One by one, archaeologists stumbled upon pieces of rubbish. Using techniques commonly reserved for documenting stone tools and bones, the team recorded items such as plastic spoons, glasses, bottle caps, straws, cell phone batteries, paint can lids, candy wrappers, and wrappers. of plastic. By the end of the experiment, archaeologists had discovered about 3,000 items, the vast majority of them plastic.
That the plastic was in place, an old Welsh fort, was no surprise. In fact, it was expected, but not to this point.
Since the 1980s, there have been two replicas of round Iron Age houses on this site, which coincided with those found in the Iron Age fort of Henllys Castle in the late first millennium BC.
Most of the visitors who came to the site were children making excursions, the legacy of which is only now being understood. As a new antiquity paper shows, plastics have a habit of adhering, including heritage 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 remake the planet in our image.
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The replicas of Henllys Castle round houses had two different purposes. The first, called Cookhouse, was set up as a real Iron Age roundabout, while the second, called Earthwatch, was set up as a classroom, where students sat on benches to learn and eat their snacks.
Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, which manages the site, recently decided to dismantle due rounds to safety and health issues. Before building new structures, however, archaeologists thought it advisable to excavate the site. It would serve as a good opportunity to study the processes of decay, determine which human activities give rise to surplus waste, and how replicated structures could affect the integrity of prehistoric structures located in the same place. Here, the two round replica houses were built literally 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 sets and distributions at Henllys Castle could act as valuable evidence to correlate accidental discarding with activity patterns.”
It turned out to be the case, but the amount of waste that was seen at the site exceeded his expectations.
“We often find a small amount of recent debris when we start an excavation or if we find a deliberate dump, but never like that inside a heritage or occupation building,” said Harold Mytum, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool and first author of the new document, explained in an email.
This is not to say that wealth is mismanaged. Round houses were cleaned regularly to maintain the appearance of a prehistoric Iron Age setting. But, as the new research shows, a surprising amount of garbage managed to crawl on the ground, which led to the discovery of so many objects. Needless to say, the vast majority of the recovered objects were found at Earthwatch, where the students ate their snacks. Most of the items were small and fragmentary in nature, such as broken packages, which explains why not all the rubbish was collected.
“Children’s suitcases [lunch packs] it can damage the planet: they contain a lot of plastic and objects fall and are lost, ”said Mytum. “In addition, candy wrappers are plasticized and pose another environmental threat.”
Needless to say, the discovery of all this plastic, while certainly part of the experiment, forced archaeologists to change their approach. The scientists had been recording all the findings, but had to adjust their resources “to do justice to the evidence,” Mytum said. That said, it did not affect the ability of archaeologists to examine how buildings had decayed over the decades. and in the document the different signatures left by our modern civilization.
“In fact, it revealed how the artifacts are embedded in the ground and also where they were densest inside the houses,” Mytum explained. “Prehistoric houses have fewer finds, but we can think about how activities leave their mark on archeology.”
From now on, Mytum and colleagues will continue to work with Pembrokeshire Coast National Park to educate the public on these issues. and find more effective ways to keep these important spaces clean.
But it will not be easy.
“Even rural, well-managed locations can have a significant accumulation of plastics in the soil,” Mytum said. “The age of plastic – an indicator of the Anthropocene – has, in fact, reached not only the oceans of the blue planet, but also its soils. It is essential to reduce the use of plastics: this waste was a by-product of our lifestyle, even in a place where obviously modern materials, such as plastic waste, are disposed of, to avoid affecting the experience of heritage visitor ”.
To this he added: “If it’s so bad here, it’s a sign that our lifestyle needs to be rethought.”