W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

The 60-second advertisement for AT&T known in the industry by the name "The Dig" was first broadcast on television at the primest of times: at 8:17 p.m. on Oct. 29, 1989, during the first episode of ABC's made-for-TV movie The Final Days, a much-publicized and controversial docudrama recounting Richard Nixon's fall from power. "The Dig" was produced by Ayer Advertising, in New York City, and its debut was seen by some 14.6 million Americans.

Archaeologists watching The Final Days probably got a bit of a lump in their throats when the commercial appeared on the screen. Here is what it showed: The foundations of a skyscraper are being dug when cries of discovery suddenly bring work to a halt. A team of archaeologists rushes to the scene, led by a young woman with long blond hair in a yellow hard hat. There follows a stylish, quick-cut sequence: Troweling exposes the wooden skeleton of an old ship; the skeletal frame is transposed to a computer screen, which rotates it like a design on the drawing boards for a new car; finally, dirt is excitedly brushed aside to reveal the ship's figurehead in antique splendor. Through it all there are a lot of phone calls. "This is big. Really big," someone says.

The whole episode was exhilarating, and it was also good to see the virtues of conservation being celebrated - even if one knew that the ship's "frame" and "figurehead" were not real artifacts but rather stage props molded from expanded polystyrene foam and painted to look like wood; even, indeed, if one knew that the excavation on which the commercial was based involved a ship that never even had a figurehead!

The real excavation took place at 175 Water Street, in the financial district of Manhattan, in January of 1982, after workers, in advance of a major construction project involving the National Westminster Bank, dug several deep, four-foot by 10-foot exploratory pits at randomly selected places on the site so that archaeologists could check for any significant archaeological remains. (Archaeological testing of this kind is now mandatory for any federally funded project and in states and municipalities for any construction.) As one of these holes was dug, the mud siding sloughed away and exposed a ship's frame - 10 feet below street level!

The archaeologist in charge of the excavation that ensued was Sheli Smith, now at The Past Foundation in Columbus, OH. For six semesters she had been one of the Garbage Project's most assiduous garbage sorters, once telling a Wall Street Journal reporter that she sorted garbage "to relax." In her capacity as a garbage sorter, Smith appeared in 1975 on the television show "To Tell the Truth," where celebrity panelists asked questions in an attempt to identify the genuine "garbage sorter" (or whatever the subject person happened to do) from three subjects - two imposters and the real McCoy. Sheli managed to elude discovery by all four of the panelists. Her success had everything to do with a special manicure she arranged for herself before the show: "No one with nails like that would ever sort garbage," the panelist Peggy Cass confidently stated.

The ship that Smith uncovered - now known as the Ronson ship, after Howard Ronson, the developer of the property - was once a proud, three-masted merchantman. It may have been in the tobacco trade for a time, and the presence of certain species of taredo worms in its furring suggests that the ship sailed at least once to the South Seas. But sometime around 1750, her masts gone, the ship was positioned on a tidal flat abutting what was then lower Manhattan's shoreline (Manhattan had beachfront property!!) to become part of a retaining wall. In doing so, it also became part of the process by which Manhattan's shoreline has steadily encroached on surrounding waterways. The ship was filled with ballast and sludge and then heaped with construction debris and assorted garbage, including the castoff leather and tacks of a cobbler, and the castoff cow heads and pig heads of a victualler. "From all of those years of sorting garbage," Smith recalls, "I knew what we had right from the start."

To archaeologists, the Ronson ship was a find of major importance, because the vessel was the first colonial merchant ship to be discovered that they had the opportunity to preserve and study. To garbologists, the unearthing of the ship was heralded for an entirely different reason. Its discovery reminds us that, over time, the world of garbage is characterized by continuity. The Ronson ship has obvious forebears, to give but one example, in the wharves that lined the channel connecting the Tiber River and Rome's port of Ostia - wharves made from derelict scows that had been packed with garbage and topped with concrete. And it has obvious descendants in those shoreline extensions of land, built over many years out of hard-packed - often C&D - garbage, that are today the sites of such places as LaGuardia Airport in New York City, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and Foster City in California.

The examples here may seem trivial, and yet the fact is - look where one may - the history of garbage consists largely of a relatively few long, simple, durable strands of behavior. Our relentless if understandable present-mindedness often keeps us from seeing that our own practices with respect to garbage are, far from being somehow novel and unique, deeply rooted in the ways of our ancestors - a fact that might at least offer some modest psychological comfort, even if it makes the task of garbage disposal in our time no easier.

MSW - July/AugustS 2006