Students at Connecticut College are examining what trash tells us about culture.
Picture a curbside lined with garbage. You may imagine old mattresses or discarded TVs, but there's one bit of trash your mind may block out: cigarette butts. An anthropology professor at Connecticut College has become obsessed with these often-overlooked artifacts of modern life, examining what they can tell us about our culture -- and the basics of archeology.
When you think about ancient artifacts, you likely picture some kind of golden idol, maybe hidden far away in a booby-trapped temple. But Anthony Graesch, chair of the anthropology department at Connecticut College, said fascinating artifacts are actually all around us if you look down -- and sometimes, if you're willing to scrounge around a little bit.
"Trash is, in many ways, the bread and butter of archeology," said Graesch. "Trash can give voice to those who have no voice in history books."
As an undergrad at UCLA, Graesch got a taste of "trash archeology" by studying refuse from indigenous cultures off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. He went out to some islands, dug up old garbage, and said the waste taught him about food preferences and social order in ancient ChumashIndian tribes.
"We stand to learn a lot about ourselves by looking at our own trash," said Graesch.
Graesch and his students collected more than 40,000 cigarette butts from parking lots outside New London bars.
To that end, Graesch is looking at some of the grossest pieces of modern-day garbage out there: dingy old cigarette butts. More than 40,000 of them, which he and his students collected over the course of two years from parking lots outside New London bars. It can get messy.
"Occasionally we'd come to these outdoor cigarette receptacles -- like a five gallon bucket -- and someone had yakked inside of it, said Graesch. "And you might think, as you're hearing this, that there would be no decision in your mind. You would just not do it. But once you become an archeologist of the modern ... it's a tougher decision."
Graesch said he walked away from the vomit bins, "usually," and as the project progressed, his students -- always wearing gloves -- visited Irish pubs, sports bars, and other drinking spots. They mapped the sites and made detailed notes about where, exactly, a discarded butt was found.
As we talk in a basement office, holding volumes of old smoked butts collected by Graesch and his students that smells, remarkably, quite clean -- Graesch explained modern artifacts like cigarettes can tell us a lot -- providing insights into our consumption patterns, why we choose a certain type of cigarette, and where we go to smoke it, socialize, and hang out.
There's also the project's ecological dimension. "They really are these little miniature vessels of toxic waste. Hundreds of chemicals are added to rag leaf tobacco," Graesch said. "But when combusted, when burned, when you smoke a cigarette, it transforms those chemicals into like another thousand chemicals, and many of them are carcinogens."
Graesch said cigarettes can provide insights into our consumption patterns.
Graesch said the data is already yielding insight into how people smoke, socialize, and litter in front of storefronts in the community. It's information he hopes to take back to officials in the city of New London helping them examine the downstream impacts roadside trash like cigarettes could have on tourism and waterway pollution.
Since discarded cigarettes butts are constantly appearing everywhere, Graesch said the project also gives his students a chance to easily engage the "full arc" of archeological research.
"To do what you might think of as traditional archeological work -- breaking ground, digging, excavating, requires a lot of time," Graesh said. "Every time we dig into the ground, we destroy a bit of the past. You can't put it back the way it was... This kind of work allows us to escape the burdens of that time frame."
Graesch said more than 40,000 of his data points are all logged. Now, he's working on analyzing the information -- and, eventually, plans to co-author an article with a former student calling attention to the teaching opportunities afforded by trash.
And no -- in case you're wondering, Graesch doesn't smoke.
