W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

When people find out that I’m an archaeologist, the first thing I’m usually asked is: “How do ancient cities get buried so that you have to dig them up?”

“They don’t normally get buried like Pompeii was covered in volcanic ash.  Instead, the vast majority of cities in the past rose on top of layer upon layer of their own garbage.”  I always give that answer with a smile!  In fact, that answer should give all can-tossers, and especially Tucson’s Tom Price, something to smile about.  I’ll explain:

Here’s how cities get their lift.  Archaeological excavations of hard-packed dirt and clay floors usually recover an amplitude of small finds, suggesting that many bits of garbage that fell on the floor were trampled into the dirt or were brushed into corners and along the edge of walls by the traffic patterns of the occupants.  (This dispersal of garbage to the edges of an occupied space is known to archaeologists as the “fringe effect,” something we all see in the distribution of litter every day.)

When the archaeologist C. W. Blegen dug into Bronze Age Troy (dating to between about 3000 and 1700 B.C.) in the 1950s, he found that the floors of its buildings had periodically become so littered with animal bone splinters and diminutive artifacts that “even the least squeamish household felt that something had to be done.”  This was normally accomplished, Blegen discovered, not by sweeping out the offensive accumulation embedded in and around the floor, “but by bringing in a good supply of fresh clean clay and spreading it out thickly to cover the noxious deposit.  In many a house, as demonstrated by the clearly marked stratification, this process was repeated time after time until the level of the floor rose so high that it was necessary to raise the roof and rebuild the doorway.”

Eventually, of course, buildings had to be demolished altogether, the old mud-brick walls knocked in to serve as the foundation of even higher new mud-brick buildings.  Over time the ancient cities of the Middle East were lifted high above the surrounding plains on massive mounds, called tells, which contained the ascending remains of centuries, even millennia, of prior occupation.  In sheer size, any of these megastructures of garbage put modern landfills to shame—the tell of ancient Babylon, for example, stretches for 2.5 miles along the left bank of the Euphrates River in Iraq.

At Troy and elsewhere, of course, not all trash was kept indoors.  The larger pieces of garbage and debris were swept or thrown into the streets.  As structures became multistoried, the practice of throwing garbage and even the contents of bedpans from upper floors into streets became commonplace.  In fact, the custom of men walking on the street-side of women did not develop to keep women from being splashed by vehicles; it came instead from the gallant men who were willing to take the brunt of what was thrown from upper stories but didn’t make it all the way to main part of the street. 

Until relatively modern times, once garbage landed in the streets, non-food items, such as a broken jug or a torn shirt, were usually run over until they became part of the matrix of the roadway.  Food scraps were rapidly snapped up by semi-domesticated animals, usually pigs and dogs. 

Even after the advent of systematic refuse collection, it is interesting that the “slopping” of garbage to pigs continued in a major way, though it was done on farms and not in streets. A survey of 557 American cities in 1930 found that about 40% of them still saved their “wet” garbage for the purpose of slopping—this despite the well-known relationship between trichinosis and garbage-fed pigs. In 1946, postal inspectors in Philadelphia detained three large, foul-smelling packages of plate scrapings and other food debris. A man named John Wagner, who had mailed the offending parcels to his central Pennsylvania farm, explained that he hated to see good food go to waste, and so had for years been scouring the trash cans behind hotels for provender to fatten his hogs.

Needless to say, in ancient times and subsequently, more than easily ground-down items and food debris were thrown into the streets. In exchange for the right to sell anything useful that they might find, human scavengers carried much of the inorganic garbage to vacant lots or to the outskirts of a settlement, where it might either be left in piles or burned. In Old Testament times the people of Jerusalem burned some of their garbage in fires emanating from natural gas vents in the nearby Valley of Gehenna, to the south of the city; through a process of association, the word Gehenna became a synonym for “hell.”

In 1973, Charles Gunnerson, a civil engineer with the US Department of Commerce’s Environmental Research Laboratories, calculated that the rate of elevation due to debris accumulation in Troy was about 4.7 feet per century.  If the idea of a city rising above its gradually accumulating fill and debris at this rate seems extraordinary, recall that the ship Sheli Smith excavated in Manhattan’s financial district was found by construction workers at a depth of 10 feet below ground surface (see “Beyond the Pail” from the July/August 2006 issue of MSW Management). “Street level” on the island of Manhattan today is typically 6–15 feet higher than it was when Peter Minuit bought it from the Algonquins in 1626; in some places it is as much as 30 feet higher.

Nowadays, needless to say, the fill used in construction on Manhattan is not normally MSW and C&D. However, Gunnerson calculated that if all the garbage from Manhattan that was at that time being sent primarily to Fresh Kills —along with all the construction and demolition debris from Manhattan that is currently dumped at sea—was instead spread out evenly over the island, Manhattan would be sitting on its garbage at the same rate of accumulation per century as that of ancient Troy.

More than four decades ago, when Tom Price took over as head of Tucson’s sanitation division, he found a group of workers with high absenteeism and accident rate but with no esprit de corps. As a Marine, Tom had learned how valuable understanding the importance of a job was to doing that job well.  So he went to the film library at the University of Arizona, where he had graduated, and found a couple of short films on the way flies spread disease and how important it was to public health to eliminate improperly disposed garbage.  For the next three weeks he showed those films to his can-tossers every day before they hit the streets.
In a couple of months, Tom’s message had instilled an esprit in his workers and dramatically cut their absenteeism and accidents.  Within a few more months there was a waiting list for sanitation jobs.

I believe that Tom’s “fly suppression” esprit message is totally compatible with the message that can-tossers are safely eliminating an unwanted “lift” from our cities.  That message, in turn, should produce a justly deserved “lift” of pride to all garbage workers from a job well done!

Archaeologist and consulting editor W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage project.

MSW - September/October 2006