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W.L. Rathje
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By
W.L. Rathje
There
are a limited number of people who respect refuse and
what is done with it in our country. I can accept that,
but one thing that particularly appalls me is that after
landfills are appropriately covered over, designers
outside of the refuse industry go to extraordinary lengths
to hide what landfills are: large deposits of relatively
well-preserved garbage.
As an archaeologist who
describes and interprets societies based upon both the
nature and treatment of the material remnants their
constituents leave behind, I believe that our landfills
deserve the same respect as other time capsules - probably
even more! I'll explain.
Recall the thousands of
communities, interest groups, corporations, and families
that busily squirreled away time capsules to mark their
place as Father Time crossed the threshold into the
year 2000. All of these dedicated "capsulers"
went to great efforts and along the way must have asked
themselves, "Will my time capsule be found? Will
the contents be preserved? Will the contents I picked
provide people in the future with an accurate glimpse
of our lives today?"
I have come up with some
answers to these time capsule questions that provide
ample reason to reconsider the role of landfills as
crucial in presenting our society to the future.
The term time capsule
was coined in 1939 to christen a torpedo-shaped, 7.5-ft.-long
container interred 50 ft. below Flushing Meadows–Corona
Park during the 1939 World's Fair. Westinghouse
Electronic & Manufacturing Company, which was lagging
badly behind its chief rival, General Electric, created
the time capsule to attract publicity and spur sales
(which it did). The outer shell, meant to be opened
some 5,000 years in the future, was constructed of a
copper-steel alloy enclosing a 6-in.-thick Pyrex glass
case. The inert gas inside surrounded 35 common household
artifacts, including chewing gum, a fountain pen, a
tobacco pouch, cosmetics - all carefully selected
to give future folks a glimpse of American life, 1930s-style.
Time capsules probably
date back to the carefully laid-out caches that dedicated
the first human-made structures (the descendants of
these caches are the items placed in the cornerstones
of modern buildings). But the first such legacy that
clearly had posterity in mind was bequeathed by Esarhaddon,
the 7th century BC king of Babylonia, Assyria, and Egypt.
Contents included not only a list of his conquests but
also additional inscribed clay tablets that described
many aspects of his entire civilization.
The golden age of time
capsules, in which some pundits insist we now live,
began in 1938, when Thornwell Jacobs, president of Atlanta's
Ogelthorpe University, began filling his 2,000-ft.3
"Crypt of Civilization": a kind of Noah's
Ark of Depression–era knowledge and technology.
Among its thousands of contents are dental floss, the
phonograph voices of Hitler and Popeye the Sailor, a
toaster, Shakespeare's known works, and a carefully
sealed ampoule of Budweiser beer (in honor of the beer - long
since evaporated - that was left in pots in Egyptian
tombs). The crypt is supposed to be opened in AD 8113.
When the crypt was sealed
on May 25, 1940, Jacobs opined that we "are the
first generation equipped to perform our archaeological
duty to the future." Following Jacobs' lead,
the 1990 Guinness Book of World Records called
his capsule "the first successful attempt to bury
a record for any future inhabitants or visitors to the
plant Earth."
By the early 1950s, the
interment of time capsules, like much else in America,
was a mass phenomenon - a consequence, perhaps,
of the psychological shadow cast by the dropping of
"the bomb" at the end of WWII, although
the trend also correlates with the postwar upsurge in
building permits. As the new millennium approached,
Paul Hudson, a history professor who co-founded the
International Time Capsule Society and has now registered
more than 1,400 deposits, said, "America is going
time capsule crazy."
Millennium
capsules ranged in scope from large scale to diminutive.
In New Zealand, for example, a huge "Millennium
Vault" stuffed with the bric-a-brac of everyday
life was buried beneath a pyramid covered by a bronze
relief depicting 1,000 years of the island's history.
In Winslow, AR, machinist Lane Baumgardner produced
what he called the "US Time Capsule," a
massive complex of four pyramids that arose between
Fayetteville and Fort Smith that was capable of safeguarding
25,000 1- x 2-ft. troves of objects - 500 from each
state - that would let the future know, "I
was here in 2000!"
At this do-it-yourself
level, quite a number of companies and individuals shared
Baumgardner's vision. Future Packaging & Preservation,
a company in Covina, CA, sold upscale capsules for "professional
preservation." Just prior to the end of the millennium,
business was booming, with sales - at $5,200 each
for a 30-in.-long, 14-in.-wide capsule filled with silica
gel or preservation gases - expected to reach at
least 50,000 before January 2000.
Because
of such companies as The Time Machine Inc., a more modest
personal time capsule was offered within the financial
reach of most Americans. For a mere $19.95, the capsule
consisted of a stainless steel box - about the size
and consistency of a tin for Christmas cookies - with
pamphlets suggesting contents and a chart indicating
how long certain materials last when buried, which reckoned
a VCR tape would endure 10-15 years.
Will the time capsule
be found? In 1986, the townspeople of Wilkinsburg,
PA, to commemorate their centennial, decided to exhume
a time capsule buried only 25 years earlier. Unfortunately,
the capsule had been laid to rest by a select committee,
all of whose members were dead. "Chick"
Ake, 87, recalls that the committee met in secret session
to decide where to bury the time capsule and that, subsequently,
they didn't tell anyone. After days of digging
turned up nothing, Ake wrote in his diary, "Oh,
well."
Wilkinsburg's time
capsule, along with myriad others - including 17
deposited in and around Corona, CA, and the M*A*S*H
TV show's capsule buried in 1983 under
a Twentieth Century Fox parking lot - have yet to
be found.
Unusual? Not really. Professor
Hudson's rough estimate is that at least 1,000
time capsules are filled and forgotten for every one
that successfully conveys its cargo to future generations.
Will the contents
of the time capsule be preserved? Due to unanticipated
consequences, when a capsule is ceremoniously unearthed,
the upshot is often disappointing. Upon completion of
the Empire State Building in 1931, a time capsule was
deposited in the basement. When it was exhumed 50 years
later, it was filled with water - the contents had
dissolved. Again, not unusual. Oh, well.
Will the contents of time
capsules provide people in the future with an accurate
glimpse of our lives? Even if burial sites did not vanish
and materials did not decay, we lack the necessary prescience
to anticipate what those in the future might most want
to know.
In 1986, I attended the
public exhumation in Tucson, AZ, of a time capsule buried
25 years before at the grand opening of Campbell Plaza,
the first air-conditioned strip mall in the United States.
A former mayor was on hand as the master of ceremonies,
and three television crews recorded the proceedings.
The occasion turned out to be a disappointment. The
capsule contained only a faded local newspaper and some
business cards. A short while later, in 1989, a time
capsule that had been in Boston's Faneuil Hall
since 1889 was found. Its contents: a couple of crumbling
newspapers and the business cards of city officials.
A century of earth-trembling innovations in American
lifeways was commemorated by the same pedestrian contents.
Oh, well.
Somehow
the most compelling aspect of time capsules seems to
be the burying of them, the marking of our spot. At
some level, conscious or not, most time capsules seem
intended less as messages from ourselves to the future
than as messages from ourselves - self-congratulatory
or cynically commercial - to ourselves.
In its most common and
rudimentary form, the time capsule offers the sustaining
reassurance that those associated with its contents
have won some small niche in history. As such, most
capsules embody personal identities, not the large-scale
changes in our culture. But perhaps capsules have been
as they should be. For the first 5,000 years of civilization,
a lasting material legacy that identified an individual
was reserved for the most politically powerful of the
rich and famous of their time, like King Tut. Today's
"personal-size" time capsules democratize
the chance - no matter that it is one in a thousand - that
something material from a particular individual will
be immortalized in some museum. For future archaeologists,
these artifacts will add an interesting footnote on
personal hubris in the 20th century.
But for those who worry
that the rest of our culture's story won't
be told, I have good news. The authentic time capsules
of American society are not a few bits and pieces of
particular lives and interests that are rather arbitrarily
selected - just as Egyptian texts were biased because
scribes wrote down what was in Pharaoh's best
interest. The artifacts that will fully represent the
way we lived are currently safely stored inside mega–time
capsules that we call landfills. Inside are accreted
and preserved most of the billions of material remains
we discard in our daily lives - the good, the bad,
and the ugly from all our activities at work and at
school, at home and at play, with friends and with family;
the empty container of reduced-fat double Dutch chocolate
ice cream, the half-full container of pesticide, and
the recyclable aluminum can that someone didn't
recycle. And no larger landfill exists than the 3,000
ac. at Fresh Kills, perched on Staten Island only a
few miles from the Westinghouse time capsule. It is
the myriad anonymous remains of the day that formed
Fresh Kills that will tell the future about 20th
century American lifestyles - not what Westinghouse
or Ogelthorpe University selected for their own self-serving
purposes.
Furthermore, landfills
are the most ideal time capsules because they won't
get lost; for the most part, their contents will be
preserved; and when decades from now archaeologists
dig into them, the exhumed treasures will give the future
an unbiased glimpse of the material realities of 20th
century life.
So
if you collect garbage, manage a landfill, or are involved
in anything similar, the next time someone asks you
what you do, tell them that you bury and maintain the
contents of the largest time capsule in (fill in
the blank). As an archaeologist, I believe that
is a really important job, and anyone who has ever been
curious about what was buried in any other time capsule
must surely agree!
Contributing Editor
W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.
MSW
- March/April 2003
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