From Refuse to Resource: Ceramic and bone wastescapes in the early Neolithic of Europe

The used, broken, reused, recycled outcomes of daily life - waste - constitutes a major part of the archaeological record, yet the social and economic roles of waste and its impact on everyday social life is often overlooked. Broader understandings of the problems and potentials of human-waste interactions are needed to overcome this conundrum. The Early Neolithic represents a pertinent laboratory for this endeavour: the transition to farming and reduced mobility meant that waste was part of a new, more “thing-heavy” world that had to be dealt with in new ways. This project focuses on wastescapes, centring on Neolithic ceramics, as a key innovation that results in hard and durable waste, and compares the treatment and afterlife of ceramics with that of bone, an organic material. To explore how refuse shaped social practices and spaces, we ask: How did discarded objects impact local practices and environments in which they circulated? What problems and opportunities were connected to living with waste? How was waste managed? Did it “act back”? We will address these questions through an ambitious interdisciplinary work programme including established methods as well as ground-breaking automated digital techniques. Combining scientific analysis, taphonomic studies and socio-cultural interpretation, we target four case study sites following different Early Neolithic trajectories from the Balkans to the Baltic coast, c.6100–4000 cal BC. Understanding the use and reuse biographies of ceramics and animal bone will resolve key questions about the socio-economic roles, accumulation dynamics, and residuality of waste, illuminating variation in cultural strategies for managing waste and their consequences for lifeways. This work has wider implications for the discipline as it will provide new understandings of site formation processes and the development of the archaeological record, where discarded materials are one of the most numerous data categories and the foundation of much archaeological investigation into past societies. At a wider societal level, our project will contribute to raising awareness for alternative and more sustainable forms of ‘living with waste’ by reframing waste as something other than just a ‘problem’. It will help to understand that a ‘crisis’ of waste is a result of historical conditions and not a universal consequence of human behaviour.