Landfill Hills

Grappling with the Scale and Depth of Contemporary Waste Landscapes

Authors

  • Matt Edgeworth School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.25827

Keywords:

landfill, mineral extraction, scale, waste landscape

Abstract

This paper investigates a waste landscape in the Marston Vale, Bedfordshire, UK, consisting of a range of landfill hills. The hills originated as vast holes in the ground created by clay extraction, which presented suitable receptacles for the dumping of landfill waste. Although of much larger scale than evidence normally dealt with by archaeologists, these are treated here as archaeological features within an archaeological landscape. While other papers deal with important aspects of political ecology of waste landscapes, the present focus is on the upscaling of methods that is necessary to cope with such mega-scale contemporary waste landscapes, in order to make them more susceptible to archaeological analysis.

Author Biography

  • Matt Edgeworth, School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester

    Matt Edgeworth is a British field archaeologist and author of Fluid Pasts: Archaeology of Flow (Bloomsbury Academic 2011) and Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice (Altamira 2006). He is Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, UK. 

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Published

2023-10-25

How to Cite

Edgeworth, M. (2023). Landfill Hills: Grappling with the Scale and Depth of Contemporary Waste Landscapes. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 10(1), 8-24. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.25827