Todd, 

If you haven't already seen it, you should check out:  
Jewels of the Desert, Collections from the First Dump at White Sands Proving Grounds.  Meliha Duran, J.K. Finney, Toni Laumbach, Martha Yduarte, Peter Eidenbach, William Boehm.  Prepared for White Sands Missle Range, Submitted by Human Systems Research, Inc, Tularosa, NM.  1997.  WSMR Archaeological Research Report No. 97-17.

Harding Polk II
Archaeologist
Bureau of Indiand Affairs
Southwest Regional Office
Albuquerque, NM
505-563-3416


-----Original Message-----
From: Todd Hanson <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Fri, Aug 12, 2011 9:36 am
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 site 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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