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58th Anniversary US, UK, Soviet Union Nuclear Test Ban Treaty - Ep 3
96 Plays3 years ago
This discussion which occurred this episode is sure to keep anyone thinking for quite some time, inspired by the 58th Anniversary of the US, UK and Soviet Union Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, when any nuclear testing with the exception of that underground was by agreement ceased. This episode discusses nuclear archaeology... which includes everything from nuclear techniques to commentary on the ethics of nuclear to the rather intriguing notion of a 'curated nuclear archaeological site'. Perhaps most importantly this episode we find out that all archaeologists are essentially experts on past societies, wait for it... waste products! And it always sounded so glamorous too. All of this is discussed with Prof. R. Joyce, whose book certainly inspired the direction of this discussion. In advance, thanks for listening!
Music
Intro/Outro Music - Creative Commons - "Fantasia Fantasia" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to this episode of Flipside. This is, as ever, the podcast that brings to you important discussions about the past, prompted by specific historical events. I am delighted to be joined this month by Professor Rosemary Joyce, who is affiliated with the University of California in Berkeley. She specialises in the archaeology of Mesoamerica and Central America.
00:00:50
Speaker
and focuses on materiality and the archaeology of inequality, gender, sex and sexuality, cultural and heritage policy.
Nuclear Archaeology and Cultural Context
00:01:00
Speaker
Professor Rosemary Joyce is both an anthropologist and an archaeologist. She has written a great many truly amazing and important research texts.
00:01:11
Speaker
One of which partly inspired the direction of this discussion today, and that is her most recent book published in 2020 by Oxford University Press, The Future of Nuclear Waste. What art and archaeology can tell us about securing the world's most hazardous waste?
00:01:29
Speaker
This text explores the proposals which were made by the US government to mark nuclear waste repositories over the long term, which she interestingly, and will discuss this in the episode, likens to the curation of archaeological sites as world heritage.
00:01:48
Speaker
Professor Rosemary Joyce truly does some really important work, especially involving ethical policies within the fields that we all love. So again, I'll say it's been a true honour to have this discussion with her and it has left a great many answers and questions within my brain, which I am sure will not be leaving me anytime soon.
00:02:15
Speaker
This month's episode is inspired by the 58th anniversary from the 5th of August 1963 of the US, the UK and the Soviet Union signing a nuclear test ban treaty. This was a recognition of how dangerous nuclear weapons could be and was an attempt to stall the Cold War a bit.
00:02:39
Speaker
It essentially prohibited test detonations of nuclear weapons with the exception of those conducted underground. Right, so I guess the logical place to start with this discussion is just a little note on what involvement nuclear currently has within archaeology, what is the current rigmarole surrounding it, what's the opinion of nuclear within the archaeological sector.
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think there's actually a really interesting history that somebody needs to go back here. The first conversation of this kind I had was actually in the 1990s with a colleague of mine who's a specialist in the study of chemical composition of ancient obsidian.
00:03:25
Speaker
And he was probably the first person I know who pointed out that some of the impetus for the methods that archaeologists expanded to use didn't actually come from our research. It came from the nuclear industry casting about for civilian projects.
00:03:42
Speaker
that would justify continuing work in the aspect of nuclear as the rhetoric of the government was that we were turning away from militarization, not going to fuel an arms race. And you can see that in the way that things like instrumental neutron activation analysis were adapted for chemical compositional work.
00:04:07
Speaker
that by expanding into archaeology, what the industry was able to do was show that it could be benign. So we really need to go back and look at those like those formative decades after World War II and into the 1970s in which
00:04:25
Speaker
there various people made those decisions. Now this isn't to say that the information we get from these these kinds of techniques is useless, but what my colleague was pointing out is that some of the impetus in instrumental nutrient activation analysis for obsidian for very fine measurement of chemical compositional distinctions actually overshoots
00:04:48
Speaker
the useful distinctions that humans made in their use of obsidian. And he was a real advocate of recognizing that that's false precision, that sometimes people are measuring distinctions that the actual flitnappers would not have been recognizing and getting away from the kind of human-centered approach. Going on from that, though,
00:05:10
Speaker
because he was, in fact, a very reflective, had been in the military himself, as most young men in his generation were in the US, he was actually interested in the way that archaeologists can be uncritical of the political situation they find themselves in. And the larger question, I think, that we have to always ask is, what are the politics, what are the power effects of the situation in which we're working today
00:05:39
Speaker
and always be thinking about how we're getting drawn into discourses in ways that maybe counter the values that we really want to advance. So for me, that's where we should begin with nuclear archaeology, which I'm taking here as the covering term for anything that archaeologists do that reflects on the nuclear technologies, technologies that come out of the nuclear industry. And there's a wide range in that, of course.
00:06:08
Speaker
Right, so I currently know of at least one new nuclear technique which is currently being employed in archaeology from the nuclear industry, and it's a surveying technique which has currently been employed at a couple of sites just to test it, but I think there's a real disconnect not just between archaeologists.
00:06:33
Speaker
and recognizing that this is nuclear technology but also the connotations of the word nuclear with the general public and ultimately realizing that we as archaeologists do employ these techniques and there's a connotation with nuclear that it's dangerous and that perhaps because of this it's not used in so-called soft sciences
00:06:58
Speaker
There's a certain lack of discourse in regard to archaeological technique, and I was wondering if, well, what your thoughts were on potentially trying to open that discourse with the public on a technique which is potentially divisive, such as nuclear technology. How should we open this type of discussion?
00:07:24
Speaker
That's a really great question. I think it goes to one of the major challenges we have in contemporary archaeology, which is we don't explain our methods well at all to everyday humans. We've actually allowed ourselves to develop highly compressed language that we use among ourselves. And when you look at what the general public thinks archaeology is, it's very clear. We dig the past up in little packages.
00:07:51
Speaker
So if you've ever tried to explain to a general audience how exactly you get from the stuff that is in the ground to an inference, there's a lot of steps in there that we're not explaining well. And it's everything from the way we allow people to understand stratigraphy, for example, like a layer cake of the past, which it isn't, to the way that we allow people to understand culture,
00:08:15
Speaker
you know, sort of packaged identities that are somehow absolutely recognizable the minute you see the style of ceramics or the shape of a brooch or something. So I think that this is a more general challenge, not just with nuclear techniques, but with all techniques. And I've seen it, you know, with remote sensing, there's a, and you see it in the media with remote sensing where they run articles, even the New York Times runs an article that makes it seem like
00:08:42
Speaker
Lydar suddenly manifested the sort of settlement pattern in an entire region. And that leaves out all of the interpretive and inferential part of this.
00:08:55
Speaker
I think part of what we need to do is just think of how we can do that broader kind of conversation. And then when we get to the compositional techniques, and most of the nuclear techniques that we've developed so far are compositional, which makes sense because they allow us to break down the mineral contents
00:09:16
Speaker
of artifacts of various kinds. And some of them do other things. There's a technique that a former graduate student of mine was able to use again because we have a nuclear lab at Berkeley that I had never heard of that I will not remember the name of now, Rutherford something.
00:09:33
Speaker
that allowed him to look at the traces of the techniques of manufacture in ancient metal objects. So you begin to see the signs of the stresses of the manufacture. So there's a microscopic level to this. And I think the way I would say that we need to begin is we need to explain to people that we don't just pick up a piece of ceramic or a piece of stone and intuit where it came from.
00:10:02
Speaker
the concept, the much belabored concept of fingerprints, which I was taught never to say fingerprinting. I kind of think we need to go back to that because that metaphorically helps a general public understand what we're talking about. And then we can start saying, okay, things that people created in the past have traces of their origins and their histories.
00:10:29
Speaker
And what we're doing is we're trying to find ways to approach that. And things that come from the nuclear industry are just part of our toolkit. And they're part of our toolkit because fundamentally the science underlying the nuclear industry is science about the basic nature of matter.
00:10:52
Speaker
And I think if we explain that, we then bring archaeology into alignment with the sciences it should be aligned with, rather than being seen as a kind of magic trick.
00:11:05
Speaker
which when I'm talking publicly, I will sometimes describe these methods as zapping things with rays, because that's how I think most of my public audience thinks about it. So we talk about zapping things with rays, and then I try and break it down for them. I try and walk them through why a piece of obsidian from a site I'm working in in Honduras, if subjected to instrumental neutron activation analysis, can tell me the story of where it probably came from.
00:11:30
Speaker
because millions of years ago, a volcanic eruption had a different mixture of chemistry. And those are the things that we haven't put enough effort into in contemporary archaeology. We've allowed ourselves to drift further and further away from the audience that we should be talking to. And I think it has implications for our own understanding as well. I think we've allowed ourselves to continue to use concepts
00:11:56
Speaker
In shorthand, and we do understand they've got nuances, but we still say things like stratigraphic superposition. Every time an intro student is taught about stratigraphic superposition, we've lied to them because we all know that most archaeological
Public Perception and Communication Challenges
00:12:10
Speaker
sites are a palimpsest of reworking of various kinds. They're not geological strata.
00:12:18
Speaker
I would agree on the point that this is a real practical problem. Like you say with the example of people coming into archaeology, there is an expectation of what that is and what that means and then suddenly they're confronted with this spectrum of wonderful techniques which can give them details on a microscopic level about the materials that they're investigating and I think that that is in part what's wonderful.
00:12:47
Speaker
about how archaeology is now embracing subjects like material sciences. And if we could somehow communicate to the public the quality of archaeology as a subject which essentially liberates techniques from every other subject, I can only think that that would be beneficial to the understanding of archaeology as a whole.
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I describe it as a master discipline, not unlike philosophy, we can claim and archaeology even more so because we do everything from the natural sciences through to humanities style interpretation of texts. And that wide range is actually necessary because the interpretive task we've set ourselves is understanding all of human history at every scale from the everyday
00:13:39
Speaker
to the macro scale. Once you have that, you need all those different tools. So we become people who, again, we need to have this way of explaining to people that if what we're trying to do is answer the questions about these complex histories of each individual locale that we excavate, even if it just, this is how I again illustrated, even if it just looks like dirt to you,
00:14:06
Speaker
It is full of chemical and textural differences that there's some technique that's going to help us understand. So micromorphology, I found that micromorphology is a great technique to tell people about because when you explain that and explain the way that you can have signs of very quotidian activities, repetitive activities,
00:14:32
Speaker
people begin to get the broader thing that we're doing in archaeology, which is looking for all of those reflections or traces or residues of what people did in the past as clues to the complex set of social relationships, of cultural identities, of historical events and their outcomes that we end up doing in our narratives. Our narratives then synthesize all of that.
00:15:01
Speaker
And I'm not saying that we should just write nerdy articles that tell people about SEM or starch analysis, but we should figure out a way to talk about those things in our narratives.
00:15:17
Speaker
And so you stop for two minutes and say, we found traces of ancient cacao chocolate 1100 years ago. How did we do that? You start with the ceramics, which were porous. And so the liquid in them was soaked into the body of the clay. So today you can grind it up and actually explaining it to people, the technique. When you get to the part where you use spectrometry to see
00:15:44
Speaker
the chemistry and match it to chemicals that are in the modern cacao plant. They're with you on it. They don't have to be scientists themselves, but they understand that you're not making it up, and it's also not some weird synthetic magic trick. I think that's worth our while. I really think we should do more of it. To your comment about people coming into archaeology not understanding this, that's a huge issue which I see with undergraduates all the time.
00:16:12
Speaker
they have the romance of archaeology in their head. I decided to be an archaeologist when I was eight years old. That's not an uncommon childhood dream. I didn't know what archaeology was at eight years old. And between eight and 18, if you don't get some idea of what it is other than discovery, when you enter university, you suddenly find it's not discovery, it's work. And it's work that doesn't give you a whole story, it gives a little shred.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yeah, and I had personally almost the opposite problem in that archaeology isn't really taught until university level except in a select number of quite exclusive schools. So students don't really have an idea about what archaeology consists of until they get to a university undergraduate level, which makes it a bit of a gamble almost taking an undergraduate archaeology degree.
00:17:12
Speaker
In fact, using myself as an example, right up until my selection of courses for university, I wanted to be a historian. But in the back of my mind, I still wanted to be involved in the more tangible aspects of history, which are archaeology, and I still wanted to do science.
00:17:37
Speaker
which isn't necessarily a part of your atypical history course at university. Now I had no idea that what I was describing was an archaeology degree, but ultimately it's the case that no one, unless they've had the opportunity to do an excavation with, for example, a young archaeologists group, or attended one of those exclusive schools I've already mentioned,
00:18:03
Speaker
really knows what an archaeology degree is until they're faced with it at university open days. And by that I mean obviously the study of archaeology, not archaeology itself because we're constantly faced with that in the media.
00:18:21
Speaker
I think it's not any different in the US, actually. So I personally was lucky that the local science museum had a dig. So when I was in secondary school, I was able to go on a dig and actually experience that. But most people in the US will not have been exposed to archaeology as a existent thing other than through the media.
The Role of Media and Education in Archaeology
00:18:47
Speaker
So, Indiana Jones. And those movies are a long time in the past. People don't watch them anymore. And again, part of the responsibility for that obviously goes with people who think about curricula, but a large part of it is us. You know, we don't control those narratives, which is why doing popular media is important.
00:19:11
Speaker
Yeah, and even just stretching this argument back to nuclear study, which is taught within the realm of physics in the UK at least, I think around GCSE level.
00:19:27
Speaker
When it's taught, it's taught alongside its negative history and it's taught almost with an inclusive warning and without consideration of other uses of nuclear power.
00:19:43
Speaker
In this sense it sort of ingrains within the psyche of students this warning surrounding nuclear whilst at the same time ensuring it is only thought of as a power source for everyday appliances. Nuclear the energy generator which is only slightly more preferable to fossil fuels.
00:20:10
Speaker
That's actually really interesting. I don't think that our pre-university education system in the US even gets to that level. So sciences are very poorly taught in the US. Once students come to the university, I mean, one of the more interesting conversations I've had that stemmed from my book was an invitation from the nuclear engineering faculty at Berkeley, the department, to come and talk about the book. And that's because the nuclear engineering department
00:20:39
Speaker
actually teaches both the techniques of nuclear energy, but also the concerns, the social concerns with how do you handle the byproducts. And I think that kind of balance is actually useful because it's realistic. There's nothing that humans do in dwelling in the earth that doesn't produce bad consequences. It's just we do things to the beings around us to survive.
00:21:07
Speaker
And so it's a matter of the choices you make, the extremities, and as we see in the current climate crisis, when we have information about an avoidable disaster, that we could take steps to take the steps to deal with it.
00:21:22
Speaker
It occurs to me that it would be useful if a group of people could define what it means to be doing nuclear research. Looking at how nuclear should be researched and used not just within the realm of archaeology but without that.
00:21:44
Speaker
because there aren't any parameters to it and that's fine because it does encourage experimentation and ingenuity which are at the heart of research but it poses a problem when trying to explain these techniques to students.
00:22:01
Speaker
who are entering the discipline and to the general public. So ultimately how should we research nuclear archaeology? Both in the sense that this is archaeology which has been in some way influenced by a nuclear past and indeed in consideration of this is a technique which has nuclear influence behind it.
00:22:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think actually we have some good models for this in the way that bioarcheology is moving to incorporate real thought about ethics, which in turn comes from medical education. So I see this as beginning with reformating how we think about learning to be an archaeologist. We need to start with the ethics.
00:22:52
Speaker
of what we're doing so that we understand that everything we do has effects that aren't intended. Our intentional effect is to learn about the past and to share that information with people. But in doing that, there's other things that happen and that we might be part of. And to be in a position to understand or at least think about those other effects
00:23:18
Speaker
And to weigh the value of the knowledge we're getting versus those other effects. Because I think that's where in archaeology we haven't done our job. And with respect to the introduction of techniques from the nuclear industry, it's not that if archaeologists had said no to instrumental nutrient activation analysis, there'd be fewer nuclear warheads. That's not a causal chain that makes any sense.
00:23:43
Speaker
But if archaeologists were more aware of the way that our uptake of these techniques can be used by advocates of primarily militaristic science,
00:23:59
Speaker
We could have been part of the people saying there's nothing inherently evil about nuclear science. But if the funding for it is primarily coming for warfare, take that funding away and put it into things that don't harm people. And take responsibility for the byproducts, the byproducts of nuclear engineering.
00:24:26
Speaker
which are only now being brought together. So if we begin with the kind of ethical conversations about the fact that everything we do and everything we do has unintended consequences, you know, when you excavate a site,
00:24:41
Speaker
as part of a cultural resources management because there's going to be development, well, you are actually contributing to the development. Do you know what the local interests are? Are you sure where you stand? Are you in a position to offer your knowledge about those impacts and to actually assess whether the archaeological findings that we're likely to have are going to be worth the displacement of people, for example?
00:25:11
Speaker
Yeah, I've had to fill out quite a few ethical reviews in my time. And I don't think I've ever had to fill one out specifically for the use of a technique. Nope. You don't have to. You can use any technique you want as long as you're not doing medical experimentation on people.
00:25:33
Speaker
Perhaps there would be a benefit in introducing ethical reviews for techniques. I've had to fill out experiment parameters and ethical reviews for working with animals, and I know bioarchaeologists are constantly filling out forms for what they do.
00:25:55
Speaker
But I've never even considered that possibility for something like basic serial isotopic work or for materials analysis. Yeah, it's just a question of, do we take what we're doing seriously?
00:26:13
Speaker
And I think there's a level on which as archeologists, as archeological scientists, we sometimes don't take it as seriously as we should. We don't confront the fact that we're working with these incredibly powerful technologies. We have labs that have substances that can be poisonous if released. I still remember in my lifetime, the first sort of efforts made to introduce protocols
00:26:40
Speaker
to train people who were going into labs with various equipment.
Political Influences on Archaeological Practices
00:26:44
Speaker
And even so, within my lifetime, I know conversations that happened about incompatibilities of different chemistries in fume hoods in the same lab.
00:26:57
Speaker
That there's a lot of this, it's again, we need to take what we're doing seriously. We need to take it seriously on the individual day-to-day level and on the broader societal level. And there's something that's at odds with the kind of self-image we have, which is that we're harmless.
00:27:15
Speaker
that we're doing good. We're automatically doing good because we're telling you things about the past you wouldn't know otherwise. But even that telling people things about the past can be harmful. And anybody who works with historical situation of a living population has had at some point the awkward moment when you say, oh no, that's not what you think it is. That your heritage isn't what you think it is. And
00:27:42
Speaker
had somebody then say, well, no, working in Honduras, I told the local people that they weren't Maya descendants, they were Lenka descendants, which was perfectly fine from my perspective. The Lenka indigenous people are very interesting people. But one of the people I've said this to never forgave me for trying to deny his Maya heritage.
00:28:04
Speaker
Well, okay, but you're not Maya at all. I mean, you're a gringo, basically. You're a European. But I wasn't taking seriously that my words would mean something about the present, because the past means something about the present. Similarly, I think we don't think of our practices being particularly consequential, but we have the power to change
00:28:28
Speaker
Thinking along the same lines as you, we as archaeologists definitely sometimes use these techniques without acknowledging that some of them have pasts which aren't necessarily pleasant. So we'll communicate our results blindly, sometimes without even justifying the techniques we've used to get those results.
00:28:50
Speaker
Which is particularly troubling when you consider at the minute archaeology is moving towards in every aspect a more ethical consideration of the way we do things and of the way we interact with the cultures which we research.
00:29:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think it actually would help us because sometimes we have a choice between one technique and another, both of which will give us archaeologically equivalent knowledge. One of them might give us more precise knowledge or more detailed knowledge, but going beyond what we need to interpret a past. And we might want to look at who we're going to end up as allies with.
00:29:35
Speaker
And even if it's not about, you know, really just saying no to the technique, being able to place it in context. I mean, I wrote a book published in 2017 just about looking at museum collections of pottery from Honduras. It's just a study of pottery from Honduras. No techniques involved, because it's all museums.
00:29:57
Speaker
But one of the things I had to do was discuss the fact that the major archaeologists from the decade of the 19-20s were spies. That the reason that they went to the sites that I was talking about was because they were trying to gather intelligence about the Germans.
00:30:16
Speaker
And that means that their survey was in no sense representative of any cultural phenomena in the past. It was representative of how they could get information about the possible German influence in Central America in the present. Now, if I leave that out of my accounts, I'm claiming that the archaeology was driven by pure curiosity when it wasn't. And it never is.
00:30:43
Speaker
The same book, most of the 1930s, all the archaeologists went back to the same sites over and over again. And at first you could say, well, that's because those sites were really important. But that's not why. It's because the multinational banana companies were located in those sites and could facilitate their access to the sites. So essentially, the whole archaeology of the country in the 20th century was formulated by the defense efforts of the United States
00:31:13
Speaker
and by the commercial interests of a multinational corporation. And that's part of what we have to be aware of. It means that there were blank spots literally in the map, not because there's not archeology there, not because there's not historical knowledge to be gained, but because there was no advantage to the larger structures. And again, we act as if that doesn't exist for us.
00:31:40
Speaker
Euclid is perhaps one of the most blatant examples of politics being an influence within archaeology. And unfortunately, politics is influencing the sphere of archaeology in other, more, perhaps detrimental ways at the moment.
00:31:59
Speaker
with our departments being severely affected by cuts and by political manoeuvring. So we here on Flipside do want to express our support for members of staff and departments within the UK.
00:32:15
Speaker
There is a very real danger in what we are currently losing at the minute, and I have no doubt that future archaeological research will be greatly adversely affected by the current situation. Seeing from the international perspective, it's extremely troubling to see well-established and very successful departments being gutted on very thin grounds that are clearly politically motivated.
00:32:45
Speaker
Yeah, there are many reasons currently being cited for this, what is essentially a culling of university departments, university archaeological departments, one of which is the culling of political ideals and ideas. There is certainly some evidence to suggest that researchers who perhaps aren't of the mainstream or governmental political ideal are being targeted.
00:33:14
Speaker
And this is extremely concerning because this is essentially a silencing of an institution, a university, which is at its most fundamental a place of free speech. I would argue, and I know a great many others would argue, that a university is a space to express political ideals and to express
00:33:38
Speaker
our freedom of speech without a worry of being silenced so long as there is a respect for other people in the process of expressing those ideals.
00:33:52
Speaker
I think we're at a historical moment in the world where we're seeing the resurgence of these kinds of efforts to suppress universities in a way that we haven't seen for decades. And the only thing I can hope is that it's so blatant.
00:34:09
Speaker
that it will lead to the elimination of individual people's jobs. It will harm institutions, but that it will inspire people to become clearer about their engagements and about the critiques that the university is a place for us to examine and critique the nature of social relations. As you say, respectfully in the sense of with responsibility to facts,
00:34:39
Speaker
not respectfully in the sense of some things are off limits. And that's the problem that I think politicians have with universities is nothing's off limits for us. We follow some rules about how we analyze things. And we also follow those stories where they lead us. We don't reach a point where we say, oh my God, I just realized that my entire career is based on exploiting technologies or peoples or privilege or power.
00:35:08
Speaker
I'm not going to go any further with this. I'm not going to mention that. We go there. I really think that it's really brilliant and necessary to mention this. We are, of course, always trying to foster the best research environment we possibly can in these institutions.
00:35:30
Speaker
The government in this country wants to have research orientated institutions because that is a good look for the UK. But it currently also appears that to some extent the UK government wants to control what that research output is and what that research output says.
00:35:49
Speaker
Well, that's not acceptable. You can't have a healthy research environment and controls put on what researchers can research. It doesn't work like that.
00:36:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's the confrontation of academic freedom that marked the beginning of real expansion of knowledge in the 20th century. There was a moment when it became firmly accepted that you had to have academic freedom in universities or you wouldn't have new knowledge. And again, I think this is one of those historical moments when we're seeing a pushback from the political sector.
00:36:24
Speaker
History shows that universities at knowledge then pushes back in return, but at the cost to individual people, to individual people's lives and careers, and we also lose some forward momentum. This leaves potential for us to lose a great deal of forward momentum in the UK when it comes to archaeological research in future decades.
00:36:46
Speaker
And the departments that are struggling, the ones that are being depleted the most, the ones that are disappearing are some of those that were originally revolutionary. You know, they're the ones that started using nuclear techniques that first trialed them in the UK. These are leading programs. That's what makes us so alarming, is that this is not marginal participation in archaeological knowledge. These are internationally recognized centers.
00:37:15
Speaker
Again, it's important that we mention this because I don't know personally how aware the UK public is about what's happening currently to academic archaeological departments. I live in this tiny microcosm where I see the damage every day. I see what colleagues and my lecturers are feeling about this.
00:37:39
Speaker
and I acknowledge that not everyone has access to this news. There are various petitions out there that you can sign to support these academic departments and I would advise you to do so to seek those out.
Support for Archaeology and the Podcast
00:37:55
Speaker
This is the perfect place to take our first ad break so we're going to do that and when we come back we're going to talk about
00:38:03
Speaker
where we think nuclear within archaeology should go, how we should tackle potential political issues and where we think these techniques can be best employed in the future. I know material studies is a particularly cool place to be right now in regard to nuclear archaeology. So yeah, after the break.
00:38:26
Speaker
If you're listening to this, then you're getting something out of the Archeology Podcast Network. We've got volunteers from around the world helping bring these podcasts to you. We want to do more though, and we can do it with your support. For $7.99 US dollars per month, you can support us and get a little in return. For details, go to arcpodnet.com slash members. That's arcpodnet.com slash members to support archeological education and outreach.
00:38:51
Speaker
Well, I think where we're at right now in sort of the engagement of archaeology with nuclear technologies is bifurcated. So on the one hand, we have a group of people doing work like the work I did in my book that is about bringing archaeological knowledge to bear
00:39:11
Speaker
the current sort of challenges of the nuclear industry, which have to do with how do you deal with all this waste? And there, our expertise as archaeologists in how humans have managed waste over millennia gives us a particular viewpoint and a particular way to
00:39:29
Speaker
On the one hand, analyze this and my analysis of it is somewhat critical. And on the other hand, be in an advisory capacity, perhaps, or at least an interlocutor. And there are many archaeologists who are working with people trying to come up with reasonable plans because we have the nuclear waste and we actually need nuclear energy.
Nuclear Waste Management and Historical Insights
00:39:49
Speaker
we really do to be able to move away from the oil economy, which is killing the planet, but to acknowledge that you have these long-lasting materials that are byproducts. Now, that's again a place where it's great being an archaeologist because we can say, yes, humans have always produced toxic wastes. That's kind of our thing.
00:40:10
Speaker
What's new today is that we're aware of the fact that we're interdependent on a world of other beings and that maybe we're not the most important in that chain of being. So maybe we need to take more responsibility for the negative impacts. So there's that part which I think is really critical and is going well that comes out of let's say contemporary archaeology and it includes people looking at
00:40:35
Speaker
the archaeology of nuclear installations, the archaeology of nuclear protests. And I've even widened a little to include the contemporary archaeologists looking at the artifacts of militarism, both in the globe and space archaeology, which of course is all in some sense tied up with these technologies that have their roots in militarism. And if that part of archaeology can keep its focus on the fact that
00:41:03
Speaker
The fundamental reason these technologies were developed was warfare. That isn't by the way that new either. The historian Manuel de Landa has shown us that many of the technologies that fueled the Industrial Revolution also came out of the warfare of that era. So warfare has often been an engine driving technological innovation.
00:41:30
Speaker
But then we have the sort of part that I think is less self-conscious, and that's what we've been talking about so far, which is archaeologists looking at these techniques as they're offered to us, as we're given this chance, and making certain that when we enter into agreements to use them, that we don't over-hype them, which makes it seem like the nuclear industry was critical, and without it, we wouldn't find something.
00:41:59
Speaker
I mean, that overhyping is a big part of this. And whenever you're in a situation where an archeological technique is being overhyped, some alarm bell should go off behind you. You should become self-conscious about, am I being used? Am I like the window dressing for another agenda? And again, we should, as part of this broader engagement in our looking at the social context of archeology.
00:42:27
Speaker
We should always say, so why is this technique available to us now here? And we want to talk again also about the differential access. You know, some places have access to this technique since some archaeologists don't. Why is that? Is that OK? Maybe we should have some ways to introduce equity. For example, in the US, the National Science Foundation funds a reactor in Missouri.
00:42:58
Speaker
that has a chemical compositional program. And any archeologist can apply to that program to get samples done. So that provides some equity. So if you're in a less prestigious university or one with less resources or one that doesn't have your own nuclear reactor right on campus,
00:43:17
Speaker
then you at least have the potential of having access to these new emergent techniques. We need to think about the kinds of questions that these techniques are being applied to as well. What kinds of questions are we addressing using the advanced scientific technique? Do they always contribute to the story of progress and hierarchy?
00:43:39
Speaker
Which is not the story of all of human history. Is there a way to use the techniques to talk about the everyday, the contested, the horizontal, not the story of the wealthiest? And those are things that if we do them, then we're using techniques in a mindful way. We're not just being drawn in their slipstream as kind of promotional devices. And I'm afraid we really aren't there yet.
00:44:11
Speaker
What you've said just there brings up the point that often when we use these techniques they are used to answer questions either on an individual craftsman level or on a wider scale of power contingencies and how power is divided throughout a society.
00:44:29
Speaker
Now it would be really interesting to me in terms of my own studies if you could highlight anything, specifically analysis undertaken on a material, but then to talk about that material's effect or placement within a landscape, and then how human interaction
00:44:50
Speaker
within a landscape has been affected or influenced by that, because that's not something that I've come across before in my own interactions with landscape studies. I think there's a big project that took place in the US Southwest. The ceramic analysis was led by Barbara Mills of the University of Arizona.
00:45:16
Speaker
And the analysis of obsidian in particular took place with scholars, including my former colleague, Steve Shackley. They got a lot of attention because of the large size of their samples allowed them to do an excellent social network analysis.
00:45:36
Speaker
And the interesting thing about the social network analysis itself is it looks at the complexity of how women and men were agents in different ways about the differences among settlements of various kinds.
00:45:49
Speaker
The obsidian part of that study, the part that Sheckley did, is really interesting because it does involve using scientific techniques, largely actually EDXRF rather than INAA, to look at how obsidian exists across a very extensive landscape.
00:46:11
Speaker
And then how people moving through that landscape might relate to people in their settlements. And I think that project is possibly a model for what we could do. It's multi-institutional.
00:46:27
Speaker
It took place over decades. It involves specialists in a number of different capacities. But that's a place where the application of technologies to a large number of samples has yielded much more about human, non-human living.
00:46:45
Speaker
in a vast geographic range. And it's not about the rise of the state. It's not about the concentration of power in an economy. And it's not just at the level of individual production at the craftsman level. We need those things, but it's that sort of extensive regional historical ecology.
00:47:07
Speaker
that comes out of it. And I'm sure there are some other localized examples, but that's the one that comes to my mind right away. That is most certainly a study which I will look into more. That closely aligns with some questions I've had about my own research. And it brings up an interesting link with something which you mentioned earlier, I think, which is that we have looked
00:47:29
Speaker
quite closely as archaeologists at techniques and methods which have been developed in communities as a result of warfare. We've most certainly begun to make connections between those techniques and effects within landscapes.
00:47:48
Speaker
But we haven't really done that in the modern perspective as archaeologists about the techniques that we now use, about how those techniques which we employ affect the landscape. We're very introspective about the past, but not so introspective, I believe, when it comes to our own methodologies as archaeologists.
00:48:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. Again, one of the things that came out of writing the book about how archaeology was used by nuclear planners in the US to try to envision a future marker system was that I kept coming back to the fact that the US West
00:48:32
Speaker
was treated by everybody involved as a vacant space. So it was a space where you could put nuclear waste, it was a space where if you put up this monument, which I compare to these very major art projects that also happened in the US West, and that is an emptiness
00:48:51
Speaker
that is contradicted by the actual living people, the indigenous people who inhabit this space, have inhabited this space for thousands, tens of thousands of years.
00:49:04
Speaker
and who just, they're simply invisible in this whole discourse. And the only people involved who could have made them visible would have been the archaeologists. Because archaeology, and when I get to the point where I'm looking at the environmental impact statements, there's the archaeologist documenting the fact that these mountains that they're going to dig caverns under to put nuclear waste in
00:49:29
Speaker
are important cultural sites and important sites of seasonal collecting. So yeah, there's no houses built there, but that's a particularly urban way of saying so it's abandoned because there's not a house there.
00:49:47
Speaker
That's the kind of thing that if we as archaeologists start putting that into the landscape, it's extraordinary. So my own current book project actually begins with that. And I'm looking at materials trying to expand and look from the geological, the distribution of geological materials in towards the settled places rather than out from the settled places. Because I realized that if I really wanted to do something that was beyond the human, starting from villages was never going to work.
00:50:17
Speaker
In reality, it's quite a curious concept, isn't it? And one that I don't think many people have talked about or thought about, that concept of a curated nuclear archaeological site.
00:50:32
Speaker
But in a way it really does seem logical in the sense that when we as humans take an active role within a landscape, we are influencing it. We are not benign within that context. We have curated something.
00:50:50
Speaker
We do not have a benign influence upon our landscapes, and we are responsible for the influence that we have and the consequences of that influence. So in that sense, the concept of a curated nuclear archaeological site is a really interesting one, and one I wish, hopefully via this podcast episode, we will have introduced to more people to get more people thinking about.
00:51:19
Speaker
Well, it's clear that this proposal or this kind of proposal to have, as you say, I say an artificially constructed heritage site, so building something that looks like it was Stonehenge but was created as a marker, that caught lots of people's imagination because it shows up all around the globe
00:51:40
Speaker
And especially, there were two plans in the US system, one of which was basically based on art, archetypes of art, and the other one, which is based on archaeology. It's the archaeology based model that the US government actually endorsed. But the art model appears all over the place. People in Australia write about it when they're talking about if we do this kind of thing, we'll have all of this waste and how will we take care of it.
00:52:05
Speaker
this art project idea comes up. And even on the website of the US repository that's supposed to be marked with the faux archaeological site, the images that they use are from the art project, not from the archaeological project. They're much more evocative.
00:52:22
Speaker
The interesting thing there is I think the word curated, and I think that's where the sort of sets of experts from various fields, from geography, from physics, from history that looked at this thing and were charged by the US government with creating scenarios of how long this marked site would be unimpinged on.
00:52:48
Speaker
would actually repel visitors. Their scenarios start with, within 100 years, people will be there digging, which I thought was really good. The one scenario they came up with that predicted long-term stability was if, instead of trying to abandon it and leave it, there was a museum on site, and they cultivated an actual museum figure called Nicky Nuke,
00:53:15
Speaker
who would be a children's character and there would be children's books and all sorts of things, so that they turn to a popular culture and museology idea, a sort of a theme park, a nuclear waste theme park. And that would have the potential to last the longest of any of the ways of marking it. So curation, literally, in terms of the idea of a museum, as opposed to guardians.
00:53:45
Speaker
Yeah, that presents a great deal of archaeological sense actually. I would agree because often, certainly not always, but often, sites which have a sustained presence from one cultural group
00:54:01
Speaker
exhibit less change archaeologically and within material culture than sites which have sporadic occupation. So by either the same group coming back after periods of time away or by a different group that wishes to impose their own culture on a pre-existing settlement or occupation site.
00:54:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's an idea of the kind of growing a continuing set of interactions between people and the place and the materials there that seems very well grounded, the idea of a continuing relationship to place, which we can see in many social groups around the world.
00:54:46
Speaker
can be cultivated in multiple ways. I'm not certain that building fake Stonehenge will do it, but that's the idea. And actually, in the book, I end up pointing out that this is where indigenous scholars have ended up on marking nuclear waste sites, is that physical markers are less important than the oral tradition of talking about it and passing it on from generation to generation.
00:55:14
Speaker
so that the place becomes commemorated, where commemorated means stays in our memory, not marked with a monument. We have good analyses of monuments and how they work that basically argue that the monument stands in lieu
00:55:31
Speaker
of the memory. It replaces the memory, it releases us from having to remember. So you put a monument up and people don't have to keep the living memory going. And then the monument becomes a focus for whatever you want to project into it, including stories that aren't continuous, including forgetting, as opposed to
00:55:49
Speaker
the community together passing on the knowledge that something exists. On some fundamental level, the US government understood that because their planning process, which was required for the environmental impact statement, which is the only reason they did this in the first place, this marker system is the so-called passive control.
00:56:11
Speaker
But the active control that they are really relying on and that they say several times, this is what's going to actually work if anything does, is distributing documents to libraries and archives around the world and keeping the network of basically primarily textual information alive so that it updated so that everybody knows where these sites are.
00:56:32
Speaker
That brings to mind two things actually. Firstly, that initial communication of somewhere being a waste site. I know in the UK after World War II there are a lot of sites which became bomb dumps or dumps for chemical waste and now not a lot of individuals would recognise that they were walking over some of these sites.
00:57:00
Speaker
But there was an active stratagem in the UK, an intention to curate these sites into nature reserves or sites of important natural heritage. So in a way, I think that this could work. Memory does work. Indigenous populations prove that.
00:57:23
Speaker
But at the same time, these indigenous populations you have to consider have a very specific and special relationship with landscapes.
00:57:36
Speaker
Well, there are two things to say about this. This is also what happens in the US that that it is common to take a toxic waste site, nuclear waste site and turn it into a nature reserve. In fact, in doing the research for the book, I found out that I grew up playing on one of these near in near my hometown of Buffalo, New York. I didn't know the TIFT farm was also a nuclear waste site. The purpose there by the government entity was not to commemorate
00:58:05
Speaker
It doesn't say the Tift Farm covering nuclear waste or the Savannah River Conservation Area plus nuclear waste. The purpose was to obliterate, to cover up, to replace. So there's a part of what the indigenous activists in North America have argued for, which is that the first thing you have to do is admit that this is horrible stuff.
00:58:31
Speaker
so that you're not trying to forget that. And so we could still put our parks on these things, but the signage would need to say this park actually covers the remains of a toxic waste dump. This park is our attempt to stabilize the surface on top of the leavings of a nuclear factory. And that would be a change of consciousness because there is a kind of idea that we can
00:59:02
Speaker
eradicate the byproducts of the technology. You see that when sometimes naive people will say, well, why don't we just put it in a rocket and shoot it at the sun or something like that? There's a desire to truly obliterate the trail that humans leave behind them of alterations to the landscape. That's not just an archeological problem. That's a human problem, a contemporary human problem. We really don't want to face up
00:59:29
Speaker
to our disproportionate impact on the globe. I'm fully invested in continuing to have an impact on the globe as a human. I don't want to just go and live in a bush somewhere, but I think that we need to take on board that. We need to acknowledge what we're doing and assess those moments when the cost is not worth the benefit.
00:59:54
Speaker
It is a really good point that this is a contemporary human issue. As an archaeologist, we essentially study human waste in all its various guises and forms. So we can also recognise that there wasn't this separation between humans, communities and their waste products in previous times.
01:00:19
Speaker
Yes, sometimes, but not always. Middens, for example, were sighted away from settlements. But that's more of a practical consideration to do with smell and vermin than anything else. But previous human communities used their waste products. They weren't considered necessarily useless, valueless, or indeed dangerous.
01:00:49
Speaker
These were simply secondary products which could be used to the benefit of society in another form.
Historical Waste Management Practices
01:00:56
Speaker
That's quite a contrast to how we think and treat waste today, in that now we want that separation from waste products. Waste products are considered dangerous and they certainly aren't something that we want to be confronted with.
01:01:16
Speaker
Yeah, the separation, and it's interesting because one, I think of the more interesting suggestions to come out of archaeologists talking to European nuclear waste specialists is that what today is useless isn't necessarily useless forever. And one's possible future solution, and I think myself personally,
01:01:43
Speaker
the most likely good solution to this is going to be when there's work that can be done with the leavings, the byproducts of nuclear processes to work through them and use them for other processes. And that is actually what human history shows us is this constant process of reworking. Now, middens, for example, I was raised
01:02:05
Speaker
you know, conventional archaeological training and was taught about middens as these spoiled heaps somewhere. In the sites I work in, there aren't middens like that. The everyday detritus is dumped right next to the houses, and that's because they actually compost
01:02:25
Speaker
And in much of the Amazon, what are called black soils, are deliberate human compost events. And what they do is they change the soil so that it's more propitious for agriculture. So that actual human history of dealing with our byproducts is much more positive than the last hundred years, let's say. In the last hundred years, we've evolved this urban idea, the landfill,
01:02:54
Speaker
I don't know of any ancient landfills, a space that's just dedicated to dumping garbage. The landfill itself then becomes, as Rathji has shown us,
01:03:06
Speaker
this permanent thing that preserves material, that if it weren't in the landfill, wouldn't be preserved as long. If you throw that, you know, he famously excavated hot dogs from decades ago that were still edible, I guess, if you wanted to. If you threw the same kind of garbage in your backyard, the hot dogs would be foraged by some animal, which would eat them, and that would recycle it. And the organic parts
01:03:33
Speaker
would alter over time, but there's a surface to volume ratio problem. A compost heap can't be that large without adding chemistry to it to start the reactions. But small compost heaps that everybody has near their house, sure. So there's a lot more we could do as people who know what people did with their foils in the past. And people have been working with toxic chemicals for a long time.
01:03:59
Speaker
The people in Honduras that I study, they created liquid mercury. They burned cinnabar to create deposits of liquid mercury, which is pretty awful. And there's things like that all around the world. Humans have been dealing with poisonous substances for a long time. Now, granted, nuclear byproducts have a different level of danger. But in general, I think the thinking we as archaeologists could bring to the table
01:04:28
Speaker
and are bringing to the table in some conversations is one that doesn't deal in this, there is bad and good stuff. There's just stuff and it's differentially active stuff. Lae Yeah, and this is perhaps one of the most productive ways to bring archaeology into this discussion in that we study waste products.
01:04:49
Speaker
And it's a wide spectrum of byproducts as well. Just as an example, I work with a site that is this amazing built stone structure of the city, and they are just periodically dumping waste over the walls.
01:05:08
Speaker
But then it seems that some time passes that deteriorates slightly, or it builds up to a level which is troublesome for the inhabitants of that city. And then they redistribute that midden waste from the walls to various points within field systems. And then that waste is then redistributed over fields to supplement agriculture.
01:05:35
Speaker
Which brings up the point that certainly the societies which I study and I think the ones that you do as well probably don't have a termination date on the use of waste by-products. Instead it appears to be more of a cycle of use.
01:05:55
Speaker
In contrast, I think the opposite is true for how we view nuclear waste today, in that I think that a lot of people do see a period of time over which nuclear waste deteriorates in being dangerous, and there actually being a termination date in terms of that waste having any actual use.
01:06:22
Speaker
Yeah, and the problem with that thinking is that the scale of the temporality of nuclear byproducts is so large. Humans are bad at thinking about the long-term temporality. Again, archaeologists may be exceptions to this. We have to think about humans on the long-term scale, but not on the scale of the nuclear.
01:06:45
Speaker
So the projects in the US had to, the environmental impact statement originally set that these markers had to last 10,000 years. And when I first started doing research on this project, I wanted to know where the 10,000 years came from. And initially I thought it was going to turn out to be the half-life of some component, but it has nothing to do with the half-lives. After 10,000 years, there's no significant diminution
01:07:12
Speaker
of the danger of these byproducts. And in fact, the US Environmental Impact Statement guidelines now actually call for a million year timeframe, which is beyond all of human history. So nothing humans have done has yet been shown to last for that long, making the whole enterprise a different enterprise. Now that number is also arbitrary.
01:07:40
Speaker
The truth is you have to think about these nuclear byproducts. Even the half-life is only the period of time when half of the substance has altered so that it is no longer radioactive.
01:07:55
Speaker
And then you have the same amount of time for another half. The scale is not congruent with human expectations. Which means that when governments are talking about disposing of this waste, well, you can't dispose of it. We as humans have curated something which has a mark on time, which even we as archaeologists cannot comprehend fully.
01:08:21
Speaker
Thus, no solution which is provided is actually a permanent solution to this. If the goal is separation, which is the point you made earlier, if the goal is to create a separate waste zone and somehow inoculate it from human presence, that's not a realistic goal. And it's not what humans have ever done.
01:08:46
Speaker
And the longer lasting nature of these wastes makes it clear that humans can't do it effectively. So then we have to turn and say, okay, what do we do with these nuclear byproducts? And again, I think what archaeology can suggest is that humans have always lived with the toxic materials that they're interacting with, that they have differentially affected human populations.
01:09:08
Speaker
that there's a cycle of reaction to that that happens and that the thing we have to get away from is that thinking of humans separated from the rest of the landscape. It's the separation that leads us into the false notion that we can separate it and send it somewhere else. The people who say put it on a record and send it into space are actually manifesting the same kind of consciousness.
01:09:32
Speaker
This really has a place in memoryscape theory in that we have curated this product, this waste product. Therefore, it already naturally has a place within the landscape and a monument because it has existed within that landscape, within our memory of that landscape.
01:09:55
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, again, I think goes with the fact there's a late 20th century form of consciousness that certainly in Europe and the US, that ecological campaigns promulgated the idea of humans being separate from the environment. That was not good for the environment or humans. We are not separate from some inert container called the environment. Humans are part of the same thing.
01:10:25
Speaker
and humans clump in different ways, but we're always tracking around in the rest of the environment, leaving those Arctic explorers leaving behind their junk.
01:10:39
Speaker
That's us. And that's the reality so that there's no pristine part of the world. There's no place that humans haven't had an impact on, especially now that we understand that what we do in one place changes the atmosphere, changes the climate, changes the rainfall.
01:10:58
Speaker
And we're not the only agents that act that way either. So we've also got to be a little more humble because volcanoes can do a lot more than humans can in a lot less time. And it means that we have to accept that we can't stabilize the world. We can still be responsible for our own actions.
01:11:14
Speaker
We can still say, hmm, maybe then we don't want to build this nuclear device in a tectonically unstable area. Maybe our nuclear device shouldn't just be thrown into what we think of as a wasteland because the people there are politically powerless.
01:11:34
Speaker
maybe our nuclear devices could be multiplied and distributed in more places so everybody's got the same risk. There's the rather infuriating concept as well that an environment is an environment because humans are in it or an environment has value only because humans can exist within it and that disposal of waste products is acceptable therefore in an environment which is otherwise hostile to humans.
01:12:03
Speaker
I'm thinking immediately for example of ocean environments and there's certainly less consideration which goes into the disposal of nuclear waste products and waste products in general into that sort of environment.
01:12:20
Speaker
So this is a perfect place to take another short ad break and after that I'm sure we'll have a lot of responses on the previous point because as I said when I introduced it, it is infuriating.
01:12:39
Speaker
You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show. Yeah, we treated the oceans up until recently as if they were inert.
Ethics and Inequities in Waste Site Management
01:13:04
Speaker
And so stuff could go into them and it disappeared. There's an interesting consideration here. We might think about the importance of visuality to modern humans. We know that other senses were really important to humans in the past, but we've become more and more, not just dependent on the visual, but have given it preference in our sort of epistemologies. What you see is more reliable because the other senses may fool you.
01:13:33
Speaker
And so you throw it into the ocean and it's gone. That works, except that it doesn't. And the ocean is dynamic environment that has altered terribly. There's just this sense of responsibility that humans are so reluctant to take up. And again, it's not that there's a utopia in which we can't have an effect on our world. We always have an effect on our world. It's not the Star Trek future. That's not gonna happen.
01:14:02
Speaker
But we can look at local responsibilities for things like waste. And there, when you start looking at nuclear waste in particular, what you find is that the biggest problem with it is the social inequities of where it's located.
01:14:21
Speaker
The second biggest problem is the suppression of knowledge of where it's located. So the fact that I grew up playing in a site that I only found out in adulthood had been constructed partly because of nuclear waste. So we should all have naps that show all the waste disposal places. We should all know that landscape. I don't know about the UK, but in the US, there is no place that it isn't. There is some trace of the nuclear industry everywhere, every single state.
01:14:51
Speaker
There is certainly an issue with that in the UK in that I think it's more a consideration of chemical waste products in the UK from as far back as World War I. One of the sites that springs to mind actually is now a nature reserve which has recorded some of the few sightings of the common adder in the entirety of Nottinghamshire.
01:15:13
Speaker
Yet that site has tons of chemical gases produced for warfare in World War II just beneath its surface. That's again, this is the kind of thing that certainly we have these major environmental cleanup sites in the US that are usually industrial chemistry in our case, not so much the military chemistry.
01:15:37
Speaker
But that's the suppression of knowledge, the not knowing. That means that you as a person can't make an informed choice about where you're going to circulate and how you're going to direct with it. Where I grew up in Buffalo, New York, there's a famous site called the Love Canal, which was near Niagara Falls. The Love Canal neighborhood was full of toxic chemistry covered with landfill.
01:16:03
Speaker
and would have been fine if it stayed park-like. The reason people put parks there is so you don't dig. It's the digging thing, that's the issue. And instead it was zoned for housing, a whole housing development developed, and a whole generation of children became ill. The digging function, the fact that humans will almost always go into park-like environments at some point and do some digging,
01:16:29
Speaker
is part of what we can tell people as archaeologists. We know this. And in fact, in the documents from the US planning for nuclear waste, they acknowledge that too. There's two categories of future humans that they're worried about. One is miners, the other is archaeologists. Those were the two groups they thought were likely to dig.
01:16:49
Speaker
It's certainly the case in the UK that if someone took the time to map one when these chemical waste products and nuclear waste products and various other more dangerous waste products were buried and also exactly where they were geographically, you would probably be able to see a strategic targeting over
01:17:18
Speaker
At least 100 years of lower income bracket communities, communities which would be considered poverty-stricken, or indeed communities of minority or marginalised individuals.
01:17:37
Speaker
Or lastly, within landscapes and communities which are already considered ruined for their natural beauty, like a lot of mining communities.
01:17:49
Speaker
spaces and places where natural regeneration isn't considered worth the effort. So an already scarred landscape becomes the home of potentially dangerous waste products.
01:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a fairly universal logic, the targeting lower income in the US that's almost always also racially marginalized groups. Communities, often with the logic that those communities already have contamination or are not in good shape.
01:18:32
Speaker
So reusing the mining mine shafts because after all, it's already a contaminated landscape. That kind of logic appears over and over again. And then, of course, there's the political power that the communities involved rarely know. Sometimes there's an economic incentive that's so strong that they can't not do it. There's a terrible, poignant story of a particular Paiute band in Nevada that
01:19:02
Speaker
basically advocated for temporary storage of nuclear waste on its reservation lands, because the reservation lands are almost entirely unusable because of other military uses. And that's a space where at least this was some form of income. But when you put people in the situation where that's the only way that they can live, that's where the social responsibility comes in. And that's where having
01:19:31
Speaker
a look at a map that shows you these things. This is a thing that archaeologists with our knowledge of historical techniques to map processes, we could play a role. We could be the people making that argument. Geographers are the ones making that argument right
The Future of Archaeology and Environmental Solutions
01:19:48
Speaker
now. People often don't realize the set rhetoric that these proposals come with for communities and why they can seem appealing initially.
01:19:59
Speaker
It often involves bartering for future benefits essentially for future generations. Proposals often involve rhetoric like, if we can do this now, if we can store this nuclear waste within the vicinity of your community now,
01:20:21
Speaker
In the future, your community will be green. It will be economically viable again. Schemes will be put in place to relieve issues stemming from poverty. If we can adversely affect your community now, in the future, your community will be an idyll. A place where anyone would be lucky to live.
01:20:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's promises that are often quite cynical. And again, sort of exposing that or having a considered conversation about what actually happens with those kinds of chemical landscapes is something that historical scholars who deal with techniques that allow us to map things and allow us to look at change over time, which is us, we could be in the forefront of these kinds of conversations. And those are consequential.
01:21:20
Speaker
they have an impact on people's lives, on people's ability to make decisions. It would be nice to end, I think, on a bit of a summary. What can and what should be done first in a physical sense? To make the situation better for communities that have to live
01:21:42
Speaker
within the vicinity of these chemical nuclear waste dumps. But also more specifically, how archaeology itself can have a beneficial effect in respect to this.
01:22:00
Speaker
Yeah, for me, it begins with archaeology education itself, so that as we're formed, as we're forming new archaeologists, we make certain that at every point people are confronted with thinking about the ethical implications of what they're doing, that you explore
01:22:19
Speaker
the origins of the knowledge, the origins of the techniques. And that also probably means questioning the questions that you're asking, because the questions themselves also have histories. There are reasons why we ask questions about how powerful become powerful, not about how the everyday people manage to resist power. So we start with archaeology education, and then there's the public communication of archaeology.
01:22:44
Speaker
just broadly, we need to get better. We've made the commitment, I think we have made the commitment, modern archaeologists across the board want to get our messages out, but we're not always good at it. And that takes relaxing some of our sort of terminology, not I don't, I'm not saying don't use jargon, because jargon is a professional set of language that we use among ourselves as shorthand, but learn to say things in a different way when you're not talking to other archaeologists.
01:23:12
Speaker
listening. Listen to the questions people ask you so that you understand what they think you're doing. Ask people what an archaeologist does before you tell them what an archaeologist does. And then moving to the nuclear question specifically, I think that it's really critical that we remain engaged as participants in all these planning projects.
01:23:34
Speaker
Although my own writing has been critical of how archaeological knowledge was drawn into the US project, that was specifically because the actual archaeological knowledge wasn't drawn in.
01:23:47
Speaker
that the project used kind of stereotypes of what, for example, the history of Stonehenge had been when there was rich knowledge about what Stonehenge really was about and how changeable it was. So we need to be there and we need to be prepared when a planner says, oh, and we'll just mark this with a monument and that will take care of things to say, well, what about the pyramids? You know, what about the fact that people always get curiosity? No, that's not going to work.
01:24:15
Speaker
And moving to the question of how to rethink the utopian goal of separating waste and ensuring that it doesn't do any harm, there I think we should draw on our expertise. We're the only world experts in human waste management.
01:24:38
Speaker
over millennia. We are the experts. We should be putting forward the message that humans have always created waste, that the difference in the last century and a half has been this desire to somehow segregate the waste from human being, and that that separation itself is a fiction, and we shouldn't begin our planning with that.
01:25:07
Speaker
And maybe that does lead to things like, okay, instead of thinking about how you can put this down a salt mine, think about how you can incentivize the chemists and the physicists to figure out how to make this material usable in other processes. Because that's the history of how humans have dealt with wastes in a productive fashion, is by using them. And so that then leads to a different thing. You don't want it down a salt mine, you want it stored somewhere where it becomes raw material for a process.
01:25:38
Speaker
And I think archaeology has the potential to talk at all of those levels, but we have to be self-conscious about that, and we have to be more optimistic about our ability to get our messages out.
01:25:49
Speaker
And that last comment is really important because without effort there won't be any change. And this topic, more than any other perhaps, truly demonstrates the place of archaeology in future discussions on the environment and truly shows why we should have a place at the table in terms of policy decision making.
01:26:15
Speaker
We don't have all the answers yet as a society but perhaps in some cases that's because we've not been asking the right questions to the right people. I could bang on about this for ages but I truly believe that the answer to a lot of the problems we face are interdisciplinary discussions and studies. Now because of the time there isn't going to be a tangent time this episode.
01:26:45
Speaker
But I think we all have enough to think about from this discussion. There are experts out there on every possible subject, and in that the world is truly blessed.
Episode Appreciation and Credits
01:26:58
Speaker
As ambiguous as that may sound,
01:27:02
Speaker
We'll leave it there. Thanks for listening to this episode of Flipside. You can find us on APN every month and on every other major streaming platform. That's the likes of Apple, Spotify, Google podcasts.
01:27:20
Speaker
You know, we end with our greatest thanks going to Professor Rosemary Joyce for her contribution to this episode. And with that, I'll see you next month on The Flipside, guys.
01:27:52
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, in the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:28:14
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.