Hello Todd: I have been monitoring the remediation of waste sites on Anti-Aircraft Artillery Batteries  from the 1950's on the Hanford Reserve in Central Washington. At these sites dozers created trenches where the refuse was burned and then covered by the dozers again. I have been a little surprised by how much actually survived the fire and subsequent weathering. Particularly surprised by the survival of paper(shooting scores and a paperback novel "The Last Race"), but also plastic and textiles. Batteries, lubricating oil, paint, solvents and other potentially toxic waste can also be encountered. These trenches were not always obviously different from other earthmoving features or demolition events on the site but could be identified by very thin scatters of refuse and a slightly flattened or mounded surface profile. I don't know how common this practice was on military sites as this has been my only experience with refuse disposal on a U.S. military base from this period. I hope this is helpful.
Dan Martin

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From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Todd Hanson [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2011 8:36 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Talkin' Trash

Greetings,

I'd like the group's thoughts on a small dilemma I'm having. I'm
investigating a series of Cold War era (early 1960s) missile
ballistic missile sites in New Mexico. To date, our
investigations have found no ground evidence of trash dumps and the
site plans make no references to such. Likewise, the site histories
also make no reference to trash collection services. So, where did
the trash go? Obviously, if we could locate any site local dumps it
could be a gold mine of data. Now given the specific site, I realize
that no one may had the have exact answer, but I do have a couple
general questions that the group may be able to shed some light upon.

First, is anyone aware of any semi-seminal works on the history of
solid waste management in the United States? I've found Lanier
Hickman's American Alchemy: The History of Solid Waste Management in
the United States, but it focuses mostly on urban efforts and the
rise of recycling, and Rathje and  Murphy's Rubbish! The Archaeology
of Garbage to be insightful, but not completely. The site I'm working
is really rural and annexed to a small New Mexico town.

Now I'm actually old enough to actually remember a time when trash
collection in rural areas did not exist and I'm sure it varied from
town to town with the enactment of federal waste management laws in
the mid-1960s, but I've not yet found anything that really documents
this paradigm shift from home or local dumps to municipal waste
processing as it relates to archaeology. Maybe such a single
historical work (or works) simply doesn't exist? But maybe others
have pondered this dilemma before?

The second question is aimed at those of you who may have some 20th
Century military experience or at least more experience than I with
the archaeology of US military sites. How is trash generally handled
in the military? Did bases normally (in my case Walker Air Force
base) have their own trash collection services? Perhaps they
incinerated what they could and sent the rest to a dump? The trash
had to go somewhere.

Obviously, much more archive and library work on this topic is in my
future, but any thoughts you folks might have on this will be most
welcome.

Thanks,

Todd Hanson
--
Todd A. Hanson, Ph.D.
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545
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