquest, even if violence was always immanent in it, than by attempts to alter existing modes of production and reproduction, to recast the taken-­for-­granted surfaces of everyday life, to re-­make consciousness; a dialectic, therefore, founded on an intricate mix of visible and invisible agency, of work and gesture, of subtle persuasion and brute force on the part of all concerned.” Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 28. See also Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–­1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x.

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3. As Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote in his Provincializing Europe, 20: “The point is not to reject social science categories but to release into the space occupied by particular European histories sedimented in them other normative and theoretical thought enshrined in other existing life practices and their archives.” 4. See, e.g., Lofrano and Brown, “Wastewater Management through the Ages,” 5258. 5. Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean, 149. 6. See, e.g., Jacques Revel, “The Uses of Civility,” in A History of Private Life, Vol. 3: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 167: “The sixteenth century was a time of intense effort to control social intercourse through rules of civility.” Although critics of Elias’s work have argued that early modern conduct books drew on rules of disciplined behavior cultivated in medieval monasteries and detailed in “courtesy books,” my focus is on how a preoccupation with normalizing personal and social comportment in the early modern period (regardless of the place or moment in which those rules were codified) met an array of very different behaviors, particularly with respect to waste, in the Americas. See John Gillingham, “From Civilitas to Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002): 267–­89; and Dilwyn Knox, “Disciplina: The Monastic and Clerical Origins of Civility,” in Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice Jr., ed. John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto (New York: Ithaca Press, 1991). 7. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000 [1939]), 58. 8. See, e.g., Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 51; and Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018). 9. Joan Corominas and José A. Pascual, Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico, Volumen 2 (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1984), 93. 10. Margherita Morreale, Castiglione y Boscán: El ideal cortesano en el renacimiento español, Tomo 1 (Madrid: Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia Española, 1959), 113: “Así, de la traducción desaparece una de las palabras claves del legado espiritual de Roma, cuya ausencia no sólo es muy significativa para la época, sino que tiene, en mi sentir, una repercusión histórica de siglos en la autoconsciencia y autodeterminación de los españoles.” 11. See Fernando Ampudia de Haro, “La civilización del comportamiento: Urbanidad y buenas maneras en España desde la baja edad hasta nuestros días” (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2004), 176. 12. Joan Corominas and José A. Pascual, Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico, Volumen 4 (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1985), 598. See also William F. Hanks, Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 1. 13. Revel, “The Uses of Civility,” 171–­72. 14. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 105–­17. 15. David Inglis, “Scatological Investigations: Excreta and Excretion in Modernity” (PhD diss., University of York, 1998), 132–­33. 16. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, 3–­4, 91–­92. 17. David Inglis, A Sociological History of Excretory Experience: Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technologies (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2001), 145. 18. See, e.g., John G. Bourke, Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine

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Books, 2009 [1891]); and Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (London: Routledge, 2011). 19. On Rome: Hazel Dodge, “ ‘Greater Than the Pyramids’: The Water Supply of Ancient Rome,” in Ancient Rome: The Archaeology of the Eternal City, ed. Jon Coulston and Dodge (Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2000), 192–­93. On medieval London: Sabine, “Latrines and Cesspools,” 316. On Tokyo: Kayo Tajima, “The Marketing of Urban Human Waste in the Early Modern Edo/Tokyo Metropolitan Area,” Environnement Urbain / Urban Environ­ ment 1, no. 9 (2007), http://journals.openedition.org/eue/1039; Zeldovich, The Other Dark Matter, 25–­33. 20. Inglis, A Sociological History of Excretory Experience, 83–­86. 21. Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 205. 22. Cited in Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Body Mutation and Mortification in Reli­ gion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-­Murray (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 12. 23. Jonathan Cey, “The Early Modern Matter of Fecal Medicines,” last modified December 11, 2012, https://recipes.hypotheses.org/552. 24. David Inglis and Mary Holmes, “Toiletry Time: Defecation, Temporal Strategies and the Dilemmas of Modernity,” Time and Society 9, no. 2/3 (2000): 227. There has been a recent resurgence in medicinal uses for fecal matter, particularly in the past decade: fecal-­matter transplants are becoming routine in treating C. difficile colitis, a complication of antibiotic therapy, and appear to be more effective than traditional antibiotic therapies. See, e.g., Els van Nood et al., “Duodenal Infusion of Donor Feces for Recurrent Clostridium difficile,” New England Journal of Medicine 368 (2013), 407–­15; and Lina Zeldovich, “The Magic Poop Potion,” Narratively, July 30, 2014, https://narratively.com/the-­magic-­poop-­potion/. Other uses for fecal transplantation are being explored in both human and in nonhuman animals. See, e.g., Arnon Gal et al., “One Dog’s Waste Is Another Dog’s Wealth: A Pilot Study of Fecal Microbiota Transplantation in Dogs with Acute Hemorrhagic Diarrhea Syndrome,” PLOS One 16 (2021): e0250344. 25. Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 432–­33. See also Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010 [2002]), 24. 26. Euan Cameron, “ ‘Civilized Religion’ from Renaissance to Reformation and Counter-­ Reformation,” in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 49. 27. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–­1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 67. See also Elliott, Spain and Its World: 1500–­1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 53. 28. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, 79. 29. Calculations range widely for the sixteenth-­century population of New Spain, but even conservative figures put the population at more than twenty-­one million inhabitants in 1518, reduced to around one million by 1605. In the early 1570s, the Indigenous population in the Valley of Mexico is estimated to have been approximately 700,000 people, which declined to around 120,000 by the time of the census conducted in 1650. See, e.g., B. H. Slicher van Bath, “The Calculation of the Population of New Spain, Especially for the Period before 1570,” Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, no. 24 (1978): 92; and Corey S. Ragsdale, Cathy Willermet, and Heather J. H. Edgar, “Changes in Indigenous Population Structure in Colonial Mexico City and Morelos,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 29 (July 2019): 502.

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30. Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 272. 31. Joel Robbins, “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture,” Current An­­ thropology 48, no. 1 (2007), 14. See also Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 36: “It is a modern idea that a practitioner cannot know how to live religiously without being able to articulate that knowledge.” 32. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500–­1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 31. 33. Revel, “The Uses of Civility,” 169. 34. Byron Ellsworth Hamann, Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in a Mediterratlantic World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 187–­92; Elliott, Spain and Its World, 53. 35. Diego Lópe de Cogolludo, Los tres siglos de la dominación española en Yucatán, o sea Historia de esta provincia (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-­und Verlagsanstalt, 1971 [1688]), 391: “tanto más hábiles y dispuestos para la doctrina Cristiana y para recibir la predicación de el santo evangelio, cuanto más están puestos en la policía espiritual y temporalmente.” See also José M. Pérez-­Prendes, “El dictamen de Tomás López Medel para la reformación de Indias,” in Utopía y realidad indiana, ed. Luciano Pereña et al. (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1992), 26. 36. Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2004), 171, 291. 37. Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 89. 38. James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Spanish Colonial America and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 109. 39. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 69. 40. See Pagden, Lords of All the World, 11–­62. 41. Valentina Torres Septién Torres, “Notas sobre unidad y buenas maneras: De Erasmo al Manual de Carrreño,” in Historia y nación (actas del Congreso en homenaje a Josefina Zoraida Vázquez), Vol. 1: Historia de la educación y enseñanza de la historia, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1998), 92. 42. The literary critic and linguist Mary Louise Pratt defines “contact zones” as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power. Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, January 1991, 34. 43. See Inglis and Holmes, “Toiletry Time”; Rachel Lea, “The Shitful Body: Excretion and Control,” Medische Anthropologie 11, no. 1 (1999): 7–­18; Joshua Ozias Reno, “Toward a New The­ ory of Waste: From ‘Matter Out of Place’ to Signs of Life,” Theory, Culture, and Society 31, no. 6 (2014): 3; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). 44. K. Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility, 4. 45. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, 51. 46. Laporte, History of Shit, 57. 47. See, e.g., Hanks, Converting Words, 1; Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–­1650 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Nancy M. Farriss, Tongues of Fire: Language and Evangelization in Colonial Mexico (Oxford:

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Oxford University Press, 2018); and Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Vertical Empire: The General Reset­ tlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 48. Hanks, Converting Words, 163; Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009 [1989]). 49. Jesús García Ruiz, “El misionero, las lenguas mayas y la traducción: Nominalismo, tomismo y etnolingüística en Guatemala,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 37, no. 77 (January 1992): 83–­110; Frauke Sachse, “The Expression of Christian Concepts in Colonial K’iche’ Missionary Texts,” in La transmisión de conceptos cristianos a las lenguas amerindias: Estudios sobre textos y contextos de la época colonial, ed. Sabine Dedenbach-­Salazar Sáenz (Sankt Augustin, Germany: Academia Verlag, 2016). 50. Maturino Gilberti’s 1558 Arte de la lengua tarasca ó de Michoacán, for example, explains the translation of the full range of Christian concepts into Indigenous languages as a means of undoing the legacy of Babel: “The remedy for [the confusion arising from linguistic diversity] requires no more than the good, and no less necessary diligence of composing grammars, translating words from language to language, through the assiduous work that achieves everything. So that in this way, with humility, the common eloquence of which we were deprived by the arrogance of the prideful aforementioned building [the Tower of Babel] is restored in part.” Gilberti, Arte de la lengua tarasca ó de Michoacán (Mexico City: La Oficina Impresora del Timbre, Palacio Nacional, 1898), 2–­3: “Para remedio de lo cual, solo rest[a] [ . . . ] la buena, y no menos necessaria diligencia de componer artes, traduzir vocablos, de lenguaje en lenguaje, me­ diante el assiduo trabajo, que lo alcança todo. Paraque por esta via, de humillacion, se restaure en parte, el comun eloquio, de que nos privo la altiuez, del sobervio, y sobre dicho edificio.” 51. Hanks also lists “interpretance” as one of the principles of commensuration. Drawn from the work of the American philosopher and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce, the principle of interpretance asserts that the gloss in a bilingual dictionary is a valid interpretant of the headword—­ that the gloss designates at least one valid meaning of the original term. Interpretance is a basic requirement for translation, as a bilingual dictionary cannot function without it. Hanks goes further, however, to suggest that missionary dictionaries, with their pairs of headword and gloss, were drawing on a structure used in Nahuatl-­and Mayan-­language poetry: What is most provocative is that the bilingual dictionaries of the missionaries performed an operation quite similar to that of a widely attested Indigenous literary style. The headword and gloss are in effect a semantic couplet.” Hanks, Converting Words, 161. 52. James Lockhart made the same argument for Nahuatl, citing examples such as quaate­ quia, meaning “to pour water on someone’s head,” as a translation of “to baptize,” and quailpia, meaning “to tie (a ribbon on) someone’s head,” as “to confirm.” Lockhart, “Sightings: Initial Nahua Reactions,” 227. 53. Hanks, Converting Words, 158. 54. E. g., Gerrit J. van Steenbergen, “Translating ‘Sin’ in Pökoot,” Bible Translator 42, no. 4 (1991): 431–­37. 55. Louise M. Burkhart, The +: Nahua-­Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-­Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 87–­129. 56. Alfonso de Molina, Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1880), 118: “Tlaçolli. vasura que echan enel muladar.” 57. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 87–­88. See “ihzolihu(i), ihzoloa, tlahzol-­li” in Frances

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Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 102–­3. 58. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 88. 59. Burkhart, 28. 60. Difrasismos, or “diphrastic kennings,” are common in formal Nahuatl. In tlilli in tlapalli, “the red, the black” is a difrasismo used for “writing”; in xochitl in cuicatl, “the flower, the song,” for “poetry”; tetl quahuitl, “stone(s) and stick(s)” for “punishment”; ihiyotl tlatolli, “breath and words” for “fine speech,” etc. The Florentine Codex includes a full chapter of such metaphors. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–­ 1982), book 6, 241–­60. See also Mercedes Montes de Oca Vega, Los difrasismos en el náhuatl del siglo XVI y XVII (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2013). Nancy Farriss describes a similar device using syntactically and semantically paired structures (termed “ensembles” rather than difrasismos) in Zapotec ceremonial rhetoric, such as “bitter + stinking” and “ugly + blackened” followed by “dirty + filthy + revolting” to express the corruption of dissolute and unclean souls. Farriss, Tongues of Fire, 278. 61. Frances Karttunen and James Lockhart, eds., The Art of Nahuatl Speech: The Bancroft Dialogues (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, vol. 65, 1987), 110–­11. 62. The Spanish accompaniment to the Nahautl text reads: “You both serve our Lord God. And live as one and in agreement, without the devil bringing the discord that is customary among you and always happens.” Bartolomé de Alva, A Guide to Confession Large and Small in the Mexican Language, 1634, trans. and ed. Barry D. Sell and John F. Schwaller (Norman: Uni­ versity of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 22, 156–­57: “Ambos esteys en seruicio de Dios Nuestro Señor, y viuays vnanimes, y conformes, sin que el diablo trayga las discordias que suele entre vosotros, como os acontece siempre.” 63. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 89, 96. 64. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 6, 97. The Spanish accompaniment to the Nahuatl text makes the metaphor explicit: “the dung and stench of lust” (emphasis added). Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, Tomo 2, ed. Alfredo López Austin and Josefina García Quintana (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, S.A., 1988), 557: “el estiércol y hediondez de la luxuria.” 65. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 6, 30. 66. Sahagún, Historia general, 500: “Ya agora tiene dolor y descontento de todo lo pasado, y su corazón y su cuerpo reciben gran dolor y desasosiego.” 67. Alfredo López Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideología: Las concepciones de los antiguos Nahuas (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, 2008), 261. 68. Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Treatise of the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain, trans. and ed. J. Richard Andrews and Ross Hassig (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984 [1629]), 134–­35. See also Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 96; and Catherine DiCesare, Sweeping the Way: Divine Transformation in the Aztec Festival of Ochpaniztli (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2009), 74. 69. Ruiz de Alarcón, Treatise of the Heathen Superstitions, 135. Alfredo López Austin glosses tlazolmiquiztli as “trash deadening.” López Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideología, 261: “amorte­ cimiento de basura.”

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70. John 10:11–­16. 71. Mark Z. Christensen, Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Texts and Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 54–­58. 72. Raymond van den Broeck, “The Limits of Translatability Exemplified by Metaphor Trans­ lation,” Poetics Today 2, no. 4 (1981): 73; Teresa Dobrzyńska, “Translating Metaphor: Problems of Meaning,” Journal of Pragmatics 24, no. 6 (1995): 596. 73. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 101. 74. Cecelia Klein, “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement’: The Significance of ‘Holy Shit’ in Ancient Mexico,” Art Journal 52, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 20. 75. John F. Chuchiak IV, “Sin, Shame, and Sexuality: Franciscan Obsessions and Maya Humor in the Calepino de Motul Dictionary, 1573–­1615,” in Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America, ed. David Tavárez (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017), 195. 76. Hanks, Converting Words, 202. 77. Domingo de Ara, Vocabulario en lengua Tzeldal, s.v. “mul,” Gates Collection, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, https://cdm15999.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection /p15999coll16/id/76355: “sumir debajo del agua.” 78. Michael D. Coe, The Maya Scribe and His World (New York: Grolier Club, 1973), 99, 134; Joanne Pillsbury et al., eds., Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, 2012), 335–­36. 79. Stephen Houston and Sarah Newman, “Buenos y malos olores entre los mayas del periodo Clásico,” in De olfato: Aproximaciones a los olores en la historia de México, ed. Élodie Dupey García and Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2020), 65. 80. See Alfredo Barrera Vázquez, Diccionario Cordemex: Maya–­Español, Español–­Maya (Mérida: Cordemex, 1980), 321; Michael P. Closs, “Orthographic Conventions in Maya Writing: The Rule of Phonetic Complementation,” Anthropological Linguistics 28, no. 2 (1986): 233; Stephen Houston and Karl Taube, “An Archaeology of the Senses: Perception and Cultural Expression in Ancient Mesoamerica,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10, no. 2 (October 2000): 276; and Gabrielle Vail, “Kisin and the Underworld Gods of the Maya,” Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 14 (September 1998): 167–­87. 81. The word kisin is also sometimes spelled cisin or cizin. Mark Z. Christensen, “Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Ecclesiastical Texts and Local Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2009), 48; Pedro Beltrán de Santa Rosa María, U molcabthanil camathan: Catecismo de la doctrina cristiana (Mérida: Imprenta de la Lotería del Estado, 1905 [1742]), 24; Ortwin Smailus, El Maya-­Chontal de Acalan: Análisis lingüístico de un documento de los años 1610–­1612, cuaderno 9 (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Mayas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1975), 86, 99. 82. Martha Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine (New York: Routledge, 2012), xviii. 83. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 5, 179. 84. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 95. 85. Burkhart, 121. 86. See DiCesare, Sweeping the Way; Klein, “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement’ ”; and Timothy Knowlton, “Filth and Healing in Yucatan: Interpreting Ix Hun Ahau, a Maya Goddess,” Ancient Mesoamerica 27 (2016): 319–­32.

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87. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 1, 23. 88. DiCesare, Sweeping the Way, 75; Klein, “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement.’ ” 89. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 93. 90. Alexis Wimmer, Grand Dictionnaire de Nahuatl / Gran Diccionario Nahuatl, s.v. “Tlaelcuani,” 2006, http://sites.estvideo.net/malinal/nahuatl.page.html. 91. Thelma D. Sullivan, “Tlazolteotl-­Ixcuina: The Great Spinner and Weaver,” in The Art and Iconography of Late Post-­classic Central Mexico, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, 1982), 15. 92. Alfredo López Austin, Una vieja historia de la mierda (Mexico City: Ediciones Toledo, 1988), 32; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 1, 23–­35, book 6, 31. 93. Klein, “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement,’ ” 22. 94. Klein, 22–­23. 95. Eloise Quiñones Keber, Codex Telleriano-­Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 21r. 96. On the sexual connotations of flowers and their use as metaphors for female genitalia by Indigenous Mesoamericans, see Klein, “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement,’ ” 23; and Michel Graulich, “Myths of Paradise Lost in Pre-­Hispanic Central Mexico,” Current Anthropology 24, no. 5 (1983): 585. 97. Keber, Codex Telleriano-­Remensis, 11r: “Píntanla lo mesmo que Eva como está siempre llorando y mirando a su marido Adán. Llámase Ixnextli, que quiere decir los ojos ciegos con ceniza, y es esto después que pecó en coger las rosas, y así dicen que ahora no puede mirar al cielo.” In the Florentine Codex, book 6, chapter 41, which lists Nahua sayings and adages, “Ixnex,” or “Ash-­Face,” is described as something “said of one who perhaps has done something, who perhaps has committed something. Perhaps it is a carnal life, a theft, when he thinks no one knows his secret faults, but his secret faults are already known. What is to his shame has been made public. Hence it is said: ‘Ash-­face.’ ” Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 6, 225. 98. DiCesare, Sweeping the Way, 42. 99. See Klein, “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement.’ ” 100. Ralph L. Roys, Ritual of the Bacabs: A Book of Maya Incantations (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 9. 101. Ramón Arzápalo, “Illness and Healing among the Maya in the Colony According to ‘El Ritual de Los Bacabes’: Change and Continuity,” Journal of Social Sciences 3 (1999): 133. For other (similar) translations, see Knowlton, “Filth and Healing,” 321–­22; and Roys, Ritual of the Bacabs, 162–­63. 102. Knowlton, “Filth and Healing,” 329. 103. Knowlton, 322, 327. 104. Marc Zender, “The Maize God and the Deer Lord’s Wife” (paper presented at the 22nd Annual European Maya Conference, Malmö University, Sweden, 2017). 105. Andrea Stone and Marc Zender, Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 185. 106. Matthew Looper, The Beast Between: Deer in Maya Art and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), 73. On the “Kaban curl” as invoking the glandular, earthy musk of animals, see Stephen Houston, “Maya Musk,” Maya Decipherment, last modified June 17, 2010, https:// mayadecipherment.com/2010/06/17/maya-­musk/. 107. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 6, 175–­76. 108. M. Z. Christensen, “Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Ecclesiastical Texts,” 140n4. As anthropologists of religion have demonstrated, there is no single, stable “Christianity,” especially

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in settings of cultural contact and colonialism. See, e.g., Joel Robbins, “What Is a Christian? Notes toward an Anthropology of Christianity,” Religion 3 (2003): 191–­99; and Andrew Orta, Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the “New Evangelization” (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Yet the processes of conversion I examine in this book (those to which I refer when I make direct comparisons between “Christian” and “Mesoamerican” traditions) oc­ curred at a particular time and in a context in which missionaries were hypervigilant about doctrinal consistency, as evidenced in the proselytizing literature from which I draw directly (i.e., the huehuetlahtolli in Andrés de Olmos’s Nahuatl grammar and Domingo de Vico’s Theologia Indorum). See, e.g., Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–­1700: A Reassessment of the Counter-­Reformation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999); and Amos Megged, Exporting the Catholic Reformation: Local Religion in Early-­Colonial Mexico (Leiden, New York, and Köln: E. J. Brill, 1996). 109. On the nature of Christian baptism and original sin, see Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 49–­52. 110. On the understanding of conception as a process necessarily beginning with corruption, see Alfredo López Austin, The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas, Vol. I, trans. Thelma Ortiz de Montellano and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 297. See also Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 113. 111. Stephen D. Houston, David Stuart, and Karl A. Taube, The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 130. 112. Diego de Landa, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, ed. and trans. Alfred M. Tozzer, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, vol. 18 (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1941 [1566]), 152. 113. Georges Baudot, Utopia and History in Mexico: The First Chroniclers of Mexican Civil­ ization, 1520–­1569, trans. Bernard R. Ortíz de Montellano and Thelma Ortíz de Montellano (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1995), 227–­31. See also Miguel Léon-­Portilla, trans. and ed., Huehuehtlahtolli: Testimonios de la antigua palabra (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991). 114. Andrés de Olmos, Grammaire de la langue Nahuatl o Mexicaine, ed. René Siméon (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1875 [1547]), 211: “De las maneras de hablar que tenían los viejos en sus pláticas antiguas.” 115. M. Z. Christensen, Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Texts and Religion, 46. 116. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 102. 117. Olmos, Grammaire de la langue Nahuatl, 218: “El pecador suzio y obstinado es como el puerco con el lodo.” 118. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 103: “Tlaçulli, teuhtli quimauilhtia, nextepeualli quimotlalilia, quimocuitlauia in çuquitl, in tapalhcatl inic moçoquipuloa, inic motapalhcaneloa, in yuh coyametal mocuitlanexpuloa.” 119. Burkhart, 105. 120. Baudot, Utopia and History in Mexico, 230; Léon-­Portilla, Huehuehtlahtolli, 25–­26. 121. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 103: “Ca oc nipiltontli ca oc niconetontli, ca oc nitlalolo­ lohua nitapalcamahuiltia, ca oc nicnahuiltia in naxix in nocuitl, ca oc nomac niquicuiya in notêqualac in noyacacuitl.” 122. Burkhart, 103: “Inic ticpopohuaco ticchipahuaco in amanima, inic quitlaçaz in itzoyo in iteuhyo in iyaca in ipalanca in itech oquitlalique in tliltique in catzahuaque í tzitzimi in tlatlacatecolo.”

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123. Garry Sparks, “Xalqat B’e and the Theologia Indorum: Crossroads between Maya Spi­ rituality and the Americas’ First Theology” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011); Sparks, “The Use of Mayan Scripture in the Americas’ First Christian Theology,” Numen 61 (June 2014): 396–­429; Sparks, trans. and ed., The Americas’ First Theologies: Early Sources of Post-­contact Indigenous Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Sparks, Rewriting Maya Religion: Domingo de Vico, K’iche’ Maya Intellectuals, and the “Theologia Indorum” (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2020). 124. The original Theologia Indorum does not survive and was never published (fortunately, as it avoided the scrutiny of the Spanish Inquisition), but seventeen partial manuscript copies exist in various archives. By comparing the extant versions, hand copied into different Highland Mayan languages in the late eighteenth century, Sparks has reconstructed the contents and scope of the original text. See Sparks, “Xalqat B’e,” 383–­84, 393–­474; and Sparks, Rewriting Maya Religion, 4, 117. 125. Sparks, “The Use of Mayan Scripture,” 400–­402. 126. Sachse, “The Expression of Christian Concepts,” 96; Sparks, The Americas’ First Theologies. 127. Sparks, “Xalqat B’e”; Sparks, Rewriting Maya Religion, 157–­58. 128. Sparks, “Xalqat B’e,” 175, 330–­31; Sparks, Rewriting Maya Religion, 160–­61. 129. For Classic Maya examples of this dyad, see Houston, Stuart, and Taube, The Memory of Bones, 108. For the dyad’s forms among other Mesoamerican cultures, see Ellen Messer, “The Hot and Cold in Mesoamerican Indigenous and Hispanicized Thought,” Social Science and Medicine 25, no. 4 (1987): 339–­46. 130. Sparks, “Xalqat B’e,” 333–­34. 131. Sparks, 610–­11. 132. Sparks, 179. See also Sachse, “The Expression of Christian Concepts.” 133. Sparks, The Americas’ First Theologies, 92. 134. Houston, Stuart, and Taube, The Memory of Bones, 25. See also Sparks, Rewriting Maya Religion, 9. 135. Sparks, “Xalqat B’e,” 564: “junelik xit pwaq, q’ana pwaq, saqi pwaq, junelik qoq’ol, xetkok, junelik k’uwal yamanik, junelik q’uq’, raxon, junelik k’ub’ul chak tik, junelik wa, junelik ja’, junelik chijupinik, chikijanik.” 136. Sparks, 567–­68: “Maj wi xoq’ol, maj wi puqlaj, maj wi q’ayes, maj wi mes, maj wi chu, maj wi k’a, maj wi xex, maj wi nin, maj wi k’im, maj wi kaq’ul, maj wi k’isik’, maj wi ch’ich’, ma wi raroj, ma wi tiptoj, maj wi jab’, maj wi saq’ij.” 137. Sparks, The Americas’ First Theologies, 3. 138. Sparks, “Xalqat B’e,” 596–­97: “We chimuqurik, we chi chikopirik ri che’, opwinaq chi k’ab’awil iwumal, ‘¡Ake!, mixoknumuqul, nuchikopil,’ ma cha’on chiwe, ix winaq. La chi ix wi tak, ix wi q’eq wach, ix k’o pa q’equm, pa aq’ab’? We ta chachaqix uwach kumal ak’alab’, rumal pu tz’i’, rumal pu ak’, rumal pu tz’ikin: ‘¡A chi!, mixojiwachaqij, mipuxinojik, mixinitzelaxik iwumal,’ ma cha taj Ma chisu’ uloq, ma chuch’ajon uloq.” 139. Sparks, The Americas’ First Theologies, 19. 140. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 103–­29. See also M. Z. Christensen, Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Texts and Religion, 54n20. 141. David Tavárez, “Performing the Zaachila Word: The Dominican Invention of Zapotec Christianity,” in Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America, ed. Tavárez (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017), 39–­40. 142. See also Farriss, Tongues of Fire, 179.

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1. Dan Williams, “The ‘King’ Is Dead: Mexico City Dumps: Bad Times Loom,” Los Angeles Times, October 14, 1987: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­1987-­10-­14-­mn-­9258-­story .html. 2. Gutiérrez’s control of particular dumps is outlined in Luis Enrique Pérez Sosa, “Un reino en la basura: Cartografías de la violencia política mexicana,” Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2019, accessed December 17, 2020, https://www.academia.edu/40572866/Un_reino _en_la_basura. Gutiérrez’s movement from one dump to another—­specifically, to Santa Catarina Yecahuizotl when Santa Cruz Meyehualco was shut down in 1983—­is detailed in Héctor Castillo Berthier, “El Zar de la basura: Caciquismo en la Ciudad de México,” Veredas 13, no. 7 (2006): 74. 3. The term used to describe Gutiérrez and others who exchanged work opportunities and protection for payment was cacique. Cacique is a Taíno word for “chief ” or “king,” first borrowed into Spanish by Columbus in 1492 and quickly extended to Indigenous leaders in other parts of the Americas. See Joan Corominas and José A. Pascual, Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico, Volumen 1 (Madrid: Editorial Griegos, 1980), 720. It still carries a sense of its Indigenous roots, as in the current definition by the Real Academia Española’s Diccionario de la lengua española: “Governor or chief of an Indian community or village.” Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., s.v. “cacique,” accessed September 8, 2020, https://dle.rae.es/cacique. 4. Castillo Berthier, “El Zar de la basura,” 76. 5. Ana Cecilia Treviño, Basura de oro: Crimen en Santa Catarina (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 1990), 51. 6. Williams, “The ‘King’ Is Dead”; Treviño, Basura de oro, 11–­12. See also Medina, The World’s Scavengers, 134–­35. 7. The anthropologist Kathleen Millar has critiqued the use of the term informal to describe the work performed by waste pickers (catadores) in Rio de Janeiro. Rather than highlighting what the labor of the catadores is not or what it lacks (i.e., state-­regulated, officially recognized, institutionally organized wage-­based employment), Millar emphasizes the plasticity of the cata­ dores’ income-­generating activities, reframing them as forms of living—­as both a livelihood and a way of life. Millar, Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 3–­13. 8. Tania Espinosa and Federico Parra, Proyecto de reconocimiento de la situación de derechos humanos de los recicladores en Latinoamérica: El caso de la ciudad de México, México, reporte descriptivo (Manchester: WIEGO, 2019); Carolina Valente-­Santos and José Antonio Guevara-­ García, “El papel de los pepenadores de materiales reciclables en la gestión de residuos sólidos: Los casos de Brasil y México,” Revista Legislativa de Estudios Sociales y de Opinión Pública, 12, no. 24 (2019): 87. 9. Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana y Mexicana y Castellana, ed. M. León-­Portilla (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1970), 81: “escoger algo, o arrebañar y recoger lo esparcido por el suelo.” Over a dozen examples referring to harvestable or collectable items exist, including cuauhpehpen(a), “to gather firewood,” tlaōlpehpen(a), “to harvest maize,” and xītomapehpen(a), “to pick tomatoes.” Karttunen, Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, 190. The person who did such gathering, collecting, and picking was referred to as pepenilia. The lexicographer Rémi Siméon provides an example of the term in use taken from Andrés de Olmos’s grammar: “Teutitlan, tlaçoltitlan, axixpan, tlaelpan oncan oquimo-­pepenili in tlatoani,” or “The

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lord has risen from very low, has been picked up from the dust, the filth.” Simeon’s gloss reads, “El señor lo ha levantado de muy abajo, lo ha sacado del polvo, de la inmundicia, etc.” (directly translated into English here). Rémi Siméon, Diccionario de la lengua Nahuatl o mexicana (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977), 379. The Nahuatl words used in Olmos’s example, however, include axixpan, a term with the root āxīx(a), meaning “to urinate or to have diarrhea.” Karttunen, Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, 15. This implicit reference to human excrement further underscores the moral and metaphorical uses of bodily and material waste discussed in the previous chapter. 10. Medina, The World’s Scavengers, 130–­31. 11. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, trans. Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012 [1632]), 189, 229, 211–­12. 12. Toribio de Benavente, Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España, ed. Mercedes Serna Arnaiz and Bernat Castany Prado (Madrid: Real Academia Española, Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2014 [1541]), 196: “Estaban tan limpias y tan barridas las calles y calzadas de ésta gran ciudad, que no había cosa en que tropezar, y por do quiera que salía Moteuczoma, así en ésta como por do había de pasar, era tan barrido y el suelo tan asentado y liso, que aunque la planta del pie fuera tan delicada como la de la mano, no recibiera el pie detrimento ninguno en andar descalzo.” 13. Díaz del Castillo, The True History, 210. 14. John A. Crow, Spain: The Root and the Flower (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1963), 127; Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450–­1750 (Abingden: Routledge, 2013 [1995]), 42; Laporte, History of Shit, 13–­14. See also chapter 1. 15. María Reímondez, “The Rural Urban and Global Spaces of Galician Culture,” in A Companion to Galician Culture, ed. Helena Miguélez-­Carballeira (Tamesis: Woodbridge, 2014), 159. 16. Kristy Wilson Bowers, Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville (Rochester: Uni­ versity of Rochester Press, 2013), 24. 17. Díaz del Castillo, The True History, 233. 18. Herbert R. Harvey, “Public Health in Aztec Society,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 57, no. 2 (1981): 164. 19. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 11, 124. 20. See, e.g., Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase, “Ancient Maya Houses, Households, and Residential Groups at Caracol, Belize,” Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology 11 (2014): 11; and William T. Sanders, “Classic Maya Settlement Patterns and Ethnographic Analogy,” in Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, ed. Wendy Ashmore (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 362. 21. Benavente, Historia de los Indios, 196: “de gente de servicio tenía tanta como el mayor señor del mundo.” 22. William T. Sanders, “Tenochtitlan in 1519: A Pre-­industrial Megalopolis,” in The Aztec World, ed. Elizabeth M. Brumfiel and Gary M. Feinman (New York: Abrams, 2008), 72. 23. Díaz del Castillo, The True History, 435. 24. Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-­American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 26; Barbara E. Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 76; Guillermo Porras Muñoz, El gobierno de la ciudad de México en el siglo XVI (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1982), 17–­19.

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25. Inga Clendinnen, “ ‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico,” Representations 33 (1991): 90. 26. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The History of the Conquest of New Spain, ed. Davíd Carrasco (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010 [1632]), 309–­10. 27. Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-­American City, 9–­12. 28. Dan Stanislawski, “Early Spanish Town Planning in the New World,” Geographical Review 37, no. 1 (January 1947): 100. 29. Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-­American City, 43; Christopher H. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–­1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 32–­36; Jaime Salcedo Salcedo, Urbanismo Hispano-­Americano Siglos XVI, XVII, y XVIII: El modelo urbano aplicado a la América española, su génesis y su desarrollo teórico y prác­ tico (Bogotá: Centro Editorial Javeriano, 1994), 63–­64. The traza marked a separation based on indigeneity rather than race. Juan Garrido, a Black conquistador (born in West Africa) who participated in the conquests of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Tenochtitlán, as well as expeditions to Florida, Michoacán, and Baja California, was granted a house plot within Mexico City’s new traza in 1525. Garrido also served as the town crier and the guardian of the Chapultepec aqueduct for a time. Peter Gerhard, “A Black Conquistador in Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 58, no. 3 (1978): 451–­59; Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” Americas 57, no. 2 (2000): 177. 30. Spanish colonists flattened cultural differences in order to categorize people according to their place in society and their legal status within the Spanish Empire. For example, the words chino (Chinese) and negro (Black) referred to anyone from the Asian or African continents, respectively. Similarly, the word indio/india (Indian) was used to refer to all Indigenous peoples; it was a generic term for individuals who had a distinct civic status as native vassals of the Spanish monarch. See, e.g., Robert H. Jackson, Race, Caste, and Status: Indians in Colonial Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 5; and Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 5. As a series of recent studies have documented, however, many people who self-­identified as or were considered indios were not tribute payers, did not live in reducciones, or were not subject to repartimiento labor requirements. See Mónica Díaz, ed., To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017). In light of those complexities, I use the term indio only in instances where it is a direct translation from a source. 31. Axel I. Mundigo and Dora P. Crouch, “The City Planning Ordinances of the Laws of the Indies Revisited: Part I: Their Philosophy and Implications,” Town Planning Review 48, no. 3 (July 1947): 247–­68; Stanislawski, “Early Spanish Town Planning.” See also Peter Burke, Luke Clossey, and Felipe Fernández-­Armesto, “The Global Renaissance,” Journal of World History 28, no. 1 (2017): 20–­21. 32. Mundigo and Crouch, “The City Planning Ordinances,” 248. 33. Transcripción de las Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias dadas por Felipe II, el 13 de julio de 1573, en el Bosque de Segovia, según el original que se conserva en el Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla (Madrid: Ministerio de Vivienda, Servicio Central de Publicaciones, 1973), 100: “Dispongan los solares y edifiçios que en ellos hizieren de manera que en la avitaçión dellos se pueda goçar de los ayres de mediodia y del norte por ser los mejores del. Pónganse los ediffiçios de las cassas de toda la poblaçión generalmente de manera que sirban de defensa y fuerça contra los que quisieren estorvar o ymfectar la población;

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y cada cassa en particular la labren de manera que en ella puedan thener sus cavallos y vestias de servicio, con patios y corrales y con la más anchura que fuere posible por la salud y limpieça.” 34. Transcripción de las Ordenanzas, 92: “El sitio y solares para carnicerías, pescaderías, tenerías y otras ofiçinas que se caussan ynmundiçias se den en parte que con façilidad se puedan conserbar sin ellas.” 35. Transcripción de las Ordenanzas, 92–­93: “Las poblaçiones que se hizieren fuera del puerto de mar, en lugares mediterráneos, si pudieren ser en ribera de río navegable, será de mucha comodidad; y procúrese que la ribera quede a la parte del çierço y que a la parte del río y más baxa de la poblaçión se pongan todos los officios que caussan inmundicias.” 36. James Casey, Early Modern Spain: A Social History (London: Routledge, 1999), 33. 37. Enrique Rodríguez-­Alegría, “Consumption and the Varied Ideologies of Domination in Colonial Mexico City,” in The Postclassic to Spanish-­Era Transition in Mesoamerica: Archaeol­ ogical Perspectives, ed. Susan Kepecs and Rani T. Alexander (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 41. 38. See, e.g., Díaz del Castillo. The True History, 210, 216. 39. Manuel Carrera Stampa, Planos de la Ciudad de México (desde 1521 hasta nuestros días) (Mexico City: Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, 1949), 305. 40. Ignacio Alcocer, Apuntes sobre la antigua México-­Tenochtitlan (Tacubaya, Mexico: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 1935), 14; Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, 63. 41. Junta Directiva del Desagüe y Saneamiento de la Ciudad de México, Memoria adminis­ trativa y económica (Mexico City: Tip. J. I. Guerrero, 1903), 168. 42. Donald B. Cooper, Epidemic Disease in Mexico City, 1761–­1813: An Administrative, Social, and Medical Study, Institute for Latin American Studies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 19. 43. Ignacio de Castera, “Plano ichnográfico de la ciudad de México que demuestra el reglamento general de sus calles asi para la comodidad y hermosura, como para la corrección y extirpación de las maldades ge. Hay en sus barrios, por la infinidad de sitios escondidos, callejones sin transito, ruinas y paderones que las ocasionan, a pesar del zelo de los justics. De orden del Exmo. Sr. Conde de Revillagigedo por el Mtro. Mayor D. Ignacio Castera, año de 1794.” Library of Con­ gress Geography and Map Division, Washington, DC, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g4414m.ct000338. 44. Ángel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Montevideo, Uruguay: ARCA, 1998). 45. For a comparative case study from Peru, see, e.g., Kathleen M. Kole de Peralta, “The Nature of Colonial Bodies: Public Health in Lima, Peru, 1535–­1635” (PhD diss., Notre Dame University, 2015). 46. Laporte, History of Shit, 56; Sarah A. Moore, “Garbage Matters: Concepts in New Geog­ raphies of Waste,” Progress in Human Geography 36, no. 6 (2012): 790–­91; cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1975). 47. Ignacio Bejarano, ed., Primer libro de las actas de cabildo de la ciudad de México (Mexico City: Águilar e Hijos, 1889), 82. One gold peso (ninety-­six grains of gold) in 1526 would be roughly equivalent to US $400 today. See Alberto Francisco Pradeau, Numismatic History of Mexico from the Pre-­Columbian Epoch to 1823 (Whittier, CA: Western Printing, 1938), 21. 48. Bejarano, Primer libro, 106. 49. Bejarano, 128. 50. Manuel Orozco y Berra, ed., Terzer libro de las actas de Cabildo del Ayuntamiento de la gran cibdad de Tenuxtitan Mexico de la Nueba España (Mexico City: Manuel Orozco y Berra, 1859), 48–­49.

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51. Orozco y Berra, Terzer libro, 51. 52. Orozco y Berra, 134. 53. Rodolfo Acuña-­Soto, Leticia Calderon Romero, and James H. Maguire, “Large Epidemics of Hemorrhagic Fevers in Mexico, 1545–­1815,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 62, no. 6 (2000): 733; cf. John S. Marr and James B. Kiracofe, “Was the Huey Cocoliztli a Haemorrhagic Fever?,” Medical History 44:341–­62. 54. J. Vågene Åshild et al., “Salmonella enterica Genomes from Victims of a Major Sixteenth-­ Century Epidemic in Mexico,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 2 (2018): 520–­28. 55. Lori Boornazian Diel, The Tira de Tepechpan: Negotiating Place under Aztec and Spanish Rule (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 87. 56. Cf. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 227. 57. Antonio Espinoza de los Monteros, ed., Quinto libro de actas de la Ciudad de México (Mexico City: Librería Navarro, 1862), 86–­87. 58. Ignacio Bejarano, ed., Septimo libro de cabildo que començo desde jueues primeo dia de henero de mill y quinientos y sesenta y dos años acaua en 26 de octubre de 71 (Mexico City: Águilar e Hijos, 1889), 487. 59. Ignacio Bejarano, ed., Libro octavo de actas de cabildo que comenzó en 29 de octubre de 1581 y terminó en fin de diciembre de 1584 (Mexico City: Águilar e Hijos, 1893), 93–­94. 60. Bejarano, Libro octavo, 248. 61. Cooper, Epidemic Disease in Mexico City, 201–­21. Under the New Laws of the Indies enacted in 1542, native peoples of the Americas were considered vassals of the Spanish monarch and owed tribute to the crown in exchange for certain rights and protections. See, e.g., Henry Stevens, The New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians (London: Chiswick Press, 1893), xix–­xx. 62. Junta Directiva del Desagüe y Saneamiento de la Ciudad de México, Memoria admin­ istrative y económica, 195: “La limpia era un espectáculo repugnante para los vecinos y transeuntes, y un foco de enfermedades para los habitantes y trabajadores, pues para la extracción de los lodos se desnudaban los indios ó los presidarios en plena vía pública, sumergíanse en aquellos inmudos canales, y después de haber sacado con palas ó cubos los azolves, aparecían cubiertos del más asqueroso de los ungüentos; y como los azolves se arrojaban á un lado de las acequias, y permanecían al aire y al sol, hasta que venían los carros que habían de conducirlos fuera de la población: húmedos, producían el olor más insoportable, y secos, penetraban arrebatados por el viento en las habitaciones, conduciendo gérmenes peligrosísimos, que muchas veces producían morales dolencias. “A fin de evitar los inconvenientes de este imperfecto y prejudicial sistema de hacer la limpia, no pocos se preocuparon en idear y proponer medios más rápidos, menos costosos y de menor peligro para la salud, pero fueron tan ineficaces, que apenas la memoria de uno ú otro se conserva, y por desgracia, el primitivo y pésimo modo de limpiar las antiguas acequias ó canales, imperó posteriormente á la construcción de las atarjeas?, y todavía en nuestros días hemos visto en? no lejanos barrios, el repugnante y asqueroso espectáculo, no ya de indios tributarios y sin paga ó de presos con los grillos en los pies como antaño, pero si trabajadores retribuídos que se desnudan para extraer los lodos, se embijan? asquerosamente, y arrojan á los carros los cubos plétoricos de materias inmundas: y hemos visto á esos carros, pesados y lentos, recorrer calles y calles que infestan con los miasmas que despiden y ensuciar con los líquidos que escurren, por sus mal cerradas hendeduras, ó derraman por sus imperfectas tapas.” 63. José Antonio Villacorta, ed., Libro viejo de la fundación de Guatemala y papeles relativos

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a D. Pedro de Alvarado (Guatemala City: Biblioteca “Goathemala” de la Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1934), 35: “que tienen Indios, que les sirvan al presente de sus repartimientos.” 64. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 22; W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz, “Strange Lands and Different Peoples”: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 88. 65. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 23. 66. Kole de Peralta, The Nature of Colonial Bodies, 64, 163–­64. 67. Sharon Bailey Glasco, Constructing Mexico City: Colonial Conflicts over Culture, Space, and Authority (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 102–­3. 68. Medina, The World’s Scavengers, 131. 69. Bailey Glasco, Constructing Mexico City, 101–­3. 70. Don Juan Vicente de Guemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, “Don Juan Vicente de Guemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, conde de Revilla Gigedo, baron y señor territorial de las villas y baronías de Benillova y Rivarroja, caballero comendador de peña de martos en la Orden de Calatrava, gentil hombre de cámara de S.M. con exercicio, teniente general de los reales exércitos, virrey, gobernador y capitan general de N.E., presidente de su Real Audiencia, superintendente general subdelegado de Real Hacienda, Minas, Azogues y Ramo del Tabaco, juez conservador de éste, presidente de su Real Junta, y subdelegado general de correos en el mismo reyno,” 1790, https://archive.org/details/donjuanvicentede00news_2/mode/2up. 71. See, e.g., Barles, “History of Waste Management”; and Melosi, Garbage in the Cities; see also chapter 1. 72. Guemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, “Don Juan Vicente . . . ,” no. 1: “á cuya hora deberá quedar perfectamente limpia toda la Ciudad.” 73. Guemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, no. 2. 74. Guemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, no. 10: “y todos los que se encontraren después de la hora de la queda en las calles ó plazuelas, sean de la casta que fuesen, serán muertos por las Guardas, por conocerse no tienen dueño que cuide a ellos.” 75. Guemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, no. 8: “Para remediar el indecentísismo abuso que tiene la pleve de ambos sexos de ensuciarse en las calles y plazuelas, se previene á las Patrullas y Ministros de Justicia aprehendan á los que cometan este abominable exceso, para ponerlos inmediatamente en los zepos que á este efecto se han colocado en las puertas de las Carceles y Cuerpos de Guardia.” 76. Guemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, no. 9: “una cosa tan esencial a la buena educación.” 77. Ilarione da Bergamo, Daily Life in Colonial Mexico: The Journey of Friar Ilarione da Bergamo, 1761–­1768, ed. Robert Ryal Miller and William J. Orr, trans. Orr (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 88. 78. Guemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, “Don Juan Vicente . . . ,” no. 8: “que se verifique también en todas sus partes este artículo en las Pulquerias, que es el parage en que se comete dicho exceso con la mayor freqüencia por hombres y mujeres, enagenados del pudor y la razón.” 79. Bailey Glasco, Constructing Mexico City, 104–­5. 80. Bailey Glasco, 115. Heather Rogers chronicles how the uneven allocation of waste-­ management resources in North American cities similarly leaves poor, working-­class, and immigrant communities to live with a disproportionate amount of waste. Rogers, Gone Tomorrow, 63–­64.

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81. Colin McFarlane, “Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-­colonial Bombay,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, no. 2 (2008): 418. 82. Todd A. Henry, “Sanitizing Empire: Japanese Articulations of Korean Otherness and the Construction of Early Colonial Seoul, 1905–­1919,” Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 3 (2005): 639–­ 75; Warwick Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 3 (1995): 641. 83. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 197. 84. Girolamo Fracastoro, Fracastoro’s “Syphilis”, trans. Geoffrey Eatough (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984 [1530]), 43–­45. 85. Fracastoro, Fracastoro’s “Syphilis”, 89. 86. Fracastoro, 97. 87. Fracastoro, 101. 88. Lawrence H. Feldman, ed. and trans., Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples: Spanish Explorations of the South East Mayan Lowlands (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 14. 89. Feldman, Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples, 190. 90. Thomas W. F. Gann, The Maya Indians of Southern Yucatan and Northern British Honduras, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, bulletin 64 (Washington, DC: Govern­ ment Printing Office, 1918), 32–­37. 91. Heather McCrea, “Pest to Vector: Disease, Public Health, and the Challenges of State-­ Building in Yucatán, Mexico, 1833–­1922,” in Centering Animals in Latin American History, ed. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 162. 92. For similar arguments about moral judgments about people that are made based on associations with waste and dirt (whether real or metaphorical) in other contexts, see Catherine Alexander and Joshua Reno, eds., Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation of Mate­ rials, Values, and Social Relations (London: Zed Books, 2012); Kathleen M. Millar, “Garbage as Racialization,” Anthropology and Humanism 45, no. 1 (2020): 4–­24; Emily McKee, “Trash Talk: Interpreting Morality and Disorder in Negev/Naqab Landscapes,” Current Anthropology 56, no. 5 (2015): 733–­52; and Vassos Argyrou, “ ‘Keep Cyprus Clean’: Littering, Pollution, and Other­ ness,” Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 2 (1997): 159–­78. 93. Don Juan Vicente de Guemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, “Instrucción reservada que el Conde de Revilla Gigedo dio a su succesor en el mando, Marqués de Branciforte sobre el gobierno de este continente en el tiempo que fue su virey” (Mexico City: Imprenta de la Calle de Las Escalerillas, 1831), 55: “Si en el gobierno de esta N.E. siempre se hubiera tenido el debido cuidado de la salud pública, no se hubieran padecido las frecuentes epidémias, á las cuales se atribuye, y debe atribuir en la mayor parte, la despoblación en que se hallan las provincias de estos reinos.” 94. Guemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, “Instrucción reservada,” 52–­53, 58, 57. 95. Benavente, Historia de los Indios, 18: “Y de él saltó en los indios, y si no fuera por el mucho cuidado que hubo en que no se bañasen, y en otros remedios, fuera otra tan gran plaga y pestilencia como la pasada, y aun con todo esto murieron muchos. Llamaron también a éste el año de la pequeña lepra.” 96. In their chronicle of public health failures in the face of an outbreak of cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela in the early 1990s, the anthropologist Charles L. Briggs and the physician Clara Mantini-­Briggs have detailed how similar patterns of stigma, blame, and racialization continue into the present day. Briggs, Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profil­

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ing during a Medical Nightmare, with Mantini-­Briggs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 97. Catherine J. Kudick, Cholera in Post-­revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 77. 98. Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 93. 99. Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala, 87–­90. 100. Grandin, 76. Chapter Five 1. Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, ed. María del Carmen León Cázares (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994 [1566]), 166: “El primer día de Pop es el primero del primer mes de los indios; era su año nuevo y, entre ellos, fiesta muy celebrada porque era general y de todos; y así todo el pueblo junto, hacía fiesta a todos los ídolos. Para celebrarla con más solemnidad, renovaban en este día todas las cosas de su servicio, como platos, vasos, banquillos, esterillas y ropa vieja y las mantillas en que tenían envueltos a los ídolos. Barrían sus casas y la basura y los trastos viejos echábanlos fuera del pueblo, al muladar, y nadie, aunque los hubiese menester, los tocaba.” 2. “The Chacs [the attendant priests, each dressed as the rain god] kindled new fire and lit the brazier, since in the feasts for all and for the community they burned incense to the [idol] with new fire, and the priest began to throw his incense into it, and everyone came in order, beginning with the lords, to receive incense from the hand of the priest, which he gave them with as much gravity and devotion as if he were giving them relics, and they threw it little by little into the brazier, waiting till it had finished burning.” Landa, Relación, 168: “Y los chacs sacaban lumber nueva y encendían el brasero, ya que en las fiestas de todos y de comunidad quemaban con lumber nueva el incienso al Demonio, y el sacerdote comenzaba a echar su incienso en él, y venían todos por su orden, comenzando con los señores, a recibir incienso de la mano del sacerdote, lo cual él les daba con tanta mesura y devoción como si les diera reliquias, y ellos lo echaban poco a poco en el brasero aguardando hasta que se hubiese acabado de quemar.” 3. Although Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán is one of the most widely read and oft-­cited texts from early colonial Latin America, the motivations behind the manuscript are unclear. Some argue it was intended to demonstrate the pervasiveness of idolatry in New Spain to religious officials across the Atlantic; some see it as a personal defense (or an act of contrition) against accusations of his overly harsh measures of extirpation; still others view it as a recruiting tool to attract more Franciscan volunteers to Yucatán. Recent evidence suggests that the Relación available today represents only excerpts of a more complete manuscript, some of which was likely written by Landa’s native collaborator Gaspar Antonio Chi, his contemporary and fellow Franciscan friar Gaspar de Najera, or other shadow authors after his death. Regardless of its intended purpose or the authenticity of its attributed authorship, the account provides unpar­ alleled descriptions of sixteenth-­century Maya social organization, economy, politics, and calendrical and religious systems, as well as insights into aspects of daily routines, agricultural practices, and interpersonal interactions, granting it “virtually a biblical status” among Mayanists. Matthew Restall and John F. Chuchiak IV, “A Reevaluation of the Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán,” Ethnohistory 49, no. 3 (2002): 651–­52, quotation on page 651.

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4. These dictionaries are generally, but not always, glossed in Spanish (some provide both Spanish and English glosses, some modern versions are glossed only in English). 5. Byron Ellsworth Hamann, The Translations of Nebrija: Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 85. 6. “peaceful conquest”: Hanks, Converting Words, 1. In addition to Hanks, see, e.g., Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008); and chapter 3. 7. Stephen Houston, John Robertson, and David Stuart, “The Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions,” Current Anthropology 41, no. 3 (2000): fig. 1. 8. Modern Ch’orti’ offers sojk, with the English gloss “garbage, feed for animals, dried corn stalks and leaves” and the Spanish “basura, pasto.” Kerry Hull, “An Abbreviated Dictionary of Ch’orti’ Maya” (Crystal River, FL: Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, 2005), 100, http://www.famsi.org/reports/03031/03031.pdf; cf. Charles Wisdom, Ch’orti’ Dictio­ n­ary, transcribed and transliterated by Brian Stross, accessed October 30, 2020, 588, http://doc share02.docshare.tips/files/7600/76007365.pdf. Ch’ol features tzukulel, given as “trash” and “basura” and drawn from the root tzuk, meaning “old, worn out, ragged” or “viejo, gastado.” Nicholas A. Hopkins, J. Kathryn Josserand, and Ausencio Cruz Guzmán, A Historical Dictionary of Chol (Mayan): The Lexical Sources from 1789 to 1935 (Tallahassee, FL: Jaguar Tours, 2011), 242. More variations can be found in Yucatec dictionaries from the seventeenth century, including dzicit, glossed as “cleaning up the trash and dried and fallen leaves from trees, and such things” (“limpiar la vasura y las hojas de arboles secas y caídas, y cosas assi”) in the Calepino Maya de Motul and as “to clean or sweep up trash” (“limpiar o barrer basura”) in the Diccionario de San Francisco. The Diccionario de San Francisco also features dzicit as a noun: “trash (carried by water when it rains)” (“basura [que lleva el agua cuando llueve]”). The Diccionario Solana offers taan zohol as “trash in general” (“vasura en general”). David Bolles, Combined Dictionary–­Concordance of the Yucatecan Mayan Language (Crystal River, FL: Foundation for the Advancement of Meso­ american Studies, 2001,) 1799, http://www.famsi.org/reports/96072/. 9. Terrence Kaufman, A Preliminary Mayan Etymological Dictionary, with the assistance of John Justeson (Crystal River, FL: Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, 2003), s.v. “basura,” 1227, http://www.famsi.org/reports/01051/pmed.pdf. 10. Kaufman, Preliminary Mayan Etymological Dictionary, 1227: “de mal sabor.” 11. Kaufman, 293: “estiércol, mierda, caca, popó.” 12. Wisdom, Ch’orti’ Dictionary, 665. 13. “cagar y cagada” 14. Bolles, Combined Dictionary of Yucatecan Mayan, 4890: “escremento, estiércol, mierda, camaras, escorias, viruta ó cualquier residuo de aseo.” 15. Hopkins, Josserand, and Guzmán, A Historical Dictionary of Chol, 59. The notion of gold and gems, minerals, and other metals as excrement is a pan-­Mesoamerican concept. In Nahuatl, for example, in addition to gold being perceived as the excrement of the sun, mica (and later, lead) was identified as the moon’s excrement. Klein, “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement,’ ” 25. 16. Broadening conceptions of waste to the perceptions of nonhuman animals, Joshua Reno has proposed a similar rethinking of wastes. Reno uses scat, a term borrowed from animal trackers, to recast fecal (and other) waste matter as “signs of a living thing, one that continued to live as evidence by its having left something behind.” Reno, “Toward a New Theory of Waste,” 19. 17. Hopkins, Josserand, and Guzmán, A Historical Dictionary of Chol, 212, also glosses ta’jol

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as “vulture; zopilotes. Lit. ‘excrement head,’ ” as does Marcos Beccera, who glosses chächäk ta’jol in Ch’ol as a “red-­headed buzzard,” with the accompanying literal translation as “red excrement-­ head.” Beccera, Vocabulario de la lengua Chol (Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1937), 278. 18. There are longstanding epigraphic conventions in transcribing Maya hieroglyphs. For example, for jaguar: bold uppercase for word signs (BAHLAM), phonetic signs in bold lowercase (ba-­la-­ma), and Mayan words in italics, whether cited from modern languages (e.g., Yucatec báalam) or transliterated from hieroglyphic inscriptions (Classic Mayan bahlam). See, e.g., Stone and Zender, Reading Maya Art, 4. 19. Houston, “Maya Musk”; Houston and Newman, “Buenos y malos olores,” 63–­65. 20. Stephen Houston, The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 20. 21. Stone and Zender, Reading Maya Art, 136–­37. 22. Hopkins, Josserand, and Guzmán, A Historical Dictionary of Chol, 30. 23. Wisdom, Ch’orti’ Dictionary, 518. 24. See, e.g., Janis B. Alcorn, Huastec Maya Ethnobotany (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 130–­31; William E. Doolittle, “House-­Lot Gardens in the Gran Chichimeca: Ethnographic Cause for Archaeological Concern,” in Gardens of Prehistory: The Archaeology of Settlement Agriculture in Greater Mesoamerica, ed. Thomas W. Killion (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 76–­77; Clarissa T. Kimber, “Spatial Patterning in the Dooryard Gardens of Puerto Rico,” Geographical Review 63, no. 1 (1973): 8; and Olga F. Linares, “ ‘Garden Hunting’ in the American Tropics,” Human Ecology 4, no. 4 (1976): 331–­49. 25. Landa, Relación, ed. León Cázares, 113: “Tenían una portecilla atrás para el servicio necesario.” 26. William T. Sanders and Thomas W. Killion, “Factors Affecting Settlement Agriculture in the Ethnographic and Historic Record of Mesoamerica,” in Gardens of Prehistory: The Ar­­ chaeology of Settlement Agriculture in Greater Mesoamerica, ed. Killion (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 28. 27. Andrew Wyatt, “Pine as an Element of Household Refuse in the Fertilization of Ancient Maya Agricultural Fields,” Journal of Ethnobiology 28, no. 2 (2008): 244–­58; Wyatt, “Agricultural Practices at the Chan Site: Farming and Political Economy in an Ancient Maya Community,” in Chan: An Ancient Maya Farming Community, ed. Cynthia Robin (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 71–­88. 28. Marilyn A. Masson and Carlos Peraza Lope, Kukulcan’s Realm: Urban Life at Ancient Mayapán (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 198. 29. Doolittle, “House-­Lot Gardens in the Gran Chichimeca,” 76. 30. Stephen Houston and Simon Martin, “Through Seeing Stones: Maya Epigraphy as a Mature Discipline,” Antiquity 90, no. 350 (2016): 449; Houston and Takeshi Inomata, The Classic Maya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 145; Houston, Stuart, and Taube, The Memory of Bones, 225. 31. John Monaghan, “Dedication: Ritual or Production?,” in The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication, and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of Mesoamerica, ed. Shirley Boteler Mock (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 48; Monaghan, “Theology and History in the Study of Mesoamerican Religions,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians, Supplement 6, Ethnology, ed. Monaghan (Austin: University of Texas

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Press, 2000), 25–­26. See also Miguel Angel Astor-­Aguilera, The Maya World of Communicating Objects: Quadripartite Crosses, Trees, and Stones (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010). 32. See Terrence G. Kardong, The Rule of St. Benedict: A Translation and Commentary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 384. 33. See William F. Hanks, Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 364. Among modern Tzotzil Maya, the term for “work,” ‘abtel, can refer to ritual work, such as preparing food for a feast, as well as the routine requirements of subsistence practices. Leslie Devereaux, “Gender Difference and Relations of Inequality in Zinacantan,” in Dealing with Inequality: Analyzing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond, ed. Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 93–­94. Allen J. Christenson notes that ritual, like other forms of work, can be both financially and physically difficult for Maya traditionalists. Christenson quotes a K’iche’ Maya ajq’ij, a priest, who describes the task of performing ceremonies as “a heavy, sweet burden.” “We must bear the burden of carrying out our work,” the ajq’ij says, “so that the ancestors may speak to us through our blood and our flesh. This is often very hard.” A. J. Christenson, The Burden of the Ancients: Maya Ceremonies of World Renewal from the Pre-­Columbian Period to the Present (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 15. 34. Astor-­Aguilera, The Maya World of Communicating Objects, xiii. 35. Houston, The Life Within, 79. 36. Monaghan, “Theology and History in Mesoamerican Religions,” 32. See also Patricia McAnany, Ancestral Maya Economies in Archaeological Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­­ versity Press, 2010), 62; and Scott R. Hutson and Travis W. Stanton, “Cultural Logic and Practical Reason: The Structure of Discard in Ancient Maya Houselots,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17, no. 2 (2007): 140. 37. See Fowles, An Archaeology of Doings. See also Mark A. Hall, “The Cult of Saints in Medieval Perth: Everyday Ritual and the Materiality of Belief,” Journal of Material Culture 16, no. 1 (2011): 83–­84. 38. Kaufman with Justeson, A Preliminary Maya Etymological Dictionary, 957. 39. Barrera Vásquez, Diccionario Cordemex, 523, 676; Bolles, Combined Dictionary of Yucatecan Mayan, 3678. Other related words include mes, “fertilizer; trash; garbage; sweepings; sweeping,” in K’iche’ (Allen J. Christenson, K’iche’—­English Dictionary and Guide to Pronunciation of the K’iche’-­Maya Alphabet [(Crystal River, FL: Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, n.d., accessed October 31, 2020], 74, http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/dictionary/chris tenson/quidic_complete.pdf); mehs, “trash, gleanings, sweepings,” in Ch’orti’ (Wisdom, Ch’orti­’ Dictionary, 525); and mez as “a verb that goes in the vocabulary of verbs, but also a noun; sweepings, the trash that is swept, and also the broom are called mez” in colonial Pokom (Lawrence H. Feldman, Pokom Maya and Their Colonial Dictionaries [(Crystal River, FL: Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, 2000], 251, http://www.famsi.org/reports/97022: “este es verbo que pudes en el vocabulario de verbos, y se hace nombre; el de ciervo, las barreduras, la basura que se barre; y tambien a la escoba dicen mez.”) 40. Barrera Vásquez, Diccionario Cordemex, 676. 41. Landa, Relación, ed. León Cázares, 123; Landa, 140: “teniendo limpio y con arcos y frescuras aderezado el camino”; Landa, 142: “teniendo muy limpio y aderezado el camino, iban todos juntos con su acostumbrada devoción.”

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42. Bolles, Combined Dictionary of Yucatecan Mayan, 3676: “Linpiar los caminos quitando la yerba”; “Parte o pertenencia de camino que caue a cada pueblo para limpiar”; and “Pertenecia o parte del camino que cada lugar esta obligado a limpiar.” 43. Garrett Cook and Thomas A. Offit, Ritual Symbols in the K’iche’ Tutelary Deity Complex (Crystal River, FL: Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, 2008), 16, http:// www.famsi.org/reports/07075/index.html. 44. A. J. Christenson, The Burden of the Ancients, 188. 45. Munro S. Edmonson, The Ancient Future of the Itza: The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 35–­36, 100; Gary H. Gossen, “On the Human Condition and the Moral Order: A Testimony from the Chamula Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico,” in South American and Meso-­American Native Spirituality: From the Cult of the Feathered Serpent to the Theology of Liberation, ed. Gossen and Miguel León-­Portilla (New York: Crossroad Pub­ lishing, 1993), 420. 46. H. Wilber Aulie, Evelyn W. de Aulie, and Emily Florence Scharfe de Stairs, Diccionario Ch’ol de Tumbalá, Chiapas, con Variaciones Dialectales de Tila y Sabanilla (Federal District, Mexico: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, A. C., 2009), 58, https://www.sil.org/system/files/reapdata/20 /94/98/20949871321439134057900589989737666899/ctu_diccionario_ed3.pdf: “Información cul­ tural: es parte de una ceremonia. Se dice que cuando un hombre va para que lo cure un curandero, lo primero que este hace es pulsarle la mano para saber cuál es el motivo de su enfermedad. Cuando termina con esto, el curandero ya sabe si el enfermo se ha caído en el agua o en el camino, porque dicen que si alguien se cae, allí se queda su espíritu. Entonces el curandero se va al sitio en donde el hombre se cayó para llamar al espíritu. Se va por el camino, barriendo con ramas para traer al espíritu del hombre que se cayó en el camino.” 47. Nikolai Grube and Werner Nahm, “A Sign for the Syllable mi,” Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 33 (1990): 22. 48. Charles-­Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, Manuscrit Troano, étude sur le système graphique et la langue des Mayas (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1869–­1870), 112, http://www.famsi.org/maya writing/codices/madrid.html, http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/codices/pdf/madrid_rosny_bb .pdf. 49. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 117–­24; Louise M. Burkhart, “Mexica Women on the Home Front: Housework and Religion in Aztec Mexico,” in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephan Wood, and Robert Stephen Haskett (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 34; DiCesare, Sweeping the Way. 50. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 2, 199. 51. Francis F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, The Codex Mendoza, Volume 2: Description of Codex Mendoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 173. 52. Berdan and Rieff Anawalt, Codex Mendoza, Volume 2, 148. 53. Alan R. Sandstrom, Corn Is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 311. 54. Hull, “An Abbreviated Dictionary of Ch’orti’ Maya,” 32. 55. Andrea Stone, Images from the Underworld: Naj Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave Painting (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 23. Contemporary Yucatec Maya also see sub­ surface soils as hollow but conceive of the space below ground as a womb from which humans and other forms of life are born, rather than as a cave or portal. Narciso Barrera-­Bassols and Victor Manuel Toledo, “Ethnoecology of the Yucatec Maya: Symbolism, Knowledge and

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Man­­agement of Natural Resources,” Journal of Latin American Geography 4, no. 1 (2005): 26–­28. Related notions of the earth as a womb from which human and vegetative life springs forth are reflected in much of Mesoamerican creation mythology. In the K’iche’ Maya oral history known as the Popol Vuh, the earth represents the birthplace of plants and people. As the translator Dennis Tedlock puts it: “There is the sowing of seeds in the earth, whose sprouting will be their dawning. . . . Then there is the matter of human beings, whose sowing in the womb will be followed by their emergence into the light at birth, and whose sowing in the earth at death will be followed by dawning when their souls become sparks of light in the darkness.” Tedlock, Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 31. See also Allen J. Christenson, trans., Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya, Volume 1: The Great Classic of Central American Spirituality, Translated from the Original Maya Text (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 60. 56. See, e.g., Dominique Rissolo, “Maya Cave Shrines along the Central Coast of Quintana Roo,” AMCS Activities Newsletter 27 (2004): 57–­59. 57. Marshall Joseph Becker, “Earth Offering among the Classic Period Lowland Maya: Burials and Caches as Ritual Deposits,” in Perspectivas antropológicas en el mundo maya, ed. Maria Josefa Iglesias and Francisco de Asís Ligorred Perramón (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Estudios Mayas, 1993), 67–­68. Such relations of “feeding” characterized ancient Maya sacrificial practices, but also resonate with contemporary ethnographic observations across Mesoamerica, which describe obligations to “feed” everything from ancestors to animals to altars with offerings. See, e.g., Davíd Carrasco, City of Sacrifice (Boston: Beacon, 1999); Allen Christenson, “Maize Was Their Flesh: Ritual Feasting in the Maya Highlands,” in Pre-­Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Ap­­ proaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica, ed. John E. Staller and Michael Carrasco (Springer: New York, 2010), 577–­600; Houston, The Life Within, 79; Monaghan, “The­ ology and History in Mesoamerican Religions,” 32–­39; John Monaghan, “Sacrifice, Death, and the Origins of Agriculture in the Codex Vienna,” American Antiquity 55, no. 3 (1990): 559–­69; Charles Wagley, Social and Religious Life of a Guatemalan Village, Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, no. 71 (Menasha, WI: American Anthropological Association, 1949); and Alonso Zamora Corona, “Coyote Drums and Jaguar Altars: Ontologies of the Living and the Artificial among the K’iche’ Maya,” Journal of Material Culture 25, no. 3 (2020): 333–­34. 58. Eleanor Harrison-­Buck, “Nourishing the Animus of Lived Space through Ritual Catching,” in K’axob: Ritual, Work, and Family in an Ancient Maya Village, Monumenta Archaeologica 22, ed. Patricia A. McAnany (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, 2004); Patricia A. McAnany, “Practices of Place-­Making, Ancestralizing, and Re-­animation within Memory Com­­ munities,” Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 20, no. 1 (2011): 139–­40. 59. Robert S. Carlsen, The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 52. 60. A. J. Christenson, The Burden of the Ancients, 275. 61. Evon Z. Vogt, Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 461–­65. Very similar practices have been observed among Maya communities in northern Yucatán and among Ch’ol Mayan speakers in Chiapas as well. See Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas, Chan Kom: A Maya Village (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 146–­47; and Arabelle Whittaker and Viola Warkentin, Chol

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Texts on the Supernatural, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields 13 (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1965), 79–­84. 62. David Stuart, “ ‘The Fire Enters His House’: Architecture and Ritual in Classic Maya Texts,” in Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, ed. Stephen D. Houston (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998), 394. 63. Duncan M. Earle, “The Metaphor of the Day in Quiche: Notes on the Nature of Everyday Life,” in Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community: Essays in Mesoamerican Ideas, ed. Gary H. Gossen (Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, University at Albany, State University of New York, 1986), 163. Intriguingly, k’as also has deep roots in connection to broken things. Kaufman, A Preliminary Maya Etymological Dictionary, 142–­43. 64. Earle, “The Metaphor of the Day in Quiche,” 172. 65. McAnany, Ancestral Maya Economies, 67. 66. Monaghan, “Theology and History in Mesoamerican Religions,” 38. 67. Houston, Stuart, and Taube, The Memory of Bones, 125; Stone and Zender, Reading Maya Art, 157. 68. See, e.g., descriptions and analyses of burned infant remains, offered in lip-­to-­lip cache vessels and burned atop altars before being placed within the burial chamber of the dynastic founder of the ancient city of El Zotz, in Stephen D. Houston, Sarah Newman, et al., Temple of the Night Sun: A Royal Tomb at El Diablo, Guatemala (San Francisco: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, 2015). 69. Stone and Zender, Reading Maya Art, 155. 70. For the use of this ancient couplet in colonial Spanish translations of complex Christian doctrinal concepts such as God’s greatness, see Sparks, The Americas’ First Theologies, 92; see also chapter 3. 71. Stone and Zender, Reading Maya Art, 123. 72. Stone and Zender, 157. 73. Karl A. Taube, “The Birth Vase: Natal Imagery in Ancient Maya Art and Ritual,” in The Maya Vase Book, Vol. 4, ed. Justin Kerr (New York: Kerr Associates, 1994), 659; Karl A. Taube, “The Jade Hearth: Centrality, Rulership, and the Classic Maya Temple,” in Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, ed. Stephen D. Houston (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998), 429–­32. 74. Stuart, “ ‘The Fire Enters His House,’ ” 417–­18. 75. Stone and Zender, Reading Maya Art, 69. 76. Stone and Zender, 69. 77. See, e.g., stela 4 from Ixtutz, Guatemala, and the transliteration, transcription, and trans­ lation in Harri Kettunen and Christophe Helmke, Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs, Wayeb, 2019, 30, https://www.wayeb.org/wp-­content/uploads/2019/04/wh2019english.pdf. 78. David Stuart, “The Hieroglyphic Stairway at El Reinado, Guatemala,” Mesoweb, 2012, 5, www.mesoweb.com/stuart/Reinado.pdf. 79. Houston and Martin, “Through Seeing Stones,” 449. See also Houston and Inomata, The Classic Maya, 145; and Houston, Stuart, and Taube, The Memory of Bones, 225. 80. Dennis Tedlock, Rabinal Achí: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 181. 81. Hanks, Referential Practice, 354. 82. Hanks, 361–­80.

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83. Kay Almere Read, Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ versity Press, 1998), 145. 84. Read, Time and Sacrifice, 135–­37. 85. Federico Gómez de Orozco, ed., “Costumbres, Fiestas, Enterramientos, y Diversas Formas de Proceder de los Indios de Nueva España,” Tlalocan 2 (1945): 62–­63: “Tenian gran cuenta que de cinquenta y dos en cinquenta y dos años, apagauan todo el fuego que no quedaua ninguno en toda la tierra y quebrauan todas las ollas y cantaros que auian seruido y los comales y vasijas que tenian todo lo quebrauan y este dia yuan a un cu. . . . Y alli sacauan lumbre nueua y se rrepartia por toda la tierra . . . y quemauan delante del demonio que se dize xutectle encienso y papel.” 86. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 7, 25. 87. Sahagún, 27. 88. Sahagún, 29. 89. Sahagún, 31. 90. Jan de Vos, La Paz de Dios y del Rey: La Conquista de la Selva Lacandona (1525–­1821) (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 182: “Los principales que celebran esta fiesta son los caciques y otros cuatro principales; los dichos caciques se embriagan con una agua, que hacen de piña y cañas dulces; y entran como rayos en el pueblo, y la gente huye al monte, dejando al lado del fogón, en su casa, un jarro de agua, y no queda en todo el pueblo más que los caciques embriagados, en la casa de los ídolos; y los cuatro principales, que no se embriagan, van por todas las casas, apagando el fuego, echando dicho jarro de agua encima ; y dichos cuatro cuidan que continuamente arda mucho fuego delante de los ídolos, quemando continuamente mucho copal, cuidando de cuando en cuando de cebar la borrachera de los caciques, dándoles de la dicha agua, para que no dejen de ser rayos o borrachos, por todos los cuatro días que dura esta solemnidad de los rayos; al otro día los cuatro, vuelven todos a su casa, mata cada cual su güegüecho, derraman la sangre sobre ocote, llévanlo a quemar los ídolos, y piden a los caciques (que ya pasó su embriaguez) fuego nuevo, y de allí llegan todos fuego a sus casas y cuecen sus gallinas y comen y beben y celebran su gran fiesta, con la librea ordinaria del tizne.” 91. Contemporary New Fire ceremonies may also be heavily Christianized, recalling the mutual transformations effected by conversion highlighted throughout chapter 3. The ongoing annual event of the Quema del diablo in Antigua, Guatemala, with which that chapter begins, is one such example. In another, Christenson describes the creation of New Fire as the major ceremony on the Saturday of Holy Week in contemporary Santiago Atitlán, in highland Guatemala. A newly created flame must be used, rather than a preexisting one, to light all the candles and incense burners in the church. In the modern ceremony, all the electric lights in the church are turned off immediately beforehand—­the only time that the area is cast into absolute darkness. A bonfire is assembled and lit in the plaza beyond the church, the striking of the new fire symbolizing Christ’s rebirth and the restoration of light and life in the world. The flames of the bonfire are used to light a large candle, which a priest blesses and calls “the beginning and the end.” The priest climbs the steps of the church and uses the candle to light the unlit ones held by the Atitecos closest to him, who in turn light the candles of their neighbors, creating the illusion of a cascade of light flowing through the plaza, illuminating the darkness. A. J. Christenson, The Burden of the Ancients, 330–­32. 92. A. J. Christenson, The Burden of the Ancients, 27. 93. Christina M. Elson and Michael E. Smith, “Archaeological Deposits from the Aztec New Fire Ceremony,” Ancient Mesoamerica 12 (2001): 171. See also Sanders, “Tenochtitlan in 1519,” 72–­73.

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94. William L. Fash, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Barbara W. Fash, “The House of New Fire at Teotihuacan and Its Legacy in Mesoamerica,” in The Art of Urbanism: How Mesoamerican Kings Represented Themselves in Architecture and Imagery, ed. Fash and Leonardo López Luján (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2009), 207–­11. See also Karl A. Taube, “Structure 10L-­16 and Its Early Classic Antecedents: Fire and the Evocation and Resurrection of K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’,” in Understanding Early Classic Copan, ed. Ellen Bell, Marcelo A. Canuto, and Robert J. Sharer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2004), 268. 95. A. J. Christenson, Popol Vuh, 66–­89. 96. Jeffrey Quilter, “The Moche Revolt of the Objects,” Latin American Antiquity 1, no. 1 (1990): 44. The “Revolt of the Objects” is a useful shortening of Walter Krickeberg’s earlier name for the story, “The Saga of the Rebellion of Human Utensils against their Masters.” See Walter Krickeberg, “Mexikanisch-­peruanische Parallelen, Ein Überblick und eine Ergänzung,” in Festschrift: Publication d’Hommage offerte au P. W. Schmidt, ed. Wilhelm Koppers (Vienna: Mechitharisten-­Congregations-­Buchdruckerei, 1928), 386. 97. Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste, eds., The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 53. 98. See, e.g., Catherine J. Allen “When Utensils Revolt: Mind, Matter, and Modes of Being in the Pre-­Columbian Andes,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 33 (1998): 18–­27; and Monaghan, “Dedication: Ritual or Production?” 99. The concept of k’u or ch’u (its pronunciation depends on the particular Mayan language in which it appears) connotes “sacred entity,” also meaning “holy, sacred, divine” when used in adjective form as k’ul or ch’ul. Stephen Houston and David Stuart, “Of Gods, Glyphs, and Kings: Divinity and Rulership among the Classic Maya,” Antiquity 70 (1996): 291–­92. 100. Houston, The Life Within, 78; John M. Watanabe, Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). 101. Vogt, Zinacantan, 370–­7 1. 102. See examples in Astor-­Aguilera, The Maya World of Communicating Objects; Eleanor Harrison-­Buck, “Architecture as Animate Landscape: Circular Shrines in the Ancient Maya Low­ lands,” American Anthropologist 114, no. 1 (2012): 64–­80; and Houston, The Life Within. 103. Vogt, Zinacantan, 371. 104. Houston, The Life Within, 79. 105. J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya Archaeologist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 199. 106. Vincent Stanzione, Rituals of Sacrifice: Walking the Face of the Earth on the Sacred Path of the Sun (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 56. 107. Eugene R. Craine and Reginald Carl Reindorp, Codex Perez and the Book of Chilam Balam (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 170. 108. Davíd Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovision and Ceremonial Centers (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 48–­53. This is not a uniquely Mesoamerican perspective. As the Andean art historian Catherine Allen states, “Time moves in fits and starts. Periodically, the sun is blotted out; everything goes crazy, turns backwards or inside out, and then gets washed away, burned up, or buried. The old order gives way and makes room for new worlds, new suns, and new people. In these moments of cosmic liminality, utensils and domestic animals turn on their human masters.” C. J. Allen, “When Utensils Revolt,” 18. 109. A. J. Christenson, The Burden of the Ancients, 3.

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110. Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 320–­43. According to the ethnographer Allen Christenson, “Nearly every major modern Maya ceremony is founded in one way or another on the concept of rebirth and renewal.” A. J. Christenson, The Burden of the Ancients, 3. 111. Girard cited in Enrique Florescano, “La visión del cosmos de los indígenas actuales,” Desacatos 5 (2000): fig. 4. 112. The Métis archaeologist Kisha Supernant has demonstrated the productive potential of constructing theoretical and methodological frameworks for archaeology rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing, ways of being, and ways of life. Supernant draws on the voyager sash—­an object made of threads woven together by finger weaving and an important contemporary symbol in Métis communities—­as a metaphor to rethink Métis history in terms of interwoven rela­ tional understandings. Supernant, “From Hybridity to Relationality: Shifting Perspectives on the Archaeology of Métis Emergence,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-­ Colonial Interaction in the Americas, ed. Lee M. Panich and Sara L. Gonzalez (London: Routledge, 2021), 362–­63. Chapter Six 1. Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1976), 135. 2. David Topper, “On Anamorphosis: Setting Some Things Straight,” Leonardo 33, no. 2 (2000): 115. 3. Bruno Latour, “Opening One Eye While Closing the Other . . . a Note on Some Religious Paintings,” Sociological Review 35, no. S1 (1987): 18–­19. 4. Latour, “Opening One Eye,” 16. 5. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 231. 6. Gavin Lucas, The Archaeology of Time (New York: Routledge, 2005), 130. 7. Lucas, The Archaeology of Time, 127–­30. 8. Houston, Newman, et al., Temple of the Night Sun. 9. Two carbon samples from the assemblage returned AMS dates of 1150 ± 40 BP, or cal 780–­980 CE (2σ, Beta-­265819), and 1130 ± 40 BP, or cal 780–­1000 CE (2σ, Beta-­265280). Sarah Newman, Jose Luis Garrido, and Nicholas P. Carter, “Collapse, Continuity, Change: El Zotz in the Terminal Classic Period,” in An Inconstant Landscape: The Archaeology of El Zotz, Guatemala, ed. Thomas G. Garrison and Stephen Houston (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2018), table 1.1; on the recurved stela and other Period Ending celebrations, see 120–­24. 10. The full extent of the assemblage remains unknown: artifacts were primarily recovered from excavation units along the central axis and in a small, restricted patio area immediately to the south of Structure L7–­1, the building forming the western edge of the acropolis at El Zotz. In total, however, excavations in Structure L7–­1 recovered 5,255 ceramic sherds, 427 lithic objects, 377 animal remains, 78 fragments of marine shell, 54 human remains, and 31 figurines from the assemblage. All items were excavated using a thirty-­five-­by-­thirty-­five-­centimeter (roughly fourteen-­by-­fourteen-­inch) grid. See Sarah Newman, “Rubbish, Reuse, and Ritual at the Ancient Maya Site of El Zotz, Guatemala,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 26 (2019): fig. 1 and table 1. See also Griselda Pérez Robles, Fabiola Quiroa Flores, and Stephen Houston, “Operación 2: Excavaciones en la Acrópolis,” in Proyecto Arqueológico “El Zotz” Informe No. 4, Temporada 2009, ed. Pérez Robles, Edwin Román, and Houston (Guatemala City: Institute of

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Anthropology and History, 2010), 37–­43, 45–­47, https://www.mesoweb.com/zotz/El-­Zotz-­2009 .pdf; Elizabeth Marroquín, Jose Luis Garrido, and Houston, “Operación 2: Excavaciones en la Acrópolis,” in Proyecto Arqueológico El Zotz: Informe Preliminar No. 5, Temporada 2010, ed. Jose Luis Garrido López, Stephen Houston, and Edwin Román (Guatemala City: Institute of An­­ thropology and History, 2011), 39–­42, 48–­50; https://www.mesoweb.com/zotz/El-­Zotz-­2010.pdf; and Newman, “Limpieza de saqueos en la Acrópolis de El Zotz (Operación 22),” in Proyecto Arqueológico El Zotz, Informe No. 7, Temporada 2012, ed. Jose Luis Garrido López et al. (Guatemala City: Institute of Anthropology and History, 2013), 108–­9, https://www.mesoweb.com/zotz/El -­Zotz-­2012.pdf. 11. See reviews of the various labels and interpretations offered for such complex deposits in James J. Aimers, Julie A. Hoggarth, and Jaime J. Awe, “Decoding the Archaeological Significance of the Problematic Deposits in the Maya Lowlands,” Ancient Mesoamerica 31, no. 1 (2020): 67–­75; and Newman, “Rubbish, Reuse, and Ritual at El Zotz,” 811–­13. Specific examples of the variety of terms used include problematical deposits: William R. Coe, Excavations in the Great Plaza, North Terrace and North Acropolis of Tikal (Group 5D-­2), Tikal Reports no. 14 (Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1990), 930–­39 (see also Hattula Moholy-­Nagy, “Problematical Deposits at Tikal, Guatemala: Content, Context, and Intent,” Ancient Mesoamerica 31, no. 1 [2020]: 47–­63); and Mary E. Clarke et al., “Revisiting the Past: Material Negotiations between the Classic Maya and an Entombed Sweat Bath at Xultun, Guatemala,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 31, no. 1 (2021), 68; terminal offerings: William R. Coe, Piedras Negras Archaeology: Artifacts, Caches, and Burials (Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1959), 94–­95; destructive event deposits: Brett A. Houk, “Life, the Universe, and Everything: Re-­ evaluating Problematic Deposit 2 from Dos Hombres, Belize,” in The 1998 and 1999 Seasons of the Chan Chich Archaeological Project, ed. Houk (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 141–­50; transposed ritual middens: James F. Garber et al., “Bloody Bowls and Broken Pots: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Maya House,” in The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication, and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of Mesoamerica, ed. Shirley B. Mock (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 125–­34; de facto refuse: Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase, “Terminal Classic Status-­Linked Ceramics and the Maya ‘Collapse’: De Facto Refuse at Caracol, Belize,” in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation, ed. Arthur A. Demarest, Prudence M. Rice, and Don S. Rice (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004), 342–­66; Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase, “Texts and Contexts in Classic Maya Warfare: A Brief Consideration of Epigraphy and Archaeology at Caracol, Belize,” in Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare, ed. M. Kathryn Brown and Travis W. Stanton (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003), 171–­88; violent terminal events: E. Wyllys Andrews V and Barbara W. Fash, “Continuity and Change in a Royal Residential Complex at Copán,” Ancient Mesoamerica 3, no. 1 (1992): 86; unusual accumulations: Enrique Nalda and Sandra Balanzario, Kohunlich: Acumulaciones Inusuales y Figurillas (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2011);

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n o t e t o pa g e 1 4 3 desecratory termination ritual deposits: M. Kathryn Brown and James F. Garber, “Evidence of Conflict during the Middle Preclassic in the Maya Lowlands: A View from Blackman Eddy, Belize,” in Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare, ed. Brown and Travis W. Stanton (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003), 91–­108, Jonathan B. Pagliaro, James F. Garber, and Stanton, “Evaluating the Archaeological Signatures of Maya Ritual and Conflict,” in Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare, ed. Brown and Stanton (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003), 75–­89; Stanton and Brown, “Studying Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare,” in Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare, ed. Brown and Stanton (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003), 1–­16, Stanton and Tomás Gallareta Negrón, “Warfare, Ceramic Economy, and the Itza: A Reconsideration of the Itza Polity in Ancient Yucatan,” Ancient Mesoamerica 12 (2001): 229–­45; and Stanton, Brown, and Jonathan B. Pagliaro, “Garbage of the Gods? Squatters, Refuse Disposal, and Termination Rituals among the Ancient Maya,” Latin American Antiquity 19, no. 3 (2008): 227–­47; termination deposits: James N. Ambrosino, “Warfare and Destruction in the Maya Lowlands: Pattern and Process in the Archaeological Record of Yaxuna, Yucatan, Mexico” (PhD diss., Southern Methodist University, 2007); M. Kathryn Brown, “Emerging Complexity in the Maya Lowlands: A View from Blackman Eddy, Belize” (PhD diss., Southern Methodist University, 2003); William N. Duncan, “Understanding Veneration and Violation in the Archaeological Record,” in Interacting with the Dead: Perspectives on Mortuary Archaeology for the New Millennium, ed. Jane E. Buikstra et al. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 207–­27; James F. Garber, “Patterns of Jade Consumption and Disposal at Cerros, Northern Belize,” American Antiquity 48 (1983): 800–­807; Takeshi Inomata, “War, Destruction, and Abandonment: The Fall of the Classic Maya Center of Aguateca, Guatemala,” in The Archaeology of Settlement Abandonment in Mesoamerica, ed. Inomata and Ronald W. Webb (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003), 43–­60; Shirley Boteler Mock, “Prelude,” in The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication, and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of Mesoamerica, ed. Mock (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 3–­18; and Olivia C. Navarro-­Farr, “Ritual, Process, and Continuity in the Late to Terminal Classic Transition: Investigations at Structure M13–­1 in the Ancient Maya Site of El Perú-­Waka’, Petén, Guatemala” (PhD diss., Southern Methodist University, 2009); above-­floor deposits or surface deposits: Olivia C. Navarro-­Farr and Ana Lucía Arroyave Prera, “A Cumulative Palimpsest Effect: The Multilayered Meanings of Late-­to-­ Terminal Classic Era, Above-­Floor Deposits at Structure M13–­1,” in Archaeology at El Perú-­Waka’: Ancient Maya Performances of Ritual, Memory, and Power, ed. Navarro-­ Farr and Michelle Rich (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 34–­52; squatters’ refuse: David M. Pendergast, Excavations at Altun Ha, Belize, 1964–­1970, Vol. 1 (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1979); and Pendergast, “Intercessions with the Gods: Caches and Their Significance at Altun Ha and Lamanai Belize,” in The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication, and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of Mesoamerica, ed. Shirley B. Mock (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 55–­63; pilgrimage deposits: Aimers, Hoggarth, and Awe, “Decoding the Archaeological Significance,” 72–­73; or simply domestic refuse or middens: T. Patrick Culbert, “The Maya Downfall at Tikal,” in The Classic Maya Collapse, ed. Culbert (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico

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Press, 1973), 63–­92; Culbert, “The Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization,” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), 69–­101; Peter D. Harrison, The Lords of Tikal: Rulers of an Ancient Maya City (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000). 12. For example, a special section of the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, published in 2020, was devoted explicitly to “Problematic ‘On-­Floor’ Deposits in the Terminal Classic Eastern Maya Lowlands: Implications for the Maya Collapse.” Across ten papers, contributors reviewed the history of problematical deposits (and questioned the continued use of the term), provided detailed examples from multiple sites, and analyzed specific artifact classes recovered (e.g., faunal remains, lithics). See Nancy Gonlin and William R. Fowler, “Introduction,” Ancient Mesoamerica 31, no. 1 (2020): 65–­66. 13. W. R. Coe, Piedras Negras Archaeology, 94. 14. W. R. Coe, Excavations in the Great Plaza, 930–­39. Hattula Moholy-­Nagy asserts that the PD category arose from Coe’s earlier excavations at Piedras Negras, where he encountered specially deposited material that he could not comfortably describe as either a burial or a cache. Moholy-­Nagy, “Problematical Deposits at Tikal,” 47. For example, Coe had coined the phrase terminal offering in 1959 to refer to one such deposit from Piedras Negras: a find featuring the sherds of two large, incomplete, open-­base, vertical-­flange censers, scattered around a column altar and associated with the abandonment of Structure K-­5–­2nd, which he found “curious.” Coe noted specifically that he did not consider the cached vessels a dedicatory offering in connection with Structure K-­5–­1st-­C (by Mayanist conventions, the ordinal numbers indicate that K-­5–­1st-­C was constructed atop K-­5–­2nd with much the same floor plan, sometimes even with shared basal terraces), because they were not interred as whole objects. Rather, large portions of the vessels were missing despite careful clearing. Coe saw their internment as “an example of ceremonial object-­sacrifice at the moment of a structure’s abandonment,” with strong suggestions of “rituals of renewal.” He also described this find as “a seemingly rare custom in the lowlands, or, perhaps better, a custom rarely detected there.” W. R. Coe, Piedras Negras Archaeology, 94–­95. 15. W. R. Coe, 930. 16. Hattula Moholy-­Nagy, “Problematical Deposits at Tikal,” 47. 17. Problematical deposits are also not clearly distinguished from other typological categories used to designate complex assemblages of fragmented materials or processes of abandonment, especially in geographical areas other than Mesoamerica, where the concept of a “problematical deposit” is not recognized (see, e.g., J. C. Chapman, Fragmentation in Archaeology; and Catherine M. Cameron and Steve A. Tomka, eds., Abandonment of Settlements and Regions: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Approaches [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996]). In the American Southwest, for example, archaeologists often find kiva structures intentionally burned and filled with human and faunal remains; unbroken ceramic vessels and pot sherds; lithic flakes; ground stone fragments; shell beads; and other items. In the regional vernacular, these are variably described as evidence of “decommissioning” (e.g., Sarah H. Schlanger and Richard H. Wilshusen, “Local abandonment and regional conditions in the North American Southwest,” in Abandonment of Settlements and Regions: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Approaches, ed. Catherine M. Cameron and Steve A. Tonka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 93–­94) as ritual “closure” (e.g., E. Charles Adams and Vincent M. LaMotta, “New Perspectives on Ancient Religion: Katsina Ritual and the Archaeological Record,” in Religion in

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the Prehispanic Southwest, ed. Christine S. VanPool et al. [Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2006], 560; and Scott Van Keuren and Christopher I. Roos, “Geoarchaeological Evidence for Ritual Closure of a Kiva at Fourmile Ruin, Arizona,” Journal of Archaeological Science 40, no. 1 [2013]: 615–­25); or as “kratophanous,” “sacrificial,” or “ceremonial trash” deposits associated with a building’s abandonment (e.g., Walker, “Ceremonial Trash?”; and William H. Walker, “Ritual Deposits: Another Perspective,” in River of Change: Prehistory of the Middle Little Colorado River Valley, ed. E. Charles Adams, Arizona State Museum Archaeological Series 185 [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996], 75–­91). 18. According to Nancy Gonlin and William Fowler, archaeologists working in Belize “are partial to the term ‘problematic deposit’ ” rather than “problematical deposit.” Gonlin and Fowler, “Introduction,” 65. 19. Aimers, Hoggarth, and Awe, “Decoding the Archaeological Significance,” table 1. The list of material and chronological correlates provided by Aimers and his colleagues draws on categories of evidence proposed for desecratory and reverential termination deposits elsewhere. See, e.g., Olivia C. Navarro-­Farr, “Dynamic Transitions at El Perú-­Waka’: Late Terminal Classic Ritual Repurposing of a Monumental Shrine,” in Ritual, Violence, and the Fall of the Classic Maya Kings, ed. Gyles Iannone, Brett A. Houk, and Sonja A. Schwake (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), table 11.2. Maxime Lamoureux-­St-­Hilaire and Andrew Kent Snetsinger have proposed an alternative typology, specific to abandonment-­related assemblages, that also considers contextual information and stratigraphic relationships among artifacts. Lamoureux-­St-­Hilaire and Snetsinger, “Explaining Variability in On-­Floor Assemblages: The Behavioral-­Contextual Method,” Ancient Mesoamerica, 31, no. 1 (2020): table 1. 20. Moholy-­Nagy, “Problematical Deposits at Tikal,” 52. 21. Julie L. Kunen, Mary Jo Galindo, and Erin Chase, “Pits and Bones: Identifying Maya Ritual Behavior in the Archaeological Record,” Ancient Mesoamerica 13 (2002): 199. 22. Aimers, Hoggarth, and Awe, “Decoding the Archaeological Significance,” 71. See also David A. Freidel, “Sacred Work: Dedication and Termination in Mesoamerica,” in The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethno­ graphic Record in Mesoamerica, ed. Shirley B. Mock (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 189. 23. Moholy-­Nagy, “Problematical Deposits at Tikal,” 48, 61. 24. See, e.g., Patricia McAnany, Living with the Ancestors: Kinship and Kinship in Ancient Maya Society (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 51. 25. As an act of termination: see, e.g., M. K. Brown and Garber, “Evidence of Conflict,” 92–­93; W. R. Coe, Piedras Negras Archaeology, 94–­95; and Pagliaro et al., “Evaluating the Ar­ chaeological Signatures,” 77. As an act of (re)dedication: see, e.g., Lamoureux-­St-­Hilaire and Snetsinger, “Explaining Variability,” 101. 26. See Freidel, “Sacred Work,” 192. 27. Cf. William Y. Adams and Ernest W. Adams, Archaeological Typology and Practical Reality: A Dialectical Approach to Artifact Classification and Sorting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 4. 28. Lorraine Daston, “The Coming into Being of Scientific Objects,” in Biographies of Sci­­ entific Objects, ed. Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 5. 29. Michel O’Brien and R. Lee Lyman have made a similar argument with respect to the “Clovis point” used by archaeologists working in North America, which both lacks definitive criteria and is dependent on a limited set of specimens available for examination. O’Brien and

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Lyman, “The Epistemological Nature of Archaeological Units,” Anthropological Theory 2, no. 1 (2002): 42. 30. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), as well as similar and regionally specific critiques in Kathryn Fewster, “The Responsibilities of Ethnoarchaeologists,” in The Responsibilities of Archaeologists: Archaeology and Ethics, ed. Mark Pluciennik, British Archaeological Reports 981 (Oxford: Ar­­ chaeopress, 2001), 65–­73; Yannis Hamilakis, “Archaeological Ethnography: A Multi-­temporal Meeting Ground for Archaeology and Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011), 399–­414; Brian Hayden, “Are Emic Types Relevant to Archaeology?,” Ethnohistory 31, no. 2 (1984): 79–­92; Bill Sillar and Gabriel Ramón Joffré, “Using the Present to Interpret the Past: The Role of Ethnographic Studies in Andean Archaeology,” World Archaeology 48, no. 5 (2016): 656–­73; and Alison Wylie, “The Reaction against Analogy,” Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8 (1985): 63–­111. 31. Cristóbal Gnecco and Carl Langebaek, “Introduction: Against Typological Tyranny,” in Against Typological Tyranny in Archaeology, ed. Gnecco and Langebaek (New York: Springer, 2014), vi. 32. Becker, “Earth Offering”; Duncan Garrow, “Reply to Responses,” Archaeological Dialogues 19, no. 2 (2012): 134–­35. 33. The assemblage at El Zotz was excavated and analyzed as part of the El Zotz Archaeological Project (Phase 1), under the direction of Stephen Houston and Thomas Garrison. The dense deposits in the palace were first discovered and excavated during the 2009 field season by Griselda Pérez Robles. Continued excavations in the palace were carried out in 2010, led by Elizabeth Marroquín, followed by my own excavations in 2012. I analyzed the materials recovered from all palace excavations between 2012 and 2014. See Sarah Newman, “Rethinking Refuse: A History of Maya Trash” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2015), 206–­12. 34. For additional analyses and data, including figures and tables, see Newman, “Rethinking Refuse”; and Newman, “Rubbish, Reuse, and Ritual at El Zotz.” 35. For related arguments about the limitations of refuse types in understanding how materials enter the archaeological record, see Alan P. Sullivan III, “Inference and Evidence in Archaeology: A Discussion of the Conceptual Problems,” Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 1 (1978): 183–­222. James Morris and Ben Jervis argue that the values held by a community guide all depositional practices, a fact masked by imposing a ritual/rubbish dichotomy. J. Morris and Jervis, “What’s So Special? A Reinterpretation of Anglo-­Saxon ‘Special Deposits,’ ” Medieval Archaeology 55, no. 1 (2011): 70. 36. For similar critiques—­specifically, of the frequent use of “ritual” as both a description and an explanation in confronting complex archaeological assemblages—­see, among others, John C. Chapman, “Structured Deposition Meets Deliberate Object Fragmentation,” Archaeological Dialogues 19, no. 2 (2012), 129–­33; David Fontijn, “Meaningful but Beyond Words? Interpreting Material Culture Patterning,” Archaeological Dialogues 19, no. 2 (2012): 124–­27; Garrow, “Odd Deposits and Average Practice”; Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology 31, no. 2 (1999): 169–­78; Ben Jervis, “Middens, Memory, and the Effect of Waste: Beyond Symbolic Meaning in Archaeological Deposits: An Early Medieval Case Study,” Archaeological Dialogues 21, no. 2 (2014): 175–­96; J. Morris and Jervis, “What’s So Special?”; and Edward Swenson, “The Archaeology of Ritual,” Annual Review of Archaeology 44 (2015): 329–­45. 37. Diana C. Crader, “The Zooarchaeology of the Storehouse and the Dry Well at Monticello,”

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American Antiquity 49, no. 3 (1984): 548; Sandra L. Olsen and Pat Shipman, “Surface Modification on Bone: Trampling versus Butchery,” Journal of Archaeological Science 15 (1988): 535–­53; Peter W. Stahl and James A. Zeidler, “Differential Bone-­Refuse Accumulation in Food-­Preparation and Traffic Areas on an Early Ecuadorian House Floor,” Latin American Antiquity 1, no. 2 (1990): 150–­69; Hind Sadek-­Kooros, “Primitive Bone Fracturing: A Method of Research,” American Antiquity 37, no. 3 (1972): 369–­82; Sadek-­Kooros, “Intentional Fracturing of Bone: Description of Criteria,” in Archaeozoological Studies, ed. Antje Trientje Clason (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1975), 139–­41. 38. See Newman, “Rubbish, Reuse, and Ritual at El Zotz,” table 3. Production stages are based on Kitty F. Emery, “Techniques of Ancient Maya Bone Working: Evidence from a Classic Maya Deposit,” Latin American Antiquity 19, no. 2 (2008): 211–­16. 39. Sarah E. Newman, “Applications of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to the Study of Bone Surface Modifications,” Journal of Archaeological Science 53 (2015): 536–­49. 40. Halperin and Foias, “Pottery Politics,” 402; Sandra L. López Varela, Annelou van Gijn, and Loe Jacobs, “De-­mystifying Pottery Production in the Maya Lowlands: Detection of Traces of Use-­Wear on Pottery Sherds through Microscopic Analysis and Experimental Replication,” Journal of Archaeological Science 29 (2002): 1133–­47. 41. See Michael Deal and Melissa B. Hagstrum, “Ceramic Reuse Behavior among the Maya and Wanka: Implications for Archaeology,” in Agency in Archeology, ed. Marcia Ann Dobres and John E. Robb (London: Routledge, 2000), fig. 9.14; and James M. Skibo, Understanding Pottery Function (New York: Springer, 2013), 149. 42. See Patricia Plunket and Gabriela Uruñuela, “From Episodic to Permanent Abandon­ ment: Response to Volcanic Hazards at Tetimpa, Puebla, Mexico,” in The Archaeology of Settle­ ment Abandonment in Middle America, ed. Takeshi Inomata and Ronald W. Webb (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003), 16; Michael B. Schiffer and James M. Skibo, “A Provisional Theory of Ceramic Abrasion,” American Anthropologist 91, no. 1 (March 1989): 101–­15; and Skibo, Understanding Pottery Function, 120–­22. 43. Terry O’Connor, The Archaeology of Animal Bones (College Station: Texas A&M Uni­ versity Press, 2008), 48. 44. William D. Haglund and Marcella H. Sorg, eds., Forensic Taphonomy: The Postmortem Fate of Human Remains (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1997), 411. 45. See Newman, “Rubbish, Reuse, and Ritual at El Zotz,” table 4, which is based on descriptions provided by Pat Shipman, Giraud Foster, and Margaret Schoeninger, “Burnt Bones and Teeth: An Experimental Study of Color, Morphology, Crystal Structure, and Shrinkage,” Journal of Archaeological Science 11 (1984): 312–­14; criteria used by Mary C. Stiner et al., “Dif­ferential Burning, Recrystallization, and Fragmentation of Archaeological Bone,” Journal of Archaeological Science 22 (1995): 226; and some modifications following more recent studies, including Brent Buenger, “The Impact of Wildland and Prescribed Fire on Archaeological Resources” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2003), 29–­30, 133–­70; and Takeshi Inomata, “Fire Intensity Assessment through the Analysis of Artifacts and Building Materials: Burning and Abandonment at the Classic Maya Sites of Aguateca and Ceibal, Guatemala,” Advances in Ar­chaeological Practice 2, no. 1 (2014): 52. 46. Douglas H. Ubelaker, “The Forensic Evaluation of Burned Skeletal Remains: A Syn­ thesis.” Forensic Science International 183 (2009): 3; Thomas R. Whyte, “Distinguishing Remains of Human Cremations from Burned Animal Bones,” Journal of Field Archaeology 28, no. 3/4 (2001): 439.

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47. Cf. Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase, “Status and Power: Caracol, Teotihuacan, and the Early Classic Maya World,” Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology 8 (2011): 10. 48. Nira Alperson-­Afil and Naama Goren-­Inbar, The Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov: Volume II (New York: Springer, 2010), 23; William J. Hranicky, Archaeological Concepts, Tech­niques, and Terminology for American Prehistoric Lithic Technology (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2013), 229. 49. Joris Sergant, Philippe Crombé, and Yves Perdaen, “The ‘Invisible’ Hearths: A Contribution to the Discernment of Mesolithic Non-­structured Surface Hearths,” Journal of Archaeological Science 33, no. 7 (2006): 1000. 50. Barbara A. Purdy, “Fractures for the Archaeologist,” in Lithic Technology, ed. Earl Herbert Swanson (Paris: Mouton, 1975), 133–­41. 51. See a similar case in Christina T. Halperin and Zachary X. Hruby, “A Late Postclassic (ca. 1350–­1521 CE) Border Shrine at the Site of Tayasal, Petén, Guatemala,” Latin American Antiquity 30, no. 1 (2019): 65. 52. See Newman, “Rubbish, Reuse, and Ritual at El Zotz,” table 5, which is modeled after burning scales for ceramics used by Laura M. Banducci, “Function and Use of Roman Pottery: A Quantitative Method for Assessing Use-­Wear,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 27, no. 2 (2014): table 4. 53. See, e.g., Sol Tax and Robert Hinshaw, “The Maya of the Midwestern Highlands,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 7, Ethnology, Part 1, ed. Evon Z. Vogt (Austin: Uni­­ versity of Texas Press, 1969), 77; and Raymond H. Thompson, Modern Yucatecan Maya Pottery Making, Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology, no. 15 (Salt Lake City: Society for American Archaeology, 1958). 54. On common types of Maya tempers, see Antonia E. Foias, “Changing Ceramic Pro­­ duction and Exchange Systems and the Classic Maya Collapse in the Petexbatún Region, Volume I” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1996). For the effects of heat on those materials, see Dean E. Arnold, Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 29; and Shlomo Shoval et al., “Thermal Behaviour of Limestone and Monocrystalline Calcite Tempers during Firing and Their Use in Ancient Vessels,” Journal of Thermal Analysis 40, no. 1 (1993): 263–­73. For experiments and archaeological case studies, see Giuseppe Cultrone et al., “Carbonate and Silicate Phase Reactions during Ceramic Firing,” European Journal of Mineralogy 13 (2001), 621–­634; Inomata, “Fire Intensity Assessment,” 55–­56; and Krista Deal et al., “Wildland Fire in Ecosystems Effects of Fire on Cultural Resources and Archaeology,” JFSP Synthesis Reports 3 (Rocky Mountain Research Station, CO: United Stated Department of Agriculture Forest Service, 2012). 55. See, e.g., Christopher T. Morehart, David L. Lentz, and Keith M. Prufer, “Wood of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Pine (Pinus spp.) by the Ancient Lowland Maya,” Latin American Antiquity 16, no. 3 (2005): 264; and Brian Stross, “Mesoamerican Copal Resins,” U-­Mut Maya 6 (1997): 177–­86. In Momostenango, Guatemala, for example, during the annual feast to celebrate the town’s patron saint, a ritual event known as the Dance of the Monkeys takes place every other year. Garrett W. Cook, Renewing the Maya World: Expressive Culture in a Highland Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 121. During the dance, animal impersonators cross a tightrope from the roof of the town’s church to a twenty-­meter-­tall (about sixty-­six feet) pine tree trunk stripped of its bark and erected as an axis mundi outside the church doorway, then descend along a slanted guyline to the plaza’s dance ground. Each of the nine K’iche’ dancers is represented by a broken pottery sherd throughout the ritual. Candles and incense are burned

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during a series of ceremonies to cut and erect the dance pole, the practices, and the dances. Cook and Thomas A. Offit, Indigenous Religion and Cultural Performance in the New Maya World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 58. Following the event, the potsherds are retained and delivered to a specific altar the following year. 56. Anders Lindahl and Edward Matenga, Present and Past: Ceramics and Homesteads: An Ethnoarchaeological Project in the Buhera District, Zimbabwe (Uppsala: Repro HSC, 1995), 105. 57. Hayden and Cannon, “Where the Garbage Goes,” 131. 58. Guilhem Olivier, “Sacred Bundles, Arrows, and New Fire: Foundation and Power in the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2,” in Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2, ed. Davíd Carrasco and Scott M. Sessions (Albuquerque: Uni­ versity of New Mexico Press, 2007), 301. 59. Jesper A. Nielsen, “The Coming of the Torch: Observations on Teotihuacan Iconography in Early Classic Tikal,” in Maya Ethnicity: The Construction of Ethnic Identity from Preclassic to Modern Times: Proceedings of the 9th European Maya Conference, Bonn, December 10–­12, 2004, ed. Frauke Sachse (Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein, 2006), 22. 60. The archaeologist Steve Kosiba provides an analogous example from Cuzco, Peru, in certain depositional events marking the onset of Inka occupation at the significant pre-­Inka town of Wat’a. Dense concentrations of rapidly burned materials, deposited in a plaza at the core of the pre-­Inka settlement, served to “cleanse” the space, “an agriculturalist’s way of clearing the area before it was to be further ‘cultivated’ through the construction of new architecture.” In later constructions, stones, bones, and broken objects were incorporated in layered sequences into architectural fill, the materials of the preceding order converted into the foundations of the new order, accruing meaning through the controlled destruction and reconstitution of a particular place. The temporal distinction was made through the material distinction: transitions took place by placing particular pots in architectural fill, then burning the deposited layer. Kosiba, “Emplacing Value, Cultivating Order: Places of Conversion and Practices of Subordination throughout Early Inka State Formation (Cusco, Perú),” in Constructions of Value in the Ancient World, ed. Gary Urton and John Papadopoulos (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2012), 115. See also Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “Chronological Pollution: Potsherds, Mosques, and Broken Gods before and after the Conquest of Mexico,” Current Anthropology 49, no. 5 (2008): 803–­36. 61. See Viney, Waste, 4. Decades before waste gained traction as a subject of interest in material culture studies, however, the anthropologist Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory outlined what he called “the recursivity of rubbish.” According to Thompson, objects can be understood as existing in two categories: the “transient” and the “durable.” Objects in the first category, the transient, decrease in status and value over time and have a finite number of life spans. In the other category, durable objects increase in value and status over time and have (ideally) infinite life spans. Most consumer goods exist in the transient category, most art and antiques in the durable. Rubbish, however, exists as a third and covert category, occupying a region of flexibility between the durable and the transient. In this region, objects have little or no value or status, instead occupying a blank and fluid space between the other two categories. Something of declining worth, such as an old car or a broken pot, must first enter the indeterminate state of being rubbish in order to transition into something invaluable—­for example, to become a classic car or an archaeological artifact. Like Viney, Thompson saw this transformation or malleability grounded not in the intrinsic properties of the things themselves, but in the new and unexpected uses and functions that people bring to them. Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and

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Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs has played with the ability of waste to unexpectedly return (and its intersection with market economies) in his Mexico City–­based project, Seven Lives of Garbage. On the night of February 4, 1994, Alÿs took seven identical bronze sculptures of snails, painted in seven different colors, and placed them in seven plastic bags, then dropped the bags onto garbage piles in seven different districts of Mexico City. In the years since 1994, Alÿs has found two of his seven snails for sale in local flea markets. Alÿs, Le temps du sommeil (Vienna: Secession, 2016), 17; Russell Ferguson, Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2007), 68. 62. A. J. Christenson, The Burden of the Ancients, 6. 63. Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 71. 64. B. Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya, 65–­66. 65. Ruth Leah Bunzel, Chichicastenango: A Guatemalan Village, American Ethnological Society Publication 22 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1952), 232; A. J. Christenson, The Burden of the Ancients, 12; John M. Watanabe, “From Saints to Shibboleths: Image, Structure, and Identity in Maya Religious Syncretism,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 139. 66. The archaeologist Monica Smith provides similar examples from modern ritual contexts in India. Smith documents recycled tin cans that are used to hold incense and other important objects in worship, as well as what she calls “votive trash”—­strips of newspapers and folded-­up snack wrappers that are tied to trees as talismans of luck and wish making. Smith, “ ‘I Discard, Therefore I Am”: Identity and Leave-­Taking of Possessions,” in Identity Crisis: Archaeological Perspectives on Social Identity, ed. Lindsay Amundsen-­Pickering, Nicole Engel, and Sean Pickering (Calgary: Chamool Archaeological Association, University of Calgary, 2011), 135–­36. More generally, Talal Asad explores issues of recognizing ritual anthropologically by distinguishing between a ritual as a set of instructions for regulating religious practice (distinct from a rite, which would be the actual performance of that script) and a type of behavior that symbolizes or expresses something (virtually equivalent to a rite). Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 57–­58. 67. See, e.g., Gell, Art and Agency, 225; Bruno Latour, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 14; and Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 49–­51. 68. Cited in Edward Kenney, ed., Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [1971]), epigraph. 69. Julian Thomas, drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, has argued this point more generally: “Our understanding of materials relating to the past will be generated through a mode of knowing which is qualitatively different from that which characterized its use in past contexts.” Thomas, Time, Culture, and Identity: An Interpretive Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1996), 70. 70. Webb Keane, “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things,” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 182. 71. Shanks, Platt, and Rathje, “The Perfume of Garbage,” 65. 72. William Y. Adams, “The Archaeologist as Detective,” in Variation in Anthropology: Essay in Honor of John C. McGregor, ed. Donald Ward Lathrap and Jody Douglas, 17–­29 (Urbana: Illinois Archaeological Survey, 1973); Cornelius Holtorf, Archaeology Is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007), 131. 73. Geoff Bailey, “Time Perspectives, Palimpsests, and the Archaeology of Time,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26, no. 2 (2007): 209.

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74. See, e.g., Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Communization as a Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Gosden and Marshall, “The Cultural Biog­ raphy of Objects,” 169–­78. 75. Cornelius Holtorf, “Notes on the Life History of a Pot Sherd,” Journal of Material Culture 7, no. 1 (2002): 54. The anthropologist Tim Ingold critiques both Holtorf and Geoff Bailey for understanding the life histories of materials not as intrinsic to the things themselves or the physical stuff from which they are made, but as life histories of the human lives that surround them and give them meaning. Ingold argues for a focus on the materiality implicit in Holtorf ’s and Bailey’s approaches, instead of the notions of temporality that underlie them—­on the material world as actively form-­taking rather than passively form-­receiving. Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 28. 76. Lucas, Understanding the Archaeological Record, 12, emphasis in original. 77. Matthew R. Goodrum, “Questioning Thunderstones and Arrowheads: The Problem of Recognizing and Interpreting Stone Artifacts in the Seventeenth Century,” Early Science and Medicine 13, no. 5 (2008): 482–­508. 78. J. C. Chapman, Fragmentation in Archaeology. See also William H. Walker and Lisa J. Lucero, “The Depositional History of Ritual and Power,” in Agency in Archaeology, ed. Marcia Ann Dobres and John E. Robb (London: Routledge, 2000), 130. 79. Viney, Waste, 21–­23. 80. This is not a universal perspective. The archaeologist Alejandro F. Haber provides an illuminating contrast from his fieldwork in the Archibarca area of Catamarca Province in Argentina, in which a local inhabitant from a nearby village made libations and asked the archaeological site “to ‘breed’ many beautiful, ancient things.” For the villager, Haber writes, “archaeological things (the raw material of the discipline of archaeology) are not the remnants of a distant and perfect past, waiting to be manipulated methodologically in order to gain knowledge of that past. . . . No such distant and dead past exists.” Haber, “Animism, Relatedness, Life: Post-­ Western Perspectives,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no. 3 (2009): 428. 81. See, e.g., Lewis R. Binford, “Behavioral Archaeology and the ‘Pompeii Promise,’ ” Journal of Anthropological Research 37, no. 3 (1981): 233–­34; and Schiffer, Behavioral Archaeology (1976), 12. 82. Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumerism (West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 1987), 190. 83. D. C. Orton, “Taphonomy and Interpretation: An Analytical Framework for Social Zoo­ archaeology,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 22, no. 3 (2012): 321. 84. Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie, Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 5. 85. R. Chapman and Wylie, Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology, 206. See also John C. Barrett, Archaeology and Its Discontents: Why Archaeology Matters (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 10. 86. See esp. Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); but also John D. Norton, “A Material Dissolution of the Problem of Induction,” Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, July 2, 2013, http:// www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Induction_problem.pdf; William C. Wimsatt, “Robustness, Reli­ ability, and Overdetermination,” in Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences, ed. Marilynn B.

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Brewer and Barry E. Collins (San Francisco: Jossey-­Bass, 1981), 124–­63; and Wimsatt, “Robustness: Material, and Inferential, in the Natural and Human Sciences,” in Characterizing the Robustness of Science: After the Practice Turn in Philosophy of Science, ed. Léna Soler et al. (New York: Springer, 2012), 89–­104. 87. Adrian Currie, “Review of Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology,” Philosophy of Science 84, no. 4 (2017): 785. Conclusion 1. Humes, Garbology, 10–­13. China has imported 45 percent of the world’s total waste since 1992. When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, China’s share of the global waste trade jumped to 70 percent. Laura Parker, “China’s Ban on Trash Imports Shifts Waste Crisis to Southeast Asia,” National Geographic, November 16, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic .com/environment/article/china-­ban-­plastic-­trash-­imports-­shifts-­waste-­crisis-­southeast-­asia -­malaysia. 2. Colin Staub, “Import Restrictions Ripple across Southeast Asia,” Plastics Recycling Update, June 6, 2018, https://resource-­recycling.com/plastics/2018/06/06/import-­restrictions-­ripple-­across -­southeast-­asia/. 3. Kimiko de Freytas-­Tamura, “Plastics Pile Up as China Refuses to Take the West’s Re­­ cycling,” New York Times, January 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/china -­recyclables-­ban.html. One study estimated that the new policy would displace 111 million metric tons of plastic waste by 2030. See Amy L. Brooks, Shunli Wang, and Jenna R. Jambeck, “The Chinese Import Ban and Its Impact on Global Plastic Waste Trade,” Science Advances 4, no. 6 (2018): eaat0131. 4. Hiroko Tabuchi and Michael Corkery, “Countries Tried to Curb Trade in Plastic Waste. The U.S. Is Shipping More,” New York Times, March 12, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12 /climate/plastics-­waste-­export-­ban.html; United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Fre­­ quently Asked Questions on International Agreements on Transboundary Shipments of Waste,” February 7, 2022, https://www.epa.gov/hwgenerators/frequent-­questions-­international-­agreements -­transboundary-­shipments-­waste#basel. 5. Livia Albeck-­Ripka, “Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not,” New York Times, May 29, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-­landfills-­plastic -­papers.html. See also, e.g., Hadriana Lowenkron, “Philadelphia Still Dumping Trash with Recycling, Frustrating Residents,” WHYY PBS, February 18, 2021, https://whyy.org/articles/phil adelphia-­still-­dumping-­trash-­with-­recycling-­frustrating-­residents/; and David Brooks, “In Franklin, Trash and Recyclables Are Sent to the Incinerator Together,” Concord Monitor, July 28, 2018, https://www.concordmonitor.com/franklin-­recycling-­trash-­nh-­19057126. 6. Glen Thomas quoted in Michael Corkery, “As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling,” New York Times, March 16, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/business/local -­recycling-­costs.html. 7. Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 26–­27. 8. Albeck-­Ripka, “Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right?” 9. Calvino, Invisible Cities, 114. 10. See, e.g., Timothy Cooper, “Burying the ‘Refuse Revolution’: The Rise of Controlled

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Tipping in Britain, 1920–­1960,” Environment and Planning A 42 (2010): 1033–­48; and Garth Andrew Myers, Disposable Cities: Garbage, Governance, and Sustainable Development in Urban Africa (London: Ashgate, 2005), 6. 11. De Freytas-­Tamura, “Plastics Pile Up.” 12. Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, 14. 13. Wayne Brekhus, “A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus,” Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (1998): 49; Nagle, Picking Up, 38. 14. I use the phrase “take seriously” here in the same sense that it is defined by Matei Candea (following Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), where “the conditions of possibility of a ‘we’ (and . . . therefore, of a ‘they’) are always under interrogation.” Matei Candea, “ENDO/EXO,” Common Knowledge 17, no. 1 (2011): 149; see also Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes, and Other Truths,” Common Knowledge 17, no. 1 (2011): 128–­45. 15. Janet Roitman, Anti-­crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 41. 16. Roitman, Anti-­crisis, 13. 17. Reno, “Toward a New Theory of Waste,” 20. Michel-­Rolph Trouillot drew on Pierre Bourdieu to make a related argument about historical narratives as “unthinkable.” As Trouillot wrote, “The unthinkable is that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased.” Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015 [1995]), 82. Asking what should be done about a crisis of waste assumes that waste must be made. 18. Nigel Whiteley, “Toward a Throw-­Away Culture: Consumerism, ‘Style Obsolescence’, and Cultural Theory in the 1950s and 1960s,” Oxford Art Journal 10, no. 2 (January 1987): 3–­27. 19. See, e.g., Strasser, Waste and Want, 21–­67. 20. Neil Maycroft, “Consumption, Planned Obsolescence, and Waste” (working paper, 2009), https://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2062/. See also Kevin Greene, “Learning to Consume: Consumption and Consumerism in the Roman Empire,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 21 (2008): 64–­82. 21. Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis, “Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy, Culture, and the Politics of Fat,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 3 (2006): 442; George L. Henderson, “What Was Fight Club? Theses on the Value Worlds of Trash Capitalism,” Cultural Geographies 18, no. 2 (2011): 143–­70. In the past decade, proponents of circular economy models, design for sustainability approaches, and “right to repair” movements have pushed back against the expected roles for both producers and consumers in linear flows of disposal. See, e.g., Tracy Bhamra and Vicky Lofthouse, Design for Sustainability: A Practical Approach (London: Routledge, 2016 [2007]); Ricardo J. Hernández, Constanza Miranda, and Julian Goñi, “Empowering Sustainable Consumption by Giving Back to Consumers the ‘Right to Repair,’ ” Sustainability 12, no. 3 (2020), 850–­65; and Ken Webster, The Circular Economy: A Wealth of Flows, 2nd ed. (Cox, UK: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2016 [2012]). 22. Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, The Decay of Capitalist Civilization (London: Fabian Society, 1923), 71–­72. 23. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (New York: Verso Books, 2006), 71. See also Nagle, Picking Up, 42. 24. Martin O’Brien, “A ‘Lasting Transformation’ of Capitalist Surplus: From Food Stocks to Feedstocks,” Sociological Review 60, no. 52 (June 2013): 203.

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25. David Boarder Giles, “The Anatomy of a Dumpster,” Social Text 32, no. 1 (March 2014): 101–­2. 26. Randy O. Frost and Rachel C. Gross, “The Hoarding of Possessions,” Behavior Research and Therapy 31, no. 4 (1993): 367. 27. Charmaine Eddy, “The Art of Consumption: Capitalist Excess and Individual Psychosis in Hoarders,” Canadian Review of American Studies 44, no. 1 (2014): 1–­24. 28. Jane Bennett, “Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency,” in Animal, Mineral, Vegetable: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 248. Bennett references Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Mental Illnesses (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988). 29. Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 66. 30. Barry Allen, “The Ethical Artifact: On Trash,” in Trash, ed. John Knechtel (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Alphabet City Media, 2007), 203, emphasis in original. 31. B. Allen, “Ethical Artifact: On Trash,” 211. 32. Karrie Jacobs, “The Design of Garbage,” Metropolis, December 1988, 56. 33. Quoted in Carolyn Kormann, “A Grand Plan to Clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” New Yorker, January 28, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/04/a-­grand-­plan -­to-­clean-­the-­great-­pacific-­garbage-­patch. 34. See, e.g., Gloria Dickie, “Ocean Cleanup Struggles to Fulfill Promise to Scoop Up Plastic at Sea,” Reuters, September 16, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/ocean-­clean up-­struggles-­fulfill-­promise-­scoop-­up-­plastic-­sea-­2021-­09-­16/#:~:text=The%20Ocean%20Clean up%2C%20created%20by,garbage%20until%20it%20ultimately%20broke; and Eric Nagourney, “Ocean Cleanup Plastic Collector Heading Home. In Pieces,” New York Times, January 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/americas/great-­pacific-­garbage-­patch-­cleanup.html. 35. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii. 36. Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (London: Athlone, 1999), 61. Joshua Reno has taken this point further, arguing that waste—­specifically, animal scat—­may be read as a biosemiotic sign of life: “a seamless conduction of material expenditure between life processes, which never ceases but only begets more life.” Reno, “Toward a New Theory of Waste,” 19. 37. Where I have used “those,” Le Guin specifically said “writers.” See Rachel Arons, “ ‘We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom’: Ursula Le Guin and Last Night’s N.B.A.s,” New Yorker, November 20, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-­turner/national-­book -­awards-­ursula-­le-­guin. 38. Noah Berlatsky, “Why Sci-­Fi Keeps Imagining the Subjugation of White People,” Atlantic, April 25, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/why-­sci-­fi-­keeps-­imag ining-­the-­enslavement-­of-­white-­people/361173/. 39. Felipe Rojas, citing Le Guin, has argued that archaeologists can make contributions to current political discourse by calling attention to possibilities other than the here and now. Rojas, “Realists of a Larger Reality” (presentation, 10th North American meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group, University of Toronto, Canada, May 18–­20, 2017). 40. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists,” Wordsworth Circle 38, no. 1–­2 (2007): 87. 41. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 129.

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42. Calvino, Invisible Cities, 114–­16. 43. Italo Calvino, “The Daughters of the Moon,” New Yorker, February, 15 2009, https://www .newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/23/the-­daughters-­of-­the-­moon. 44. Calvino, “Daughters of the Moon.” 45. Paul Desbraski cited in Susan Strasser, “Rags, Bones, and Plastic Bags: Obsolescence, Trash, and American Consumer Culture,” in Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age, ed. Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 41–­42. 46. Calvino, Invisible Cities, 126–­27.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. abstinence, 84, 89, 111 Actas de Cabildo: Mexico City, 98–­100; Santiago de Guatemala, 101 Ambassadors, The (Holbein the Younger), 140, plate 16 anamorphic archaeology, definition, 12–­13, 140–­42 anamorphosis, 139; mirror (catoptric), 139–­41, 154, 159 animism, 134–­37, 146. See also ch’ulel Antigua, Guatemala, 101–­2 antiquarian(s), 5, 41, 43, 47–­48 aqueduct: from Chapultepec (Aztec), 97, 100; Roman, 16, 18–­19 archaeophilia, 5 Arte para aprender la lengua Mexicana (Olmos), 69, 85–­86, 89, 90, 202n108 Atitecos (Tz’utujil Maya), 120, 123 Atitlán, Lake, 120, 123 Ávila, Francisco de, 134 axixtlalli, 94 bak’tun cycle, 142 Bancroft Dialogues, 77 baptism: Catholic, 76, 83–­84; sweeping and, 120 baths and bathing: in Anatolia and the Levant, 16; in Catholic doctrine, 89; and disease, 109; pre-­ Columbian rituals, 83–­84; Roman, 16, 18–­19; sweat-­, 84. See also baptism Bautista, Juan, Huehuetlahtolli, 86 behavioral archaeology, 50, 55–­56, 59 Benavente, Toribio de (Motolinía), 93, 109 Bennett, Jane, 63–­64, 166 Binford, Lewis R., 48–­50, 52, 53 biographies, object, 147, 150, 154, 158–­59

Borges, Jorge Luis, 37–­38, 40, 57, 60 Boscán, Juan, 70 burning: of agricultural fields, 118–­19, 129–­30, 137, 153; at El Zotz, 141, 150–­52; of garbage, 25, 52–­53, 119, 128, 161; of material offerings, 124–­26, 128, 125, 152; in the Popol Vuh, 133; and purification, 68, 128–­29; ritual, 127, 128, 137; soil (terra preta) formed by ancient composting and, 118. See also fire; New Fire ceremony Burning of the devil (Quema del diablo), 67–­68, plate 3 burying: planting and, 118; the dead, 53, 123; of refuse, 21, 119, 122; as ritual work, 128–­30 calendar: Gregorian, 142; Long Count, 130, 142, 153; Maya, 87, 111, 135, 154; ritual, 130, 132, 154; solar, 130, 135, 154. See also Period Ending event Calvino, Italo: “The Daughters of the Moon,” 169; Invisible Cities, 1–­3, 5, 13, 34, 162, 169–­70; Letters, 1941–­1985, 2 Cano, Agustín, 107 capitalism: forces of, 2, 34; object obsolescence and logic of, 165–­66; problems of, 168 carretoneros (refuse collectors), 102 Castiglione, Baldassare, Il Cortegiano, 70 Catholicism, 73–­75, 89; Indigenous rituals reframed as sacraments of, 83–­84, 90 ceremony: calendrical, 13, 84, 111–­12, 137, 153; caltlacualiztli (“feeding the house”), 124; ch’ul kantela, 124; contemporary Guatemalan, 152, 154–­56, 227n55; hol chuk, 123–­24; “house-­ censing,” 124; house dedication, 124; “New Fire,” 130–­33, 137, 153, 218n91; New Year, 111–­12; performance of, 118–­19, 128, 214n33; of renewal,

276 ceremony (cont.) 13, 137, 153, 220n110, 223n14; sweeping and ritual, 120–­22, 132; termination, 145, 223n14 cesspit/cesspool, 24, 25, 109; lined, 21; in medieval London, 19; at Mohenjo-­Daro, 16; Roman, 17; unlined, 21; wastewater diverted into, 31, 97 Chadwick, Edwin, 22 Chalchiuhtlicue (goddess of fresh water), 83 Chapman, John C., 59–­60 Chapultepec, 95, 97, 100 Chiapas, Mexico: Ch’ol language of, 120; Tzotzil speakers in, 123, 134–­35; Yaxchilán in, 126 Chichén Itzá (Yucatán), 142 Chilam Balam, Books of, 120 Ch’ol (language), 113, 115, 120, 134 Ch’olan branch (Mayan languages): Ch’ol, 113, 115, 120, 134; Ch’olti, 113; Ch’orti, 113, 114–­15, 122, 214n39; Classic Ch’olti’an, 113 cholera, 21–­22, 23, 109 Ch’olti’ (language), 113 Ch’olti’an, Classic, 113 Ch’olti-­Lacandon Maya, 132 Ch’orti’: language, 113, 114–­15, 122, 214n39; people, 137 Christianity: conversion to, 68–­69, 73–­76, 113; and European notions of civility, 12, 68, 72–­75; promotion of, 86; translation of the doctrine of, 75–­79, 84–­85, 89–­90, 113. See also Theologia Indorum (Vico) ch’ulel, concept of, 134–­35. See also animism Ch’ul kantela rite, 124 civility: Early modern European ideals of, 12, 68, 70–­74, 92, 104–­5; Norbert Elias’s concept of, 69–­70 cleansing: agent, 82, 125; International Conference on Public Cleansing, 27; as part of ongoing cycles of renewal, 118; and purification, 1, 80, 84, 89; sweeping as symbolic act of, 84, 89, 111, 120–­22 Cloaca Maxima (Rome), 18 Coatlicue, 122 Coca-­Cola as offering, 155–­56 cocoliztli (“pestilence”), 99–­100, 108 Codex: Florentine (General History of the Things of New Spain, Sahagún), 77, 80–­81, 83–­84, 94, 121–­22, 130–­31, plate 4, plate 9, plate 11, plate 13; Madrid, 115, 117, 121, 121, 126, 127, 128; Mendoza, 122, plate 12; Telleriano-­Remensis, 81, plates 5–­7 commemoration and refuse, 56, 138 conduct books, 23, 71, 72–­73, 195n6. See also etiquette books conjectural history, 35–­36 consumerism, 2, 34, 55, 163, 166, 169 consumption: in America, 2, 51; capitalism and, 165; and disposal, 4, 14, 33–­34, 54, 61, 118; of food contaminated with discarded materials

index (plastic), 62, 64; industrialized production and, 15, 30, 34–­35, 165; middens (garbage) studied to understand past, 49, 51–­52; mass, 34; over-­, 166; transforming into positive production, 29 contagion: diseases caused by, 23; Indigenous bodies as source of, 106–­10; waste as source of, 11, 15 contamination: bodily waste as source of, 18, 22; “geographies of,” 106; Indigenous bodies as source of, 106–­10; physical and moral, 12, 89, 93, 105–­6; of recyclable with nonrecyclable materials, 162; symbolic, 86; waste as threats of, 23, 33, 92–­93, 104–­6 Copán, Honduras, 133 Cortegiano, Il (Castiglione), 70 Cortés, Hernán, 93, 95 costumbre (“traditional practice”), 155–­56 courtesy books. See etiquette books Coyoacán, city of, 95 Cuitlapanton (a nocturnal oman, tetzahuitl), 80 culture-­historical archaeology, 40–­48, 65 Cuvier, Georges, 41, 43 Cuzco, Peru, 228n60 cycle(s): agricultural, 153, 154; calendrical, 142, 153–­ 54; of consumption and disposal, 165; cosmic, 136; of destruction and decay, 129; of destruction, purification, and (re)creation, 129–­30; of dispersal and reconstitution, 156–­57; life-­, 158; material object’s life, 147; phagocentric, 129; of production and consumption, 30; of progress and decadence, 36; regenerative ritual, 153–­54; of (reinvestments and) renewal, 118, 130–­32, 136, 137–­38; of use, reuse, and discard, 147, 158 daykeepers, 142, 154–­56 de facto refuse, 50, 145, 221n11 deposit: “ceremonial trash,” 59; “desecratory termination ritual,” 145, 146, 222n11; “destructive event,” 221n11; “kratophanous,” 59, 224n17; “problematical,” 144–­47, 152, 223n17; “sacrificial offerings,” 59, 224n17; “termination,” 145–­46, 147, 152, 153, 222n11, 223n14. See also middens destruction: archaeology and, 140; cycles of, 129–­30, 135–­37; capitalism, production, decay and, 165; environmentalist discourse of, 54; era of filth-­, 28; waste and, 64; Indigenous and imported notions of creation and, 68; intentional, 59, 141; processes of dispersal and, 59 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 93–­94, 95 Diccionario de la lengua maya, 115 Diccionario Solana, 115, 119, 120, 212n8 difrasismo (“diphrastic kenning”), 76–­77, 199n60 discard, typologies of, 50, 57–­58, 59, 145, 152, 221n11 disease: bodily and material waste tied to, 15, 22, 30, 89–­90, 108–­10; cocoliztli (“pestilence”), 99–­100, 108; Indigenous populations blamed

index for spread of, 93, 106–­10; putrid miasmas and, 21–­23, 109; ritual purification to treat, 81–­82, 120; sanitary law to prevent, 16, 22, 109–­10; waterworks and, 17–­19, 24; Wayeb period and susceptibility to, 136 disposability: ethos of, 14, 164; of goods and packaging, 33–­34, 51; in Invisible Cities (Calvino), 1, 169 disposal of waste and ritual, 118–­19, 122, 129–­32, 137–­38, 152–­56, 229n66 “Divine Filth” (goddess Tlazolteotl; Ix Hun Ahau), 80–­82, plates 4–­5 doctrinero (evangelizing friar), 74–­78, 90. See also Olmos, Andrés de; Vico, Domingo de domestic waste, 9, 51, 58, 67, 118, 129, 222n11 Donora, Pennsylvania, 33 Douglas, Mary, 3, 56 drainage, 24, 95, 101, 104 drop zones, 49, 52. See also dumping; toss zones dumping: aggregate areas for, 49, 52; disposal method of, 15, 25–­27, 29, 52, 93, 96–­102; sanctioned places for, 21, 27, 100, 102–­4; of trash as part of New Year festival, 111 dumpster divers, 165 dung, 17, 19, 21, 102; heap, 42, 76, 80; -­hills (“muckhills”), 20; as “medicine,” 72; in moral and theological narratives, 79, 89; as offerings, 81. See also middens Durán, Diego, 122 Durrington Walls, 57–­58 Earth Lord, 123–­24 EL (Classic Mayan glyphic verb for “to burn”), 125, 125 Elias, Norbert, 69–­70, 71, 195n6 El Reinado, Hieroglyphic Stairway 1 (Guatemala), 127 El Zotz (Pa’ka’n), 141; (problematical) deposits in the palace, 142–­43, 143, 146, 147–­54, plates 17–­27; Period Ending, 142–­43, 152–­53 environmentalism, 2, 13–­14, 15, 34, 54, 163 epidemic, 21–­22, 33, 106; cocoliztli (“pestilence”), 99–­100, 108; Indigenous people blamed for spread of, 106, 108–­9 ethnoarchaeology, 49–­50, 55–­59, 152 etiquette books, 70–­7 1, 195n6. See also conduct books excrement: in ancient Rome, 18; behavioral norms and, 74; colonialism and, 106; and disease, 23, 71, 79, 81–­82, 90; as embodiment of sin, 79–­80, 84–­86, 89, 110; European new ideas about, 69; fertilizing soil with, 72, 94, 118, 129, plate 8; goat, 57; human or animal, 10, 19, 47, 71; management/regulation of, 21–­22, 26, 71, 94–­ 104; pre-­Columbian understanding of, 79–­84, 89–­90, 92, 118, 129; “sacred” (suhuy ta), 82; taa’

277 (ta’), 114–­15, 119; tlazolli, 76–­80, 84, 89; used for medical purposes, 72, 81–­83 fasting, 84, 89, 111 feces. See excrement Felipe II, 96–­97 fertility, 56, 118 fertilizer, 9, 28, 72, 80, 90, 94, 129 filth: as agent of disease, 21–­23, 27, 32, 108–­ 10; -­destruction, 28; as fertilizer, 80, 90; Felipe II ordinances and collection of, 96–­97; -­formation, 28; of Golden Age Spanish cities, 93–­94; in history, 15–­16, 19, 69; and ideals of civility, 12, 22, 71–­72, 74; Indigenous people associated with, 108–­10; Indigenous people forced into proximity of, 100–­102, 104–­5; Mexico City plagued by, 98–­101; moral impurity and physical, 77–­79, 80–­84, 89–­90, 92; Tenochtitlán, collection of, 94; used metaphorically (in Christian theology), 12, 68, 74, 79, 85, 88–­90 fire: bon-­, 67; as cleansing agent, 125; as “disinfectant,” 27–­28; drilling “new,” 111, 126, 126, 127, 127; household, 134; open dumps and, 27; priests, 131; for ritual ceremonies, 120, 124–­28, 125, 142, 150–­52, 154–­56; as transformation and purification, 67, 124–­27. See also New Fire ceremony Flannery, Kent, 49, 189n85 Florentine Codex (General History of the Things of New Spain, Sahagún): difrasismos, 77, 83; human bodily waste as fertilizer, 94, plate 9; Nahua bathing ritual, 83–­84; New Fire ceremony, 130–­31, plate 13; sweeping, 121–­22, 131, plate 11; Tlazolteotl (“Goddess of Filth”), 80–­81, plate 4; tetzahuitl (nocturnal omen), 80 Ford, James, 38 Fracastoro, Girolamo, Syphilis sive morbus gallicus, 106–­7 fragmentation theory, 59–­60 Gann, Thomas, 108 garbage dump, 16, 20–­21, 33, 64; archaeological (re)interpretation of assemblages defined as, 54, 59, 145; China’s role as “worlds’,” 162; in Mexico City, 91, 98–­100, 103–­4, 105; open, 27, 29, 52–­53, 155; postprocessual archaeology and, 53–­54. See also middens; landfill Garbage Project (University of Arizona), 51–­53, 62, 64 garbology, 51–­52, 53 García Bravo, Alonso, 95 geology, 40–­41, 42, 43 germs, 101, 106 germ theory, 23 “Goddess of Filth” (goddess Tlazolteotl; Ix Hun Ahau), 80–­82, plates 4–­5 “gong farmers,” 20

278 Griffin, James, 38 Guatemala: archaeological fieldwork (and analyses) in, 7, 141–­54, 143, plates 17–­27; colonial, 69, 86–­88, 97, 101, 107; Mayan languages spoken in, 113, 154–­55; Momostenango, 120, 132, 154–­56, 227n55, plates 28–­29; Naj Tunich cave, 116; pre-­ Columbian rituals in, 153; present-­day rituals in, 120, 123, 132–­33, 137, 142, 152, 154–­56, 227n55; prevention of diseases policies of Spanish governments in, 109; Quema del diablo, 67–­68; Tomás López Medel sent to Yucatán from, 73 Güémez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, Don Juan Vicente de (second Count of Revillagigedo, a.k.a. Revillagigedo), 102–­4, 108 Gutiérrez Moreno, Rafael, 91–­92 hearth: Classic Maya domestic, 126–­27, 131–­32; household, 118; of køkkenmøddinger settlement, 47; in Momostenango where daykeeper is initiated, 155; stones of the Maya, 131, 133 Hill, J. D., 58–­59 history: artifact, 12, 147–­52; conceptual, 36; “conjectural,” 35–­36; oral, 44, 133; of waste, 3–­6, 7, 15, 36, 66, 69 hoarding, 166 Hodder, Ian: postprocessual archaeology, 56–­57; Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture, 56, 59 Holbein the Younger, Hans, 140, plate 16 Hol chuk ceremony, 123–­24 household waste. See domestic waste huehuetlahtolli (discourse of the elderly), 85–­86, 202n108 Huitzilopochtli, 122, 131 Huk Sip, 82 hygiene: cleanliness standardized and medicalized as, 23; concern for, 31–­33, 106, 110; Roman city and, 17–­19; science of, 23; spread of disease associated with Indigenous peoples, 108–­10; waste as problem of, 34 immorality, 78, 80–­81, 85, 92–­93 impurity, 1, 12, 69, 76–­81, 84, 89–­90, 105–­6 incineration, 4, 15, 27–­29, 30, 35, 49, 161, 162 indexical binding, 75–­76 industrialism, 2, 15, 25–­26, 32, 36, 64, 163 industrialization, 25, 30, 31, 34–­35, 40, 47, 48 Invisible Cities (Calvino), 1–­3, 5, 13, 34, 162, 169–­70 Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–­1985, 2 Ix Hun Ahau (Lady One Ahau), 80, 81–­82 Ixnextli, 81, plate 7 KAB (Classic Mayan glyph for “earth”), 115, 116, 117, 121, plate 10 Kaqchikel (language), 86, 114 keban (“sin” in Yucatec), 76, 78–­79

index Keep America Beautiful, Inc., 54–­55 Kenya, ethnographic study, 56–­57 K’iche’ language: k’aslem (life), 124; Popul Vuh, 133–­34; Rabinal Achí, 129; Revolt of the Objects, 135; spoken in Momostenango (Guatemala), 154–­55; Theologia Indorum (Vico), 69, 86–­88; *xex (having a bad taste), 114 Kidder, Alfred Vincent, 45, 46, 47 K’inich Janaab’ Pakal I, sarcophagus of, 115, 117 kitchen middens (køkkenmøddinger), 42, 44–­48 Koch, Robert, 23 Kroeber, Alfred L., 45 Landa, Diego de, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, 84, 111–­12, 118, 120, 130–­31, 211n3 landfill: Garbage Project, 51–­52, 64; recyclable waste directly to, 161–­62; sanitary, 15, 29, 33, 35, 49, 64, 162 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 74 Latour, Bruno, 36, 61, 139–­40 latrines, 15, 24; archaeological records of, 20–­21; Indigenous communities required to clean, 101–­2; in Indigenous peoples’ homes, 108; in medieval London, 19; Revillagigedo’s proclamation regarding Mexico City and building public, 104; Roman, 17, 18; sinners punished with death in, 79–­80; in Tenochtitlán, 94. See also privies Lee, Benjamin (secretary of State Board of Health of Pennsylvania), 31–­32 legislation: Felipe II’ s ordinances on waste-­ management, 97; Mexico City’s waste, 98–­100, 102–­4; sanitary, 16, 20, 21; Santiago de Guatemala’s waste, 101; Lima’s waste, 102 Le Guin, Ursula K., 168 Lister, Joseph, 23 Long Count calendar, 130, 142, 153 López Medel, Tomás, 73 Macfarlane, Robert, 156–­57 Madrid Codex, 115, 117, 121, 121, 126, 127, 128 maize, 87, 113, 134; -­based diet, 94; burned cob of (El Zotz), 143; deity, 82; grinders, 133; seed, 127, 128; vessel used for boiling, 132 manual: of conduct, 23, 71, 72, 195n6; confessional, 77; gentility, 23; household management, 25; Mayan language catechism, 86 manure, 27, 28, 115; green, 118 Marakwet of western Kenya, 56–­57 Margil, Antonio, 132 materiality, 157, 163, 230n75 Mayan, Classic: chok (“to scatter, to sow” or “to throw, to cast”), 127; Classic Ch’olti’an, 113; EL (to burn), 125, 125; KAB (earth), 115, 116, 117; K’AN (yellow), 125; mis/miz (to sweep), 119–­21, 121; script, 113; ta’jol (buzzard), 115, 116; trash as

index term does not appear in inscriptions of, 114; ukabjiiy (royal agency), 118, 129; u-­WAY-­HA’B (the sealed chamber / sleeping room of the year), 135, 136; YAX (blue-­green), 87, 125 Mayan languages, 12, 75, 112–­17, 114, 119; Ch’olan branch, 113–­15, 120, 122, 134, 214n39; Kaqchikel, 86, 114; lowland, 79; “proto-­,” 113, 114, 119; Tzeltalan branch, 79, 113, 119, 120, 134–­35; Tz’utujil, 86. See also K’iche’; Mayan, Classic; Yucatec Mayapán (Yucatán), 118 Mayhew, Henry, 24 Meadowlands (New Jersey), 64 Memphis International Airport, recycling at, 161–­62 Mendoza, Codex, 122, plate 12 mesabal (swept place), 120 Mexico City: Actas de Cabildo, 98–­100, 104, 140; canals of, 97; drainage and sanitation, 101–­2; “garbage czar” (Rafael Gutiérrez Moreno) of, 91–­92; pepenadores, 92; Revillagigedo’s reforms of dumping and collecting garbage in, 102–­4, 105; San Juan neighborhood of, 104; Santiago Tlatelolco neighborhood of, 104; traza, 95, 104, 105 miasma, 71, 101; theory, 21–­22, 23, 31, 79, 109 Michelet, Jules, 19 microplastics, 62–­63, 64, 167 middens, 100, 111, 118, 158, 222–­23n11; cultural archaeology and study of, 40–­46, 65; definitions, 42, 47, 137, 144; excavations, 43, 44–­46; kitchen (køkkenmøddinger), 42, 44–­48; New Archaeology and study of, 49–­50, 53, 65; shell, 43, 44–­45, 46, 48; transposed ritual, 221n11 milpa field, 129, 137 mis/miz: “to sweep” (Mayan), 119–­21, 121; “trash in general,” 119 modern courtesy (“cortesía moderna”), 70. See also civility modernity, 4, 17, 31, 34, 35, 36 Moholy-­Nagy, Hattula, 144–­46, 223n14 Momostenango (Guatemala), 120, 132, 154–­56, 227n55, plates 28–­29 morality: itz (K’iche’), 87; purity and, 78, 90; sanitation stood for, 22, 24; as understood by K’iche’ Maya, 87–­88. See also immorality; impurity; purity Motolinía (Toribio de Benavente), 93, 109 mud, 19, 123; categorized as tlazolli, 77; equated with sin, 85, 88; El Zotz, layer of, 143, 150; used as fertilizer, 26 mul (“sin” in lowland Mayan languages), 78 Murphy, Cullen, 52–­53 Nahua bathing rite, 83–­84 Nahuas, 80, 83, 85–­86, 121–­22, 130 Nahuatl (language), 93, 198n51, 198n52; Arte para aprender la lengua mexicana (Olmos), 69,

279 85–­86, 89, 90, 202n108; Bancroft Dialogues, 77; contemporary speakers of, 122; Florentine Codex, 77, 80, 83–­84, 94, 121–­22, 130–­31, plate 4, plate 9, plate 11, plate 13; huehuetlahtolli, 85–­86, 202n108; pepenilia, 92; tlazolli, 76–­80, 84, 89 Naj Tunich cave, 116 Napias, Henri, 26 Nebrija, Antonio de, 113 Nelson, Nels C., 44–­45, 46, 47 New Archaeology, 39, 63; study of waste, 48–­53, 55–­57, 65–­66 New Fire ceremony, 130–­33, 137, 153, 218n91 New Year celebration/rituals: described in Landa’s Relación, 111–­12, 120; during Wayeb period, 136. See also New Fire ceremony “night soil,” 20, 72, 115, 129 Nuba of Sudan, 56 Nunamiut of Alaska, 48–­49 obsolescence: of material culture, 53; object, 158, 164–­65; planned, 4, 166 Ocean Cleanup, 167–­68 Ochpaniztli festival (“Sweeping the Roads”), 122 ochpantli (ritual cleansings), 122 odor: animal, 83, 115; of death after fall of Tenochtitlán, 94; “evil,” 80; induced illness, 79; noxious, 17, 25, 33, 93; of feces and urine, 20, 23, 24, 94, 115, 116; of landfills, 29; of reduction plants, 29; of (rotting organic) waste, 9, 72. See also miasma offerings, 87; burning of, 124–­28, 125, 142, 150, 152, 155–­56; burying in the earth of, 54, 122–­24, 147, 152; ch’ul kantela rite, 124; to the Earth Lord, 124; of excrement, 81; hol chuk ceremony, 123–­24; intended effects of, 152; to manage interactions with objects, 135; at New Year celebrations, 111; Period Ending rituals, 142; (scattered) sacrificial, 59, 127–­28; sweeping and, 120, 121–­22, 129; terminal, 221n11; votive, 158 Olmos, Andrés de, Arte para aprender la lengua mexicana, 69, 85–­86, 89, 90 Orton, Edward, 16, 18 Pa’ka’n. See El Zotz Palenque, 115, 117 paleontology, 40–­41, 42, 43, 44–­45 Paracelsus, 72 Parsons, H. de B., 9 Pasteur, Louis, 23 past-­loving creatures, 5 Pecos Pueblo, 45, 46 pepenadores, 92 pepenilia, 92 Pérez, Juan Pío, 115, 135–­36 Period Ending event, 142–­43, 152 Phillips, Philip, 38

280 Pico de Orizaba (Uixachtecatl), 131 Piola, Domenico, 139 plasma gasification, 29–­30, 35 policía, 70, 74. See also civility pollution: air, 33, 34, 67; anti-­, 54–­55, 161; of drinking water, 32–­33, 34; environmental, 30, 54–­55; industrialization and, 25, 31, 34; Mary Douglas and, 3; moral, 76, 78, 80; notions of purity and, 68, 76–­86, 89–­90; waste management and, 30–­32, 104–­5 Popol Vuh, 133–­34, 216n55 posthumanist approaches in archaeology, 60–­65, 193n138 postprocessual archaeology, 39, 62, 63; study of waste, 53–­60, 63, 65–­66 pre-­Columbian Mesoamerica: fire as force of transformation, 124–­28; notions of animacy and temporality, 133–­37; role of trash in rituals, 129–­30, 137, 153; sweeping as productive and purifying act, 111, 119–­22, 136, 153; understanding of human excreta and waste, 76–­79, 80, 89–­90, 92, 111–­12, 114–­19; waste management systems, 92–­94, 96, 97 primary refuse, 50, 58 privies, 20, 21, 26, 31. See also water closets; latrines “problematical deposit,” 144–­47, 152, 223n17 processual archaeology. See New Archaeology progress, 15, 31, 35–­36, 45, 74, 163; civil, 17; scientific and technological, 15, 48, 54; single-­use products as sign of, 33–­34; waste as by-­product of, 11, 54 provisional refuse, 50, 152–­53 public health: ameliorist historiography of, 35–­36; government responsible for, 25, 32–­33, 100, 108, 109; Indigenous people and their practices as threat to, 12, 106, 108–­10; during the Middle Age, 16–­17, 19; and moral and social reforms, 22–­23, 24; Quema del diablo and impact on, 67–­ 68; in Roman Empire, 16–­19; science of, 16, 21, 23–­24; waste as threat to, 11, 21–­28, 31–­34, 98–­99 Pueblo San Cristóbal (New Mexico), 44 “pure shit,” 82 purification, 56; in Catholic baptism, 84; filth as necessary element for, 80–­83, 88–­89, 118; fire and, 125–­26, 128; Nahua bathing rituals, 83–­84; Quema del diablo as symbolic act of, 67–­68; sweeping as rite of, 120–­22, 128; waste and, 128, 129–­130, 137 purity: fire and, 125–­26; notions of, 68, 78; morality in terms of physical, 90; physical and spiritual, 69, 84 Q’eqchi’ Maya of Guatemala, 135 Quema del diablo (Burning of the devil), 67–­68, plate 3 Quetzalcoatl, 122

index Rabinal Achí, 129 Rathje, William: Garbage Project, 51–­53, 62, 64; and Cullen Murphy, 52–­53 recycling, 4, 157; “aspirational,” 162; campaigns, 11, 13, 54, 55; industrialization and, 30; market forces and, 165; as part of a site’s formation process, 50; plasma gasification and metal, 29; (traditional) practices, 9, 25–­26, 33, 50, 53, 162–­63; waste-­management strategy of, 15, 52, 64, 92, 161–­62, 167–­68 regeneration, 130, 136 Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Landa), 84, 111–­ 12, 118, 120, 130–­31, 211n3 renewal: calendrical ceremonies of, 13, 130–­32, 136–­37, 153; cosmic, 137; filth and decay (taa’) as source of, 90, 118, 130, 137; of household goods, 111; rite of fire, 132; rituals of, 13, 153, 223n14 reuse: of bodily waste, 94, 118; cycle of production, use, discard and, 147, 153, 158, 165; “informal” economies of, 92; moral and environmental discourse of, 13, 54; objects transformed for, 148–­49, 152; and recycling practices, 25–­26, 33; of refuse for material and immaterial purposes, 12, 92, 112, 130, 149, 152; of unlined pits, 20; waste having a value for, 40, 47, 50, 72 Revillagigedo, Don Juan Vicente de Güemez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, second Count of, 102–­4, 108 “Revolt of the Objects” myth, 133–­35, 134 Reynoso, Diego, 86 Richards, Colin, 57–­58, 59 ritual objects, 53, 59, 145, 156 Ritual of the Bacabs, 81–­82 rituals: of the Bacabs, 81–­82; bathing, 83–­84; caltlacualiztli, 124; ch’ul kantela, 124; cleanliness as religious, 23; cleansing, 107, 120–­22; dedicatory, 127; “desecratory termination,” 145, 146, 222n11; described in Florentine Codex, 121–­22; at Durrington Walls, 57–­58; fire-­drilling, 126–­27, 127, 131; fire-­entering, 127; hol chuk, 123; “house-­censing,” 124; for maintaining calendrical cycles, 154–­56; “New Fire,” 130–­33, 137, 153, 218n91; ordinary work understood as performing, 119–­22, 128–­29; performing a ceremony understood as a form of work, 118–­ 19, 128, 214n33; during Quema del diablo, 67; of renewal, 13, 153, 223n14; role of discard and disposal in, 12, 112–­13, 118–­20, 129, 137–­38; santiguar, 121; scattering, 127–­28, 128; and structured deposits, 58–­59; today’s dichotomy between rubbish and, 39; and typology of deposits, 59, 141, 144–­47, 154 rubbish/refuse heaps. See middens Runnymede Bridge, 47

index “sacred excrement” (“pure shit”; suhuy ta), 82 Sahagún, Bernardino de, Florentine Codex, 77, 80–­81, 83–­84, 94, 121–­22, 130–­31, plate 4, plate 9, plate 11, plate 13 sanitary landfill, 15, 29, 33, 35, 49, 64, 162 sanitation: engineers, 18, 27, 29–­30, 32–­34, 40, 65; equated with civilization, morality, and orderly way of life, 22–­23; Mexico City’s, 97–­105; during the Middle Age, 19–­21, 69; as municipal responsibility, 17, 21, 25, 31; public, 15; reformers of, 16, 22–­24, 31, 36, 102; Roman, 17–­19, 21; systems, 24, 27; technological innovation of, 27–­30, 33, 35–­36, 49, 162 Santiago Atitlán, 123, 218n91 santiguar (“to make the sign of the cross”), 121 scavengers and scavenging: animal, 19, 108; human, 25, 26, 30; of Tenochtitlán (pepenilia), 92 Schiffer, Michael, 50, 53 seeds, 40, 51, 216n55; maize, 127, 128 Segal, Gregg, 14 7 Days of Garbage (Segal), 14 sewers: construction of, 17, 34, 101; open, 97; underground, 22, 96 sewerage system, 16–­18, 24, 27–­28, 31–­32, 36 shaman, 199, 124; -­priests or diviners (daykeepers), 142, 154–­55 shell middens, 42–­45, 46, 47. See also kitchen middens (køkkenmøddinger) shell mounds. See shell middens shit, plate 7; -­head (ta’jol; buzzard or vulture), 115; “holy,” 81–­82; *taa, 114–­15. See also excrement shrine: ancestral, 132; Momostenango, 154–­55, 156, plate 29; open-­air, 120, 154; underground, 122–­23 sin: Christian idea of, 76–­77, 79, 85, 87, 89; Christianity and original, 84, 124; excrement/mud embodiment of, 79, 85; heart with mortal (urine-­jar, excrement-­jar), 89; keban (Yucatec), 76, 78–­79; as motliltica, mocatzahuaca (“your blackness, your dirtiness”), 89; mul (lowland Mayan languages), 79; physical pollution as metaphor for, 78; relationship between filth, disease, crime and, 22; tlatlaçolli, 76. See also tlazolli smallpox, 72, 109, 179n25 soil: axixtlalli, 94; fertilized with excrement, 81, 118, plate 9; KAB glyph, 115, 117; “night,” 20, 27, 72, 115, 129; organic waste buried in agricultural, 128–­29; polluted (unhealthy), 21, 23, 27, 31–­32; sub-­surface, 215n55; terra preta, 118; tlalauiyac, 118. See also ta’ Stoczkowski, Wiktor, 35–­36 Stone, Andrea, 117, 125, 126, 126, 127 “structured deposition,” 58, 62, 144 sweatbathing, 84 sweeping, 148; in Codex Mendoza, 122, plate 12; in Florentine Codex, 121–­22, 131, plate 11; mis/miz,

281 119–­21, 121; as part of ritual ceremonies, 111, 122, 132, 136, 153; in Relación de las cosas de Yucatan (Landa), 111; rite of purification, 120–­22, 128; routine and ritual at the same time, 119, 120, 122, 128–­29; “the path,” 120 sweepings: in Invisible Cities (Calvino), 1–­2; street, 26, 101; of waste, 56 “Sweeping the Roads” (Ochpaniztli festival), 122 Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture (Hodder), 56, 59 symmetrical archaeology, 61–­63 Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (Fracastoro), 106–­7 ta’ (taa’, ta, *taa, *tzaa), 114–­17, 116, 119, 129–­30, 137; KAB glyph as a reference for, 115, 116, 117 Telleriano-­Remensis Codex, 81, plates 5–­7 temple: as house for gods, 126; garbage as fill in, 53; New Fire ceremony at, 130, 131, 137, 153; New Year ceremony at, 111; sweeping of, 94, 122, 128; underground, 122; used, worn-­out and broken objects fed to, 137 temporality: archaeological, 154; conceptions of materiality and, 163, 230n75; multi-­, 13, 156; of pit-­filling events, 58–­59; pre-­Columbian Mesoamerican notions of, 130, 134, 152–­56 Tenochtitlán: canals of, 97; New Fire ceremony, 131; order and cleanliness of, 93–­94, 97; pepenilia, 92; pre-­Columbian waste-­management systems, 94–­95, 97 termination deposits, 145–­46, 147, 152, 153, 222n11, 223n14 terra preta, 118 tetzahuitl (nocturnal omens), 80 teuhtli, tlazolli (“dust, filth”), 76–­77 Texcoco, Lake, 93, 97 Theologia Indorum (Vico), 69, 86–­89, 90 “thing-­power,” 63–­65 Thomas, Julian, 57–­58, 59 Thomsen, Christian Jürgensen, 41–­42 Tikal (Guatemala), 142, 144–­46 Tira de Tepechpan, 99 Tlaçolteotl. See Tlazolteotl Tlaelcuani. See Tlazolteotl tlalauiyac (type of soil), 94 Tlatelolco market (Mexico City), 96, 100 tlatlaçolli (“something damaged, corrupted, or spoiled”), 76 tlazolli (Nahuatl for a broad realm of pollution), 76–­80, 84, 89; teuhtli, 76–­77 tlazolmiquiztli (“harm caused by love or desire”), 78, 199n69 Tlazolteotl (Goddess of Filth or “Divine Filth”), 80–­81, plates 4–­5 toss zones, 20, 49, 53. See also drop zones, dumping trampling, 50, 148, 150

282 transgression: behavioral, 78, 85, 98; carnal, 80; sexual, 77–­78, 81 trash dump. See garbage dump Trigger, Bruce, 43 Trouillot, Michel-­Rolph, 35, 169, 232n17 *tzaa. See ta’ Tzeltal (language), 79, 113 Tzeltalan Maya languages: Tzeltal, 79, 113; Tzotzil, 113, 119, 120, 123, 134–­35 Tzotzil (language), 113, 119, 123, 134–­35; creation narratives in, 120 Tz’utujil Maya: of Lake Atitlán, 120, 123; language, 86 Uayeb (or Wayeb) period, 135–­36 Uixachtecatl (Pico de Orizaba), 131 ukabjiiy (“his manuring”), 118, 129 underworld, 24, 123; entrance to the, 81, 122, 123, 135, 136; Ix Hun Ahau, consort of the lord of the, 81 urbanization, 25–­26, 34, 40 u-­WAY-­HA’B (the sealed chamber / sleeping room of the year), 135, 136 Vaillant, George C., 46 Vico, Domingo de, Theologia Indorum, 69, 86–­89, 90 Vienna Dictionary, 119, 120 Vitoria, Francisco de, 73 Vitruvius, 17, 95 Vogt, Evon, 123–­24, 135 waste management: Bourbon reforms of, 92, 102–­6; colonial systems of, 3, 12, 105, 163; Felipe II’s ordinances directing, 96–­97; histories of, 3, 16–­17, 24, 35–­36; Indigenous residents and,

index 12, 100–­102, 105, 110; industrialization and, 25, 34–­35, 40, 47; “informal” economies of reuse or recycling as components of, 92; municipal, 24–­25, 34, 49; practices of, 11, 34, 49, 52–­53, 162–­64; pre-­Columbian strategies of, 92–­94, 96, 97; procedures of, 165; as “ritual” work, 128; state-­mandated, 97; technology and, 24–­25, 35–­36, 49, 52, 65–­66, 162 water closets, 22, 24, 31–­32, 71. See also privies Wayeb (or Uayeb) period, 135–­36 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 165 Weberman, A. J., 52 Webmoor, Timothy, and Christopher Witmore, “Things are us!,” 62–­63 Wheeler, Mortimer, 46 Witmore, Christopher, and Timothy Webmoor, “Things are us!,” 62–­63 Wright, Thomas, 42 Wylie, Alison, 45, 159 Wyman, Jeffries, 48 Yaxchilán, king of, 126, 126 Yucatán: Chichén Itzá, in, 142; colonial-­period, 80, 84, 111–­12, 120, 130, 211n3; engagement with waste in northern, 68; excavations in Mayapán, in, 118; Mayan and Spanish translations of, 75, 79; nineteenth-­century, 108; present-­day Mayan languages in, 113; present-­day rituals in, 121, 216n61; Tomás López Medel (Spanish judge) in, 73 Yucatec, 76, 113, 119–­20, 129; keban (sin), 78; kux (life), 134; mis/miz (to sweep), 119; oc ha (“baptism”), 76; Ritual of the Bacabs, 81; ta (shit), 115 Zender, Marc, 117, 125, 126, 126, 127 Zinacantán (Chiapas), 123–­24