Growing Awareness

Although not exactly invented at Burning Man, the practice of contemporary archaeology is fairly new, and still far from mainstream. Arguably the earliest example, and still one of the most famous, originated in 1973 when a University of Arizona archaeologist named William Rathje decided to study garbage in Tucson.

As a specialist in Maya civilization, Rathje was well practiced in the study of middens, heaps of ancient rubbish that had provided his field with most of its knowledge about Mesoamerican culture. Prompted by several students, he realized that the same approach could be used to understand his own society. For the next four decades, often with assistance from local trash collectors, he amassed and cataloged what people threw out. His research revealed the degree to which people were in denial about their junk food consumption, and also highlighted less obvious phenomena, such as the fact that consumers waste more perishables in times of economic stress because they tend to overstock.

Rathje’s Garbage Project had an impact on public policy, informing fields ranging from nutrition to landfill management, but it failed to attract broad support in Rathje’s own discipline. “Archaeologists ask, ‘Why bother looking at the present?’ ” says White, citing a prejudice against recency that even extends to study of the 19th and 20th centuries. “There are still not that many people looking at active sites,” she says, “and they often have an activist or political slant.” As an example, White cites archaeological work on undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States, initiated by University of Michigan anthropologist Jason de León, who studies the distribution of abandoned personal items in the Sonoran Desert. The work shows how border policy affects risk-taking behaviors.

White wasn’t aware of any research in contemporary archaeology before she became interested in Burning Man. Her background was primarily in American colonial material culture when she started at UNR in 2005.