End-of-Life Purges of Massive Domestic Assemblages: Staging Archaeological Interventions and Reanimating the Social Lives of Discarded Belongings

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

North American houses are among the largest in the world and, for the better part of a century, their occupants have been accumulating and storing possessions at a rate and volume unlike any other period in human history. These lifelong-amassed assemblages are rarely kept or valued by descendants, and at the conclusion of homeowners’ lives, the bulk of home possessions are wholesale purged—from houses and from collective memory. This poster highlights several nodes of research emergent in archaeological interventions in the flow of massive assemblages of home belongings to landfills. Drawing on data gathered during pilot studies of mostly intact domestic assemblages intercepted at materials reclamation facilities (MRFs), we explore how the archaeological investigation of contemporary end-of-life inventory purging affords an examination of relational materialities in ways seldom enjoyed in other archaeological contexts. We consider the ways that discarded possessions ‘haunt’ the present when their social lives are reanimated in the context of archaeological research; we show how the end-of-life disarticulation of domestic assemblages is immediate, rapid, and violent; and we ask whether we owe anything to the objects that, over decades, were imbued with special meanings and shaped (our) domestic lives.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37557.0