On August 24, 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius erupted. It released an estimated 100,000 times the thermal energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the close of the second World War. The cloud of super-heated glasses reached a height of 21 miles as it spat molten rock and ash at a rate of 1.5 million tons per second. It is possible that tens of thousands of people and animals perished as a result of the catastrophe.
It is only because of this catastrophe, that the ancient world was able to bequeath the modern world one of its greatest inheritances. The cities near Mount Vesuvius were covered in feet of ash and pyroclastic surges, persevering them for thousands of years when many other cities turned to rubble and ruin.[1]
Although much of our knowledge of the ancient world comes from surviving letters, books, and inscriptions, we also gain tremendous insight across the centuries due to surviving material and physical goods. As we have just two surviving eyewitness accounts of the explosion, our understanding of the event is built on more than two hundred years of archaeological work (and conservation) that has been done on the remains of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
One could spend a lifetime writing about Pompeii—if one should be so lucky. But what I’m most interested about in this piece is the fact that it was destruction that preserved. A simple twist of irony that those who lost their lives, homes, and fortunes on that fateful day in the first century are those who have been immortalized millennia later. This isn’t exclusive to Pompeii, either. Many catastrophic events have created the circumstances for preservation. Shipwrecks from antiquity to the Titanic are gifts to archaeology. Where there were once hundreds or thousands of ships crisscrossing the ancient Mediterranean, now just a few have survived thanks to laying in anerobic silt for centuries, the perfect time capsule to preserve things for thousands of years.
At first, I wanted to create a list of catastrophic events that had preserved some treasure for posterity, but I quickly realized that this list would be impossible to complete. Then I had another idea. What will our society, the inner core of late capitalism’s empire, leave to the future? Car crashes, shipwrecks, earthquakes? Certainly, those will exist to some extent but, more often than not, we raise ships, repair bridges, and write-off crashes.
The closest analogy I can come up for Pompeii might be Chernobyl. A city and surrounding areas destroyed instantly, with plates left on tables, a world frozen in time. However, there are two differences—Pompeii was preserved under inert ash, Chernobyl was poisoned and will be slowly reclaimed by nature. Although Chernobyl may be readily available to an intrepid, and careful, archaeologist, I think the most readily available things to study for a future archaeologist will be the places where the debris from our society ends up, the flotsam and jetsam of consumption culture.
Thankfully, the Romans were generous again and gave us another example to provide us with guidance about what we can learn from a trash pile or dumping ground.
Monte Testaccio, literally Mountain of Ceramic, is an accidental monument in the city of Rome. From the first century BC until the site was closed in the 260s AD, Monte Testaccio served as a dumping ground for broken amphorae, i.e. transportation jugs for olive oil and wine. It has a base of more than five acres and stands over 115 feet high, although it was likely much higher in the past. According to Bryan Ward-Perkins it contains as many as 53 million broken amphorae, which is incredible to me.
However, I only use this as an example not to cause incredulity—although it does—but to share my concern. If, after 2000 years, fifty million broken jars survive as to create a hill, what will our bequeathed trash to our future archaeologists look like? Especially when our trash is hardly as biodegradable as terra cotta or ceramics?
For example, the largest dump in the United States, rising more than 500 feet high and covering more than 700 acres (140 times larger than Monte Testaccio), Puente Hills Landfill in Los Angeles was closed in 2013 after maxing out its capacity. Certainly, our ability to cover up and seal garbage has improved in the intervening centuries, but that will likely only help our future archaeologists discover what we ate, wore, drank, and tossed indiscriminately.
According to the EPA, in 2018, Americans generated nearly 300 million tons of trash. With a population of 350 million, we appear to make about 75% of a ton of garbage per person per year.[2]
The EPA published this helpful graph to show the increase in garbage, by type, in the last fifty years.
Certainly, some of this trash will quickly or slowly decay into nothingness (just like yours truly), but what the EPA lovingly calls “Durable Goods” and “Containers and Packaging” in the above graphic have a much longer shelf life than the others. Plastic bottles, for instance, have a half-life of approximately 450 years in a landfill.
Electronic waste, including the metals in phones, TVs, computers, and more, is one of the largest detrimental categories. Jeffrey Weidenhamer and Michael Clement estimate that more than 100 million of these devices are trashed in the US each year. This means toxic metals like lead and mercury are absorbed into the local soil, ground water, and environment. I have the feeling our intrepid archaeologist will have to dig through billions of dead iPhones and Tamagotchis in their search.
But what about the things we eat every day? According to Smithsonian, more than 65 billion chickens were slaughtered for consumption in 2016. 65 Trillion. I’m certainly responsible for a few million of these, but the total is mind bending. If we keep this consumption up for 20 years, archaeologists will have to deal with 1.3 trillion chicken bones to dig through to find anything interesting.
But chicken bones may decay and return to the soil, what about things that don’t like plastic and other artificial materials that we’ve created for the all-important tasks of carrying our take-out?
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a marine gyre of plastics that covers 270,000 square miles (about the size of Texas).
Round and round it goes
Although you may imagine bottles and containers floating infinitely, they break down eventually into their base particles. It is these smaller pieces of plastic that don’t dissolve and circulate in our oceans forever. According to Chris Maser, the patch grows “10-fold” each decade. Not only will our archaeologist likely find evidence of that pen I threw out this morning when it ran out of ink, they’ll find the impact our plastic usage had on wildlife like fish and fowl—animals that may be unknown to them.
Credit Ravi Khemka via Wikipedia
Billions of tons of plastic waste enter the ocean each year. With all the political instability, global pandemic, and climate chaos that we’ve endured over the last several years, this information isn’t even on the back pages of the news. We’re all guilty of using one-time use plastics and the effects it will have on the environment, on animals, and on ourselves is unavoidable.
According to a 2019 report, production and incineration of plastic contributes nearly a billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. It’s in our air, it’s in our water, it’s in our food. It’s what our descendants will find as they scrape the boiling ground for sustenance.
Resource consumption is the story we’re slowly uncovering here alongside our archaeologist. As charming and interesting as we may find Pompeii and Monte Testaccio, I am convinced that our archaeologist will despise us for how we’ve destroyed our world in a sad effort to preserve comforts and diets that are not sustainable.
[1] I don’t mean to suggest that destruction is the only path to preservation. Obviously, destruction has obliterated things from the archaeological record.
[2] I think it’s clear that most of us do not do this much damage and that large companies and government organizations probably do most of the trashing.