Till Death Do We Part: Archaeological Interventions in the Discard of Home Inventories

After decades of aspirational spending, and in houses brimming with tens to hundreds of thousands of objects, North Americans have amassed inventories of belongings that are extraordinary for their scale and complexity. In a process largely devoid of ritual, these lifelong-amassed collections are often thoroughly purged from domestic architecture at the conclusion of homeowners’ lives, dropping out of time and memory. This presentation considers whether we owe anything to the objects that once constituted the social lives of households. I highlight two pilot studies where researchers staged archaeological interventions in seldom-seen bureaucratic ‘flows’ of waste for the purpose of temporarily diverting massive domestic discard events. Such interventions, Graesch argues, permit a consideration of relational materialities seldom enjoyed in other archaeological contexts and thus are essential to developing an anthropological understanding of the dissolution or severance of human-object relationships. Finally, Graesch reflects on the ways that discarded possessions ‘haunt’ the past as well as the present when their social lives are reanimated in the context of archaeological research.

Anthony P. Graesch is an associate professor of anthropology at Connecticut College and an anthropologist whose scholarship and analytic sensibilities are shaped by archaeological method and theory. His active research programs address 1) household materiality and discard behavior in 21st century North America and 2) ancestral Stó:lō-Coast Salish households and lifeways in western British Columbia.