WORLD SCIENCE

"Long before it's in the papers"
April 20, 2005

“Garbage crisis” may have afflicted first village dwellers

Posted Sept. 23, 2004
Special to World Science

When people first settled into villages, their trash disposal habits took a long time to catch up with the new way of life, researchers have found. The result may have been a “garbage crisis” that lasted thousands of years.

The earliest village dwellers dwelt amidst piles of their own trash, researchers say. Archaeologists found these mortars and pestles amid the debris at a village site known as Wadi Hammeh 27. (Image courtesy Phillip Edwards, La Trobe University)

Researchers with La Trobe University, Australia, studied sites of the world’s oldest known villages, focusing especially on Wadi Hammeh 27, a hunter and gatherer village community living in the Jordan Valley 12,000 years ago. 

Its residents, part of a cultural group believed to be direct ancestors of some of the world’s earliest farmers, seem to have dwelt amid piles of their own trash. The site is rife with debris, including remains of food, tool-making activities and bits of collapsed structures, the researchers say.

These peoples, called Natufians, “had not yet tailored their indifferent household refuse disposal practices to the long-term requirements of sedentary living,” the researchers wrote in a paper to appear in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Only around 2,800 years later did organized garbage disposal practices become standard in some villages, the researchers write.

Phillip Edwards, an author of the paper, said it probably rarely occurred to the earliest village-dwellers to worry about trash, because their recent forebears had lived as roaming hunter-gatherers for many thousands of years. Mobile people don’t need to move their trash away; they just move away from it.

“It’s not an obvious thing to people in a lot of societies that you would spend all this time picking up and cleaning up,” he said. Early village-dwellers “probably just didn’t have an ethos of doing this.”

The same has been true of some semi-settled societies in recent history, he added. Eighteenth-century Spanish chroniclers in the Americas told of North-West Coast  villagers who tolerated massive amounts of debris, such as discarded shellfish, in their living spaces. Some Pueblo dwellers would fill up one room after another with trash until they were forced to move out.

The earliest village-dwellers probably didn’t live in fully permanent settlements, Edwards said, but rather moved every few months among two or a few living sites. This might have made it easier to put up with garbage for some time. But as villages became more permanent and bigger, the trash problem would have eventually become overwhelming.

That’s when regular garbage disposal might have arisen. It appears to have taken root by the so-called Neolithic era, about 10,000 years ago, Edwards said.

By the later Neolithic, “you have really big villages, even double-story stone houses, and up to thousands of people living in single village,” Edwards said. “It’ll become fairly obvious to them after a while that epidemics will spread rapidly through lack of sanitation, sewage and so on. They’ll get pretty aware that ‘we can’t live like this anymore.’”

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