Recycle(d): Objects and Their Afterlives

In 2019, after a decade of work, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy voted to accept the Anthropocene as a new "slice" of the geological record, beginning around the mid-twentieth century and marked by the radiogenic signal left by nuclear weapons. Although there is considerable debate amongst researchers around the timing, labelling and ultimate outcomes of the Anthropocene, there is general agreement that the scale and nature of recent human...
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In 2019, after a decade of work, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy voted to accept the Anthropocene as a new "slice" of the geological record, beginning around the mid-twentieth century and marked by the radiogenic signal left by nuclear weapons. Although there is considerable debate amongst researchers around the timing, labelling and ultimate outcomes of the Anthropocene, there is general agreement that the scale and nature of recent human activity has created fundamental shifts in the state and functioning of the Earth's system, including climate change, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, changes in the biosphere, habitat loss, and the proliferation and global dispersal of vast quantities of enduring new materials, notably plastics (Anthropocene Working Group 2019).Whe archaeological signature of such a shift is marked in part by the disposable objects of mass consumption that constitute the detritus of modern society - the garbage that first captured the attention of archaeologists such as Michael Schiffer (Gould and Schiffer 1981) and William Rathje (1979) in the 1970s and that continues to challenge us with its scale, ubiquity and consequences today. What we throw away and why, how we deal with it, and what this tells us about our lifestyles and the consequences of our waste for the future are fundamental concerns for understanding the effects of our own species on the planet.The entries in "Recycle(d)" derive from the 2020 iteration of the Flinders University archaeology topic, 'The Archaeology of Modern Society'. For their major assignment students are asked to choose an item of modern material culture, describe and interpret it, focusing on the seemingly innocuous artefacts of the everyday that infiltrate our lives. While the entries in "Recycle(d)" are in many ways similar to those in its predecessor volumes-and some, like the glass bottle and the pneumatic tyre, are directly connected-the over-riding concern in this book is with the ecological footprint of the modern world and the environmental consequences of the production, consumption and discard of these mass-produced objects.