Archaeological Stuff

To an archaeologist, ancient garbage pits or garbage mounds, which can usually be located within a short distance from any ruin, are always among the happiest of finds, for they contain in concentrated form the artifacts and comestibles and remnants of behavior of the people who used them. While every archaeologist dreams of discovering spectacular objects, the bread-and-butter work of archaeology involves the most common and routine kinds of discards. It is not entirely fanciful to define archaeology as the discipline that tries to understand old garbage.

But when all the piles have been sorted and counted and weighed and all that data has been entered into computer databases, there is a payoff: facts. ``Garbage . . . represents physical fact, not mythology,`` the authors write. Garbage offers a reality-check, a chance to place what we do against what we think we do.

For example, there is what the Garbage Project calls the Lean Cuisine Syndrome: When people are asked about their eating habits, they say one thing. When you examine their garbage, you find out something else.

``People consistently underreport the amount of regular soda, pastries, chocolate, and fats that they consume; they consistently overreport the amount of fruits and diet soda,`` Rathje and Murphy note.

People tend to underestimate their intake of sugar by 94 percent, chips and popcorn by 81 percent and candy by 80 percent. They tend to overestimate their intake of tuna by 184 percent, liver by 200 percent and cottage cheese by 311 percent.

Given the heightened health awareness in the U.S., such self-deception is probably understandable. But the Garbage Project has also come up with findings that fly in the face of what you`d expect.

For example, when an item, like red meat or sugar, is in short supply, you`d think that people would be especially careful not to waste it. But the opposite turns out to be true. During a beef shortage in the early 1970s, ``people wasted three times more beef when it was in short supply than they did when it was plentiful.``

Why? Apparently, because of the shortage, people ``were buying up all the beef they could get their hands on, even if some of the cuts were unfamiliar.`` But they didn`t know how to cook those unfamiliar cuts and didn`t like the way they tasted. Thus, more garbage.

I remain unconcerned that anyone else will ever go back there and loot the place.