Toxic Waste, Worried Communities: Building an Archaeology of Concern

Every year, the devastating effects of anthropogenic climate change become clearer, and every year, humanity's socioeconomic practices produce more devastation. What is the role of archaeology in the face of this environmental transformation? As a discipline that specializes in teasing out the contours of human-environment relations across different tempos, archaeology is indispensable for putting our current crises in long-term context. In this short piece, I would like to make a different argument. The role of archaeology is not simply to provide deep context for human-environment interaction but rather to serve as a method for investigating the hidden histories of anthropogenic sediments in the present. Beyond revealing the historical trajectories of persistent and latent waste, this approach suggests archaeology as a collaborative practice that articulates everyday community concerns with broader social logics for the purpose of building broader coalitions. We are living through what Gabriel Hecht (2018) calls “the apotheosis of waste.” Globally distributed projects like industrial capitalism, imperialism, and settler colonialism touch down in particular places to remake them for their own purposes. As these projects terraform landscapes and leave behind piles of decaying waste, they transform how environments and the societies that rely upon them reproduce themselves. These transformations have different effects and legibilities (Murphy 2013). Certain ecologies are at greater risk, and certain communities are more vulnerable to the transformation they produce. Some forms of anthropogenic persistence are ostentatiously devastating. There is no mistaking the long-term threat of a clear-cut forest for a community that relies on forests for hunting. For the most part, the effects of these transformations are latent and creeping. Heavy metals leach out of tailings (the waste material left behind from mining operations) into drinking water. Pesticides bioaccumulate across food chains. Radiating out from the ignored side of these global projects, the toxic effects of these transformations are often slow, hidden, and hard to comprehend (Nixon 2011). What does this have to do with archaeology? Our contemporary crisis is a problem of hidden pasts and their resonating effects. Archaeology is the study of latent anthropogenic objects, their histories, and their persistent effects. It would be a mistake to locate this crisis simply in the materialist realm of ecology and economics. It would also be a mistake to undo all the work that archaeology has done to become more collaborative with communities on the ground (Atalay 2006; McAnany and Rowe 2015) in the name of a global environmental crisis. That would be precisely the kind of reactionary response to “crisis” that Joe Masco (2017) and Sandy Hunter (this forum) warn about. Instead of a singular shared crisis, there are myriad communities whose existence is entangled with local environments that are negotiating destabilizing and hidden forces. This is not to deny that there are global logics which organize these forces, but the environmental transformations that are taking place across the globe must first be understood in the context of the communities who live among them, the myriad sedimented histories that these transformations emerge out of, and the forms of situated knowing and unknowing by which these transformations are made meaningful. Knowledge and meaning are interwoven into place (Basso 1996; Casey 2013). If environments are integral to the way a community remembers its history, organizes its present, and prepares for its future, then shifting environments and latent harms represent an existential challenge to the way a community reproduces, navigates, and knows its world. Local ways of knowing are not simply a source of vulnerability; they are also at the core of the communal capacity to understand and navigate these transformations. Place-based knowledge, developed over generations/millennia, is an essential medium for noticing the often-subtle transformations that define anthropogenic climate change. As environments shift, as locales of food and knowledge are disrupted, communities become concerned. By concern, I mean the affective response of a community to the subtle phenomena of a changing environment (Puig de la Bellacassa 2010; Latour 2008). Concerns are the unsettling feeling that emerges alongside destabilized riverbanks, denuded forests, and unexplainable health problems among the caribou herd that a community uses to feed itself. Concerns are less coherent than interests, the phenomena they emerge out of are “troubled and unsettled” and not clearly legible in a way that might clearly reveal harms and benefits (Puig de la Bellacassa 2010). Concerns do not represent a pure and immediate form of knowledge that locals have and scientists lack. Indeed, the ambiguity and uncanny nature of these phenomena make them prone to inaccurate interpretations or even conspiracy theories. At the same time, concerns develop around emergent phenomena whose effects are diffuse and whose histories are globally entangled. A declining caribou herd has the capacity to mobilize concerns across different communities and ways of knowing (state environmentalists and Indigenous hunters), even while producing very different concerns with very different stakes. Maria Puig de la Bellacassa (2010) argues that while interests are often zero-sum and lead to conflictual relationships, concerns are more open-ended and better at articulating care across difference. One community's concern does not just circulate internally but is oriented toward a possible future where these concerns can be alleviated, and toward a coalition of other parties that can collaborate on alleviating it. Community concerns about changing environments serve as collaborative openings for archaeologists to mobilize their methods in a way that is useful to the community but also extends beyond local interest. In the face of community concerns, archaeology can both translate and unearth. In some cases, archaeological research can make legible things that are already known by the community, yet in a way that can bring other groups to action (Liboiron 2021). This is best represented by Emma Gilheany's (this forum) work with the Inuit in Labrador. In this case, the Inuit knew there was persistent waste left behind by a military installation that was leaching harmful toxins into the soil and making people sick, but the government claimed the site had already been remediated. Using an archaeological survey to prove that this remediation was a lie, Emma's work translated the Inuit community's concerns into a register that was legible to the government. In other cases, locals have little understanding of the causes of the unsettling environmental phenomena they encounter. Here, the archaeologist can use their methods of historical reconstruction to investigate the anthropogenic residues that led to these environmental transformations and the historical causes that led to these sedimented residues. In my own research on Mill Creek Ravine Park in Edmonton, Alberta, local community members, mostly residents of a middle-class neighborhood, became concerned about the water quality of the creek in a beloved city park. These concerns emerged as much around a citizen science water monitoring project that identified the creek as having the most polluted water of any urban creek in the province of Alberta as they did around informal encounters locals had with disturbing phenomena in the creek: frothy water, river weeds turned pink, and sick pets. While water testing revealed what pollutants were present, I turned to archaeology to uncover the history behind the pollution. In performing an archaeological survey and excavation of Mill Creek Ravine, I uncovered piles of hidden coal mining and meatpacking waste that had sedimented into the ravine a century earlier and continued to leach heavy metals (Stewart, Jungkind and Losey 2020; Stewart 2022). As this research uncovered and mapped sedimented waste, it also revealed the historical connection between ongoing pollution and local histories of coal mining and meatpacking. And while these sedimented histories were local, their histories were entangled with the much broader projects of settler colonialism and industrial capitalism in Western Canada. The same industrial logic that disposed the waste into the ravine for a decade was implicated in the colonial appropriation of the ravine from the Papaschase Cree, the uneven exposure of impoverished farmers during the Great Depression, and the contemporary exposure of homeless populations. The persistence of century-old waste and its effects resonated far beyond the contemporary middle-class concerns that had first brought it to my attention. Instead of limiting the ethico-political frame of this research simply to the community I started with, these concerns opened the entangled histories of unevenly distributed harms, exploitation, and colonial appropriation. My research showed how mapping these pollutants in the present and building a politics to mitigate their harms first required understanding the broader histories that served as their conditions of possibility. This research revealed the myriad other communities across time and space whose lives were impacted by the changing environment of Mill Creek Ravine. In revealing these histories, the research not only facilitated a more robust understanding of the stakes of the persistent past but also revealed overlapping concerns across different communities both in the present and past. An archaeology of concern is a way that archaeological methods can be used to attend to environmental anxieties within a local community by historicizing unsettling environmental phenomena. By mapping environmental transformations within a broader historical context, archaeology can reveal how concerns articulate with other concerns and begin the process of linking coalitions of concerned communities across time and space.

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