Toxic Taphonomy

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We are living through an era that has been described as “the apotheosis of waste,” a globe brimming with greenhouse gasses, mountains of tailings, lagoons of pig-shit, and hangars of acidic sludge. The massive scale and persistence of industrial waste has not only transformed the air, water, and soil that we live on, it has hijacked the taphonomic processes of decay. Rather than a process of undoing, the decay of industrial waste is toxic, uneven, and hidden. As it decays, industrial waste not only materially remakes the bodies, communities and environments that live in its shadow, it transforms humanity’s capacity to know and act in the world. Drawing from excavations of a 1930s mining community that lived downwind of lead tailings, this paper explores how the immigrant miners and their families lived were unevenly exposed to these tailings and their harms. Beyond focusing on the material harms themselves, I am interested in the ways these harms played at the limits of the legibility and in doing so unsettled the community’s local practices of resilience in the face of exploitation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38552.0