Human-Object Severance: Archaeological Interventions in Contemporary Material Flows and Massive Discard

Summary

This is an abstract from the "AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

After decades of aspirational spending, and in houses brimming with tens to hundreds of thousands of objects, North Americans have amassed inventories of belongings that are extraordinary for their scale and complexity. In a process largely devoid of ritual, these lifelong-amassed collections are often thoroughly purged from domestic architecture at the conclusion of homeowners’ lives, dropping out of time and memory. Building on Jeanne Arnold and colleagues’ archaeological ethnography addressing the material worlds of American families, this presentation considers whether we owe anything to the objects that once constituted the social lives of households. I highlight two pilot studies where researchers staged archaeological interventions in seldom-seen bureaucratic “flows” of waste for the purpose of isolating massive domestic discard events. Such interventions, I argue, afford an examination of relational materialities seldom enjoyed in other archaeological contexts and thus are essential to developing an anthropological understanding of the dissolution or severance of human-object relationships. Drawing on several datasets, I problematize the classic archaeological notion of “systemic” and I operationalize more recent conceptualizations of “assemblage.” Finally, I reflect on the ways that discarded possessions “haunt” the past and the present when their social lives are reanimated in the context of archaeological research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38551.0