What the Past Throws Out

You can learn a lot about people from what they throw away.

Have you ever wondered how people lived long ago? What did they eat for breakfast? Did they wear hats? What kind of tools did they use? The answers might be hiding in their trash.

Clues in the Dump

Like modern towns, every long-ago village had a garbage pile. These dumps are full of stuff from ordinary lives. A broken sandal, a spoon, a melon rind. Archaeologists are scientists who try to find out how ancient humans lived. And to them, these ancient trash heaps are treasure troves. They even give the trash a special name: middens.

History on the Half-Shell

One thing archaeologists have learned from old trash heaps is that ancient people were very fond of oysters. Along coasts all over the world, oyster-eaters tossed their empty shells into huge piles — shell middens. A kind of salt in the shells kept anything else buried in the heap from decaying. So animal bones and other artifacts that were thrown in with the shells were also preserved.

Maine has over 2,000 shell middens. Some are 5,000 years old. When archaeologists tested the shells, they found that the oysters were only eaten in the winter or early spring. Animal bones in the heaps revealed that ancient Native Americans also ate deer, bear, moose, wild birds, and many kinds of fish. There were even bones of sea mink and great auk, a flightless bird that went extinct in the 1880s.

Cocoa from Far Away

The ruins of a great city sit in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. This was the home of the ancestors of the Pueblo people. Some of the city’s stone buildings had hundreds of rooms. Chaco Canyon was also a gathering place for religious festivals and trade.

Hundreds of thousands of bits of bowls, jars, and other pottery have been uncovered in Chaco Canyon’s middens. About half the pottery came from a place two days’ walk away. So the people of Chaco Canyon didn’t make all their pottery themselves.

Archaeologists tested some pots to see what kind of food they once held. They found traces of...chocolate! Chocolate comes from the cacao plant. But cacao trees only grow far to the south, in Mexico and Central America. That means people from Chaco must have traveled and traded with other ancient peoples from quite far away. Even long ago, everyone loved chocolate!

Into the Well

In 1607, English settlers arrived on the coast of Virginia. They built a log fort, then a town, and called it Jamestown. The settlers dug wells for water. When one well dried up, they dug another. The old wells became trash pits. As the trash built up year by year, it formed handy layers. Archaeologists can read these like a record of the colony. When there was enough to eat, the trash contained bones of deer, ducks, goats, and pigs. But a layer filled with bones of mice, rats, and snakes shows a hard year when good food was scarce.

Bits of broken pots showed that colonists brought cookware from Europe. But there were also pieces of cone-shaped clay cooking pots like those the native tribes used. This suggests that the people of Jamestown traded with their native neighbors. In one well, archaeologists discovered several pieces of armor. Why was perfectly good armor thrown in the trash? Maybe by the time it was tossed, the settlers felt safe enough in their new homes that they no longer needed heavy armor for protection.

What does your own trash say about you? If a future archaeologist dug up your town dump, what would they think about the people who live there?