William L. Rathje

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William Laurens Rathje (* 1945 in South Bend , Indiana ; † May 24, 2012 in Tucson , Arizona ) was an American archaeologist and is considered the founder of garbology , the archaeological study of garbage .

Life

Rathje grew up in Wheaton , Illinois . He studied anthropology at the University of Arizona , where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1967 . He then sat as part of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship to study at the Harvard University continued and received his doctorate there in 1971 when Gordon R. Willey with the dissertation Lowland Classic Maya Socio-Political Organization: Degree and Form Through Time and Space . In the same year he became an assistant professor at the University of Arizona; he had already received the offer to work here in 1970.

At the beginning of his academic career, Rathje dealt with the archaeological exploration of Mesoamerica and directed his main focus on the culture of the Maya . From 1972 to 1973 he was together with Jeremy A. Sabloff one of the two co-directors of the Cozumel Archaeological Project , which was funded by the National Geographic Society . The research results obtained here were able to identify Cozumel as an important trading center for the Yucatán .

In 1973 Rathje started the Garbage Project . His students collected waste from various Tucson counties and correlated it with the city's census data. After surprising findings emerged from this, Rathje came to the conclusion that it should be possible to use techniques from classical archeology, which unearthed objects that were thrown away in excavations, to investigate the waste of contemporary society, in order to draw conclusions to pull this. Rathje began to look for more volunteers and donors and to develop a suitable methodology. The discipline of Garbology would later develop from his efforts . After initial difficulties in finding donors and criticism from some archaeologists that the study of contemporary waste would not qualify as archaeological field research, he was able to obtain a grant from the Ministry of Agriculture and work with the Tuscon city council.

From 1987 he turned to the investigation of landfills and carried out deep drilling on the same, first in Arizona then nationwide. Rathje's research produced a multitude of new insights into society's garbage disposal habits, revealing that previous assumptions about the composition and decomposition of garbage disposed of in this way were found to be incorrect. The successes achieved allowed the project to continue to grow over the next three decades, and not just across national borders. There was interdisciplinary collaboration and effects on waste management beyond the boundaries of archeology .

In 1990 Rathje received the Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology from the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1992 he received the Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association . In 2000 he retired from the University of Arizona. He has now worked as a research fellow for archeology and a consulting professor for anthropology at Stanford University . In 2010 he returned to Tucson.

In addition to numerous scientific publications, he was in 1992, together with the with the magazine The Atlantic active editor Cullen Murphy , also author of the popular science book Rubbish! The Archeology of Landfills .

Publications (selection)

Books
  • with Jeremy A. Sabloff (Ed.): A Study of Changing Pre-Columbian Commercial Systems: The 1972-1973 Seasons at Cozumel, Mexico. (1975, Monographs of the Peabody Museum, No. 3)
  • with Michael B. Schiffer : Archeology. (1982, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
  • with Cullen Murphy : Rubbish! The Archeology of Garbage. (1992, HarperCollins, New York)
  • with Michael Shanks , Christopher Witmore (Eds.): Archeology in the Making: Conversations Through a Discipline. (2013, Routledge, New York.)
items
  • with Jeremy A. Sabloff: Ancient Maya Commercial Systems: A Research Design for the Island of Cozumel, Mexico in World Archeology 5, 1973, pp. 221-231
  • The Garbage Project: A New Way of Looking at the Problems of Archeology. in Archeology 27, 1974, pp. 236-241
  • The Garbàge Decade. in American Behavioral Scientist 28, 1984: pp. 9-29
  • with WW Hughes, DC Wilson, MK Tani, GH Archer, RG Hunt, TW Jones: The Archeology of Contemporary Landfills. In American Antiquity 57, 1992, pp. 437-447
  • with Joseph M. Suflita, Charles P. Gerba, Robert K. Ham, Anna C. Palmisano, Joseph A. Robinson: The world's largest landfill . In Environmental Science & Technology 26, 1992, pp. 1486-1495 doi : 10.1021 / es00032a002

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Short biography on the SpringerLink website
  2. ↑ Jeremy A. Sabloff: It Depends on How We Look at Things: New Perspectives on the Postclassic Period in the Northern Maya Lowlands ( Memento of February 14, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) . In: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 151, No. 1, 2007.
personal data
SURNAME Rathje, William L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rathje, William Laurens (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American archaeologist and founder of Garbology
DATE OF BIRTH 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH South Bend , Indiana
DATE OF DEATH May 24, 2012
Place of death Tucson , Arizona