One by one, archaeologists stumbled on pieces of trash. Using techniques normally reserved for documenting stone and bone tools, the team recorded items such as plastic spoons, glasses, bottle caps, straws, cell phone batteries, paint can lids, candy wrappers and plastic wrap. By the time the experiment was over, archaeologists had discovered almost 3,000 items, the vast majority of which were made of plastic.
The plastic that would be found at the site, an old fort in Wales, was not a surprise. In fact, it was expected, but not at this point.
Since the 1980s, two replicas of round houses from the Iron Age existed in this location, combining those that existed in the Iron Age fort of Castell Henllys during the end of the first millennium BC.
Most of the visitors who came to the site were children on field trips, whose legacy is only now being understood. Like the new antiquity paper shows, plastics have a habit of hanging around – including in historic sites that existed long before these synthetic materials were invented. It is another sign that we have entered the Anthropocene, a period in which we are remaking the planet in our image.
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The replica rounds at Castell Henllys served two different purposes. The first, called Cookhouse, was set up as a real round Iron Age house, while the second, called Earthwatch, was set up as a classroom, where students sat on benches to learn and eat their snacks.
The Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, which manages the site, recently decided to dismantle the rounds due to health and safety issues. Before building new structures, however, archaeologists thought it best to excavate the site. It would be a good opportunity to study decomposition processes, to determine which human activities result in residual waste and how replicated structures can affect the integrity of prehistoric structures located in the same location. Here, the two replicas round houses were literally built on the same site as the real ones that existed more than 2,000 years ago. As the authors wrote in their study, “we predicted that artifact assemblies and distributions at Castell Henllys could act as valuable tests for correlating accidental disposal with activity patterns.”
This turned out to be the case, but the amount of waste seen at the site exceeded its expectations.
“We often find a small amount of recent wreckage when starting an excavation, or if we find a deliberate landfill, but never so in a historic or occupying building,” Harold Mytum, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool and the first author of the new newspaper , explained in an email.
This does not mean that the heritage site was poorly managed. The revolving houses were cleaned regularly to maintain the appearance of a prehistoric Iron Age environment. But, as the new research shows, a surprising amount of garbage managed to seep into the soil, leading to the discovery of many items. Needless to say, the vast majority of items recovered were found on Earthwatch, where the students ate their snacks. Most of the items were small and fragmented in nature, like torn packages, which explains why not all the garbage was collected.
“Children’s packages [lunch packs] they can damage the planet – they contain a lot of plastic and items fall and get lost, ”said Mytum. “In addition, candy packaging is laminated and is another environmental threat.”
Needless to say, the discovery of all this plastic, while certainly part of the experiment, forced archaeologists to adjust their approach. The scientists recorded all the findings, but had to adjust their resources “to do the evidence justice,” said Mytum. That said, it did not affect the ability of archaeologists to examine how buildings had deteriorated over the decades and to the document the distinct signatures left by our modern civilization.
“In fact, he revealed how the artifacts are embedded in the floor and also where they were denser inside the houses,” explained Mytum. “Prehistoric houses have fewer finds, but we can think about how activities leave their traces in archeology.”
Moving forward, Mytum and his colleagues will continue to work with the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park to educate the public on these issues. and find more effective ways to keep those important spaces clean.
But it will not be easy.
“Even well-managed rural locations can have a significant accumulation of plastics in the soil,” said Mytum. “The Plastic Age – an indicator of the Anthropocene – actually reached not only the oceans of the Blue Planet, but also its soils. Reducing the use of plastics is essential – this rubble was a by-product of our lifestyle, even in a place where any obviously modern material, such as plastic waste, is removed to avoid affecting the heritage visitor’s experience.
To which he added: “If it is so bad here, it is a sign that our lifestyle needs to be rethought”.