ANTHRO 2AC Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Skimmed Milk, Cottage Cheese, William Rathje
8 Dec 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Why study archaeology: study of recent history. Archaeology can give you a much fuller richer account of the past that you can"t get from written history alone. The study of material culture, in this case garbage, can tell you a lot about people. In many cases what they are working with is garbage: the materials that people left behind/threw away/abandoned. Gives great evidence of people"s day to day lives: analyze garbage collections from households (and particular neighborhoods) Also included households self reports: people in the houses were writing down/documenting all the things they were throwing away: excavate landfills 9 us cities. Cannot trust their views/reports of their daily lives. Reports don"t line up with the findings in the trash. Rathje found many things in people"s garbage that they either didn"t take into account when reporting their waste or that they misrepresented in terms of amount.
