Discard Behavior

Disposal practices are not simple, dispassionate events. They can be imbued with strong emotions and deep convictions. Disasters, such as an earthquake, a fire, or a building collapse, are events that suddenly change the fortunes of a household. Such events result in substantial debris that must be sorted, removed, repaired, or discarded. As one might expect, dealing with the refuse created by such scenarios often carries strong emotional components.⁵ I suggest that mundane rubbish disposal, such as the material that archaeologists find in pits, privies, middens, or in public areas, might also be imbued with strong emotion.⁶ For example, rubbish disposal can be associated with death, marriage, abandonment, and even routine daily habits, such as housekeeping. People often dispose of objects that can no longer be repaired with great reluctance. On other occasions, individuals empty their secrets into middens, privies, or pits. These individuals were potentially ridden with sentiments of guilt, shame, or regret. Infants are the most heart-rending of these disposals, but there are other poignant items as well, such as letters, contracts, and mementos from past relationships.

The ways that households deal with rubbish on a consistent basis reveal deep convictions about how to manage hygiene, health, time management, and changes in the household structure over time. There are cultural rules about what constitutes cleanliness and what constitutes rubbish.⁷ These concepts are usually grounded in concepts of purity, pollution, and even ethics.⁸ The philosophical underpinnings behind Romano-Egyptian rubbish disposal are tantalizing, and many topics remain to be explored. Even without this philosophical foundation, we can deduce the resultant rules by carefully studying discard behaviors. Together, all of these reasons suggest that close attention to rubbish and discard behavior helps to reveal the enmeshed relationships between objects, activities, and households.

Understanding Rubbish: Terminology and Past Studies

Terminology

While contemporary society uses the terms garbage, trash, refuse, and rubbish synonymously in casual speech, these terms have different meanings.⁹ “Trash” refers specifically to dry discards such as papyri, figurines, ceramics, and so on. “Garbage” technically refers to wet discards such as food and agricultural remains. Human and animal waste are a special subset of garbage in most societies; animal waste is often used as fertilizer or for fuel, while human waste is typically deposited away from settlement areas, because it contains pathogens that can be quite dangerous to human health. “Refuse” includes both wet and dry discards, while “rubbish” includes these discards and even construction and demolition debris. I employ the term rubbish throughout this discussion to speak about discard in a general sense, even though most (but not all) of the discarded items I describe were trash. When it is quite clear that there were only dry discards within the assemblage, I use the term trash.

Just as there are specific terms associated with rubbish, there is also terminology to describe the act of rubbish disposal. Michael Schiffer was the first archaeologist to discuss the impact of rubbish disposal on the archaeological record.¹⁰ In his 1976 study, Schiffer distinguished between three categories of disposal:

1. (1) “de facto refuse,” which he defines as tools and items that are still usable left behind at an activity area;
2. (2) “primary refuse,” which is the intentional discard of items at or near the end of their use life, but still in the area where they were being used; and
3. (3) “secondary refuse,” which is the disposal of items in areas other than where they were used.

Nearly forty years after Schiffer’s initial study, Ian Hodder added a fourth category to this list:

1. (4) “tertiary refuse,” which he defines as “all the items of refuse that become incorporated into deposits as background constituents of the deposit matrix.”¹¹

To put all of this terminology into plain language, rubbish is material deemed to be of no present or future value to an individual or to society, so it is taken out of circulation. Rubbish can be found in de facto, primary, secondary, and informal disposals. De facto and primary refuse disposal are found away from high-density accumulations, such as at water sources, in agricultural fields, along paths, and in courtyards or on house floors. Secondary refuse disposal can be found in intentional rubbish depositions, such as middens. Middens are deliberate and sequentially accumulated rubbish deposits. Landfills occupy this category in the contemporary world. In Roman Egypt, archaeologists often find middens on the edges of settlements or—as I argue here—in abandoned houses. Most of the materials discarded into middens, either in antiquity or in the contemporary world, are household items and waste from household activities. In Roman Egypt, these items might include broken ceramics, figurines, bone, basketry, papyri and other dry discards that were either not reused or could not be reused in a manner close to their primary function. Specialized activities, such as house construction and feasting, rarely contribute to middens cross-culturally. Informal rubbish disposal occurs in single events and produces a low-density scatter of rubbish, which can include in-transit primary or secondary refuse. We usually refer to such informal refuse disposals as litter. Secondary refuse disposal areas are usually richer than either primary or informal refuse disposals, but we lose the household specificity that we find when dealing with de facto and primary domestic rubbish.

A Multiscalar Approach to Rubbish Disposal

A multiscalar approach to rubbish disposal reveals the links between specific households and broader society. While connectivity is always important in the study of households, it is particularly important for the study of rubbish. For example, the main conclusion reached by Hayden and Cannon in their influential case study of Mayan rubbish is that it is not sufficient to examine a single deposit from a household and its immediate surrounding area: ideally, the whole of the surviving rubbish from a specific household should be tracked down and examined if the picture of the inhabitants’ behavior is to be accurately reconstructed.¹² This and other studies demonstrate above all that secondary rubbish exists in a multitude of different forms of deposit and results from a series of decisions which vary according to special cultural and environmental conditions.¹³

It is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve the ideal suggested by Hayden and Cannon; how can one identify with certitude which household was responsible for rubbish depositions in the absence of ethnographic data? Even so, it is worthwhile to explore surrounding contexts in order to postulate likely household deposition scenarios. Schiffer points out that “artifact diversity is a strong line of evidence that can be used in many cases to differentiate various refuse sources.”¹⁴ In other words, even when we cannot connect rubbish with specific sources, we may be able to suggest a range of sources and patterns of disposal (e.g., for a specific neighborhood) on the basis of the artifact assemblage recovered.

As described here, addressing de facto and primary rubbish disposal as well as secondary disposal is essential to provide the full context of domestic discard in Roman Egypt. In other words, I examine the rubbish that usually accumulates in low densities in houses, courtyards, and streets, as well as the rubbish that accumulates in high densities in middens. At the microscale, I explore House B2 from Trimithis in Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis, as well as take a brief glimpse into rubbish disposal elsewhere at Trimithis. At the mesoscale, I compare the results from this house with rubbish disposal practices from other areas of Roman Egypt, namely Karanis and Oxyrhynchus. Finally, on the macroscale, I return to the topic of rubbish disposal in a global context, because people have similar approaches toward rubbish, even though they are filtered through cultural specificity. These macroscale insights help to provide insights into the microscale of House B2 at Trimithis.

Case Study: House B2, Courtyard CS, and Street S1 (Trimithis, Egypt)

Trimithis in the Dakhla Oasis

Amheida, known as Trimithis during the Roman Period, is located on the western end of Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis (see the map of Egypt in the introduction to this volume). Trimithis was occupied for a very long time prior to Roman rule, as can be seen by material remains that are distributed both horizontally and vertically on the site of Amheida and that date from the predynastic era all the way to the late Roman Period, with a few gaps of evidence in between.

By at least the second century CE, Trimithis was a large urban center whose core consisted of mixed-use architecture: a large temple mound, workshops, houses of different sizes, and courtyards. This urban core was surrounded by tombs, industrial complexes, agricultural fields, and dovecotes (figure 8.1). Archaeologists have not identified any middens with certitude in surface surveys. The city seems to have been completely abandoned during the fourth century. This case study will focus on a particular area of the city that appears to have been abandoned in the late third or early fourth century; this area is known as Area 1.

Trimithis: Area 1 and House B2

Area 1 is slightly off-axis from the rest of the city (figure 8.2). The structures in this area consist of modest houses and workshops. The predominant surface sherds date to the late third century CE, as do those that were recovered from excavation and surface scraping. House B2, the focus of our case study, is located immediately opposite a ceramics workshop that was built into what was probably once a house. House B2 is laid out on a simple clustered plan, a design it seems to share with many of the neighboring houses (figure 8.3). While we were unable to generate a refined occupational history of this structure, the ceramics and ostraka suggest that it was occupied in the late third century with an abandonment sometime around the start of the fourth century. This abandonment date appears to be consistent with the surface data for the rest of Area 1.

The B2 house itself consists mostly of barrel-vaulted rooms surrounding a large room that was either very lightly roofed or open to the skies. This same arrangement can be found in contemporaneous houses from Kellis (Ismant el-Kharab), which is located in eastern Dakhla. Daily tasks and sleeping mostly took place in the four rooms surrounding the central room. The fifth room, in the southwest corner of the structure, was used for food preparation and appears to have had a flat roof. The central room had a bread oven positioned along its northern end with its draft hole opposite the prevailing wind, so we know that this central courtyard was also used for food production. It is the presence of this bread oven that suggests the central room was either lightly roofed or open to the skies. This interpretation contrasts to Davoli’s description of such central rooms in the oases (chapter 1, this volume). David Depraetere’s comprehensive study of Greco-Roman bread ovens demonstrated that people always positioned them in a room that was open to the skies and with the draft hole located opposite to the prevailing wind (see also Simpson, chapter 2, this volume).¹⁵ Davoli described a hearth located within an enclosed domestic space in her chapter in this volume but could not provide examples of roofed rooms with bread ovens. Hearths, unlike bread ovens, can be found in a wide variety of architectural spaces. Indeed, many hearths were portable. Bread ovens, however, were specialized and unmovable cooking features that appear to have required certain conditions to function appropriately.

In previous studies of House B2, I have explored entanglements between local Egyptian, Greek, and Roman traditions,¹⁶ but here I shift our focus to the topics of construction, cleanliness, renovation, and abandonment within this same structure. Specifically, radically different levels of cleanliness have been observed within the different rooms of the structure, suggesting that there might be a gendered component to this disparity. While this assessment still holds, much more can be said about disparities in cleanliness as well as rubbish disposal, renovation, and scavenging. Rooms 1, 5, and 7 best illustrate this cleanliness disparity, but I refer to other rooms for comparisons. The street (S1) in front of House B2 and the courtyard (C2) behind House B2 provide further information about how the Area 1 inhabitants dealt with rubbish.

Trimithis House B2: The Occupational History as Told by Rubbish

The history of rubbish in House B2 begins with the material used for the construction of the house itself. Rubbish was used to level the site surface on which B2 was built. Demotic ostraka were found within this rubbish,¹⁷ suggesting that at least some of this material was recovered from a midden that was probably several hundred years old when it was reused as leveling material for House B2. We do not know the origins of this midden, as no formal middens have been identified anywhere at Trimithis. But of course, that does not mean that middens did not exist at Trimithis.

During the occupational history of House B2, cleanliness tells us quite a bit about how individuals prioritized their time and presented domestic space to household members and visitors.¹⁸ Although House B2 was found to be fairly clean, it was not completely cleared upon its abandonment. There were some objects that appear to be the result of de facto refuse disposal, such a jar stoppers embedded into floor surfaces (e.g., Room 1), complete jars stacked into corners of rooms (Room 3), a clay tablet (e.g., Room 7), and other items found lying flat on floor surfaces. Only Room 5, the room used for food preparation, had significant accumulations of rubbish, which appeared to be the result of primary refuse disposal. This room was completely full of ash, which was particularly concentrated in the corners of the room. Broken ceramics were used to informally repair a wall that seems to have suffered from being close to a hearth. These ceramics were pouring out of the wall. Even in the best of times, this wall would not have presented a tidy appearance. The substantial quantities of ash and debris in Room 5 remind us that houses were not simply locations of consumption, but also of production.¹⁹

The ample finds of ash and rubbish in Room 5 contrast sharply with Room 7, which was kept quite clean even though it, too, was used for food production. Even the area immediately around the bread oven was free from ash debris. The disparity in cleanliness between these two rooms demonstrates that individuals prioritized cleaning the central room, through which anyone entering the house would travel, over a room that appears to have been only used for cooking. I also suggest that there was a gendered component to this cleanliness. Women surely spent considerably more time in Room 5 than men, while all household members and visitors used Room 7. As I have argued previously, women may have prioritized saving time over cleanliness when they left Room 5 less clean than the other rooms of the house.²⁰

The maintenance of Room 7 also suggests that this room was a focal point for domestic renovations. The floor in this room was well-maintained throughout the occupational history of this structure. The floor was patched repeatedly, and then, when patching no longer sufficed, it was leveled with a layer of rubbish and then another floor layer was put into place. This process was repeated four times over the occupational history of House B2. Other rooms had repairs and floor resurfacing done, but not nearly so frequently or as carefully as appears to be the case in Room 7. As with the foundation of the house, an assortment of rubbish was used to level each of the floor levels between repairs (figure 8.4).

The abandonment of B2 also tells us something about the inhabitants. There was no complete clearance of this structure when it was abandoned. We found numerous items in apparent de facto depositions, such as storage jars embedded in subfloor storage areas (Room 6), jars clustered in groups in the corner of one room (Room 3), objects in good repair in most rooms, and so on. It may be meaningful that no terracottas or unfired clay figurines were found inside of the house (compare to Thomas, chapter 9, this volume).²¹

House B2: Its Post-Abandonment Reuse

There is another possibility to consider in the story of the House B2 abandonment, and it centers upon post-abandonment reuse. When a house is abandoned and not reoccupied, neighbors and passers-by often take advantage of the empty structure to look for items that may be of use and to throw away their own items rather than transport them to a more distant midden. Scavenging and secondary refuse disposal in abandoned houses are common practices in many cities both ancient and contemporary.²²

In Cairo since the 1940s, for example, the zabbaleen (English: “garbage people”) have scavenged and recycled some 80 percent of the rubbish they pick up.²³ Like other professional scavengers, the zabbaleen tend to specialize: one family deals in rags, another in glass, and yet another in plastics. Pigs once served as an integral part of the zabbaleen’s recycling process. This tradition has come under threat since pigs were culled in Egypt after the H1N1 influenza outbreak.²⁴ The case of the zabbaleen demonstrates how lives and bodies, as much as technical elements, serve as part of a city’s infrastructure.²⁵ The material practices of cleaning, scavenging, and recycling are interwoven with the material and moral aspects of cities. Waste makes clear how governing regimes—and the messy possibilities for their disruption—are constituted through the particularities of discard and filth, as well as their obverse, cleanliness and purity.²⁶

Scavengers also abounded in antiquity. They took portable objects as well as building materials. Wood from doors, thresholds, and shelving was especially prized; we find the scars of such removals within many Romano-Egyptian houses. While the walls of House B2 were not preserved to a sufficient height to be able to find evidence of wood scavenging, we do find such scars in House B1 (figures 8.5 and 8.6). We can safely presume that this practice was widespread at Trimithis, just as it was at other Romano-Egyptian sites. As with twentieth-century Cairo, pigs may have served an important role in the recycling process in order to prevent garbage from rotting in the urban space. While most households probably had pigs in “private” and “semi-private” courtyards, we can also imagine that some pigs helped scavenge garbage that might have been left in more “public” areas (on courtyards, see also Simpson, chapter 2, this volume).²⁷

The practice of dumping rubbish in abandoned houses also has great longevity and provided ancient scavengers with additional material. Some of this dumping occurred when individuals in the neighborhood wanted to remove rubbish from their own dwelling and did not wish to walk to an officially designated midden. Other rubbish may have accumulated when squatters occupied a structure for a short period of time. We have tantalizing evidence of a possible brief squatter occupation in House B2. Room 1 had a burn mark on a wall above floor level (figure 8.7). This stain may be the result of a fire lit on top of accumulated windblown sand by someone taking shelter in the abandoned house. It is difficult to conjecture further about the possibilities of this ephemeral usage. At the very least, it reminds us that abandoned houses were not as pristine as we might imagine them to be. Items found by archaeologists may well have belonged to the inhabitants, but they also may have belonged to passers-by or squatters who came into the structure after the household had moved on to another locale.

Street S1

The street in front of House B2 also informs our understanding of rubbish disposal in House B2 and the Area 1 neighborhood. We excavated a trench immediately in front of House B2 in order to compare the stratigraphy of the house with that of its immediate surroundings. While we found multiple surface levels for the street, each one with finely broken sherds pressed into its surface, there was very little additional rubbish. Most of the additional rubbish that we found consisted of broken figurines and wasters that presumably originated from the kilns across the street from House B2.²⁸ Most of these larger items were pushed up against the B2 house walls. There were no faunal remains or garbage strewn about. The cleanliness of the street suggests that there might have been a city mandate against dumping rubbish into public streets. Such mandates were common in Roman cities, and we have evidence of such civic regulation in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia.²⁹ Street S1, the widest we have identified at Trimithis, was probably monitored by authorities with particular vigilance. Even if there was not an ordinance against dumping garbage in the street, it is highly likely that pigs and other animals were deployed to scavenge this useful organic waste.

Courtyard C2

Courtyard C2 is located behind House B2 and its neighbor to the east (House B9). Since a doorway led directly from House B9 into Courtyard C2, it certainly belonged to this house rather than House B2 (see Simpson, chapter 2, this volume, for a description of courtyard types). Like the street in front of B2, Courtyard C2 informs us about rubbish disposal in the Area 1 neighborhood. This courtyard appears to have been used to stable animals, cook food, and weave cloth, among other activities. Among the animals usually kept in courtyards, pigs and chickens were the most common. Larger animals, such as cows and donkeys, may also have resided here, as indicated by their coprolites. Although a wide range of tasks appear to have taken place in the courtyard, the informal floor surface was kept relatively clean during its occupational history. The animals probably contributed to this cleanliness. The pigs and chickens consumed garbage, and the pigs might even have consumed human waste, converting it into a protein safe for human consumption.³⁰ Donkey dung and cow dung served as crucial fuel for ovens, so they did not accumulate as waste.

Of particular interest for the present study is the accumulation of rubbish in the eastern half of the courtyard. This rubbish appears in small circular mounds of mixed debris that consisted of statuette fragments, cloth scraps, broken ceramics, ostraka, and so on (figure 8.8). There were few faunal remains among these deposits. The rare plant remains mostly derived from plant fiber objects, such as baskets. Figurines, chiefly made out of unfired mud, were evident in high densities compared with the house (compare to Thomas, chapter 9, this volume).³¹ Because of the disparity between these depositions and the mostly clean courtyard surface, I suggest that these rounded depositions come from locals dumping basketfuls of trash into the courtyard after it was abandoned. This practice suggests that neighbors continued to live in Area 1 for some time after this courtyard was abandoned and that they used this area to dispose of items that were no longer wanted or that were in disrepair. This informal discard of rubbish does not appear to have gone on for very long, as the accumulation of dumped material is not substantial. This history appears to be consistent with the abandonment of Area 1 as a whole, which was probably in the early fourth century, at approximately the same time that House B2 was abandoned. Taken together, a picture begins to emerge of a neighborhood that was abandoned within a fairly short time frame. Of course, only additional excavation can verify or deny this suggestion.

House B1

These de facto and primary deposits found in House B2 contrast to the finds from another house from Trimithis, House B1, which is a more elite house located in a central area of the city (see Davoli, chapter 1, this volume). House B1 (figure 8.5) appears to have been more diligently cleared of items upon its abandonment than House B2. Scavengers, or even the occupants themselves, appear to have removed all of the attainable wood from within the structure. Additionally, valuable goods, such as an elaborate lamp and a container, were hidden below floor level in House B1, suggesting that the occupants or neighbors intended to come back for additional items. There is no clear evidence of squatters in B1, perhaps because it was abandoned at the same time as the rest of Trimithis or because it was less accessible to people traveling through the area than B2, which was located on the edge of the settlement.

Despite these contrasts, some practices were the same as with House B2. For example, rubbish served an important role in the construction of House B1. Trash was used to fill in a bath house underneath the house, and potsherds served as chinking for the vaults covering rooms. Bricks from the bathhouse were also reused for constructing House B1. To the north of B1, an open area also shows signs of rubbish depositions, similar to Courtyard C2.

The street, S2, however, has a different history of usage from Street S1 (on streets, see Davoli, chapter 1, this volume). Immediately prior to the abandonment of House B1, a stibadium, a type of reclining seat used for dining in the later Roman Period, was constructed in S2, next to House B1. It seems to have been used for a single-use feasting event, as evidenced by faunal remains that were left in the street.³² This street usage is intriguing, since one of the occupants of House B1, Serenos, was a city councilor. Part of his role would have included ensuring that such misuse of public spaces did not occur. It is entirely possible that this feasting event marked the end of the usage of this area of the site.

Comparisons between House B2 and House B1

There are many possible reasons for the different histories of abandonment, scavenging, disposal, and squatting between House B2 and House B1. The items left behind in House B2 might have been involuntary depositions of items that people would have liked to keep using, but that they did not consider to be worth the effort and cost of moving to a new residence. Removal costs and difficulties grew with distance, and so it may be that the individuals who abandoned B2 did not make a simple local move. The discard of these items also might be able to tell us something about the refashioning of selves and households. The items most crucial to self-identity among the B2 household, such as figurines and jewelry, appear to have been taken away with the residents, while replaceable items, such as jars, baskets, and loom weights, were left behind. The inhabitants of House B1, which was a larger, more architecturally complex, and decorated structure, may have had more objects with meaning and economic value to take with them. It is also probable that the House B1 household had the economic means to take objects with them, or perhaps to organize a planned move to a nearby location. Those objects that they did not take along might have been more appealing to scavengers, as the buried items suggest. Meanwhile, House B1 may have been missed by squatters and people looking for a place to dump rubbish, because it was abandoned at the end of the occupational history of Trimithis as a whole. Based on the current state of evidence, Trimithis shows no signs of being occupied after this structure was abandoned. More excavations are necessary to clarify the abandonment history of this neighborhood and Trimithis more generally.

The House B2 case study provides us with a fine-grained perspective on rubbish disposal within a house and its surroundings. It seems that the B2 inhabitants kept their dwelling clean, removing most rubbish from the house and depositing it elsewhere. We do not know where this “elsewhere” might be located. The inhabitants were less fastidious about cleanliness when it came to keeping their primary food preparation area clean, although it is notable that ample faunal remains were not left behind in that room either. The B2 inhabitants appear to have had easy access to older middens, from which they acquired material to level floor surfaces when they renovated their floors and to fill in a wall when it became undermined. When the household abandoned the structure, they appear to have taken valuable items with them, leaving behind things that they could easily replace. Scavengers, or the inhabitants themselves, cleared the structure of all useful wood. A squatter might have inhabited the house for a brief period of time, perhaps also scavenging it for useful items.

Excavations around the house suggest that neighbors were in the habit of dumping rubbish in abandoned buildings and courtyards, but left streets clean. Since neighbors had no issues with dumping material in houses, there might have been a civic mandate to keep thoroughfares cleared of rubbish. Together, this evidence suggests that the “missing middens” of Trimithis may be found in the houses and courtyards themselves. A comparison with other Romano-Egyptian sites complements this suggestion.

Romano-Egyptian Comparanda

The House B2 case study illuminates domestic discard within one household and neighborhood. How does this case study compare with other areas of Egypt?

Houses as Middens at Karanis and Soknopaiou Nesos

Karanis, in the Fayum, provides us with a large number of structures that were excavated chiefly in the early twentieth century. While these excavations were not recorded and published to the modern standard, the abundance of domestic data helps to provide a broad view of rubbish disposal from a single town. For example, the Karanis reports do not disaggregate rubbish disposal practices from the rest of the data. Publications mention rubbish disposal only incidentally as part of the description of excavations within the Karanis houses.

Karanis was a densely built town that was occupied for more than five hundred years. During periods of this occupational history, abandoned houses could be found located next to occupied ones. It seems that inhabitants took advantage of the changing fortunes of surrounding houses in order to offload items that were no longer wanted. Houses that appear to have been abandoned were found to contain large dumps of material that most likely originated from structures nearby.³³ Additionally, much of the southern portion of Karanis was built on deflated ceramic depositions (figure 8.9). Bethany Simpson, who leads the current UCLA mission at Karanis, suggests that inhabitants intentionally used this rubbish to level the ground surface prior to construction, much like I have suggested for Trimithis.³⁴ The disposal and reuse of rubbish at Karanis added horizontal stratigraphy to the vertical stratigraphy commonly encountered at archaeological sites. It is perhaps because of this horizontal stratigraphy that the University of Michigan team found it so difficult to decipher temporal horizons.³⁵

Inhabitants of the nearby site of Soknopaiou Nesos also seem to have used rubbish as a leveling agent before new construction.³⁶ Abandoned houses also resided next to occupied ones and seem to have been used advantageously as neighborhood middens.³⁷ The excavators do not supply great detail about the contents of these middens, but the unpublished records at the Kelsey Museum may be able to reveal something of them if consultation access is provided. For now, we can say that the disposal of household rubbish in an abandoned house appears to have been commonplace at several sites in the Fayum. These same middens also provided a ready source of leveling material for house construction and renovation. This reuse of material suggests that the rubbish disposal may have been perceived as a sort of “cold storage” of goods that might be reused at some, as yet undefined, moment.

The Middens of Oxyrhynchus

Oxyrhynchus, a large urban site with dense occupation, illustrates a different type of rubbish disposal in Roman Egypt (figure 8.10). The inhabitants used the edge of the desert to dispose of their rubbish. These rubbish mounds accumulated substantial quantities of debris over the long occupational history of Oxyrhynchus. The excavations of Grenfell and Hunt exposed the enormous quantities of papyri that accumulated in this area. Often the baskets in which these papyri were transported to the dump were found dumped along with the papyri they contained.³⁸ These papyri inform us that these mounds themselves were subject to episodic usage; those on the outskirts of the site produced first- to early fourth-century papyri, while those near the village dated to the medieval period, and the intermediate mounds dated to the Byzantine Period through to the eighth or ninth centuries.³⁹ One large rubbish mound, Kôm Gamman (K 20), was used for approximately six hundred years. It is unfortunate that we do not have comparative data from excavations within the Oxyrhynchus houses themselves that can inform us whether rubbish disposal also took place within abandoned houses. Because of the way that the town was looted, excavated, and recorded, we do not know about depositions within the houses themselves. In the absence of such evidence, I suggest that such depositions probably did occur.

Global Rubbish Disposal: Comparative Case Studies

Although archaeologists have considered rubbish disposal to be an important component of the archaeological record and site formation processes since the publication of Schiffer’s influential work, they have studied it only rarely. While many archaeologists acknowledge the need to differentiate between Schiffer’s deposition categories, few published reports record data with sufficient rigor to make it possible to do so. This weakness is particularly evident in excavation reports produced prior to the mid-late twentieth century.

Two projects—the “garbology” project run by the University of Arizona⁴⁰ and an ethnoarchaeology study within the Kalinga Province of the Philippines⁴¹—are among the few to suggest broad theories about rubbish disposal practices, how people manage disposal, and what rubbish disposal reveals about society. In addition to these overarching anthropological perspectives, a range of specific case studies have provided insights into regional rubbish disposal practices.⁴² Together, these studies suggest that people are willing to travel only limited distances to dispose of their rubbish, unless there is a civic mandate requiring them to use distant middens.

Among these regional case studies, there are a few studies of rubbish disposal in Pharaonic Egypt that help to illuminate the longue durée of rubbish disposal in this region. Dixon introduced the earliest study of Pharaonic Egyptian rubbish disposal with a brief survey from the prehistoric era to the New Kingdom.⁴³ He argued that the first evidence for organized sanitary conditions and human bodily waste disposal took place in the Archaic Period, although this development was primarily among the elite. Later on, Dixon suggested that domestic and civic rubbish was dumped into the Nile, streets, deserted buildings, and pits, citing Twelfth Dynasty Kahun and Eighteenth Dynasty Tell el-Amarna as examples of these practices.⁴⁴ Eighteenth Dynasty Deir el-Medina, which was occupied for four hundred years without floor levels being raised, served as a counterexample.⁴⁵ Consequently, Dixon suggested that there was strong civic control over building, planning, and rubbish disposal at Deir el-Medina. This suggestion is reasonable given that the state supplied and closely monitored the settlement.

There have been few studies of rubbish disposal in Pharaonic Egypt since Dixon’s pioneering article. Most mentions of rubbish depositions have been brief and were focused on a select number of sites. For example, quite a few scholars have mentioned the small pits that households used to dispose of their rubbish at New Kingdom sites such as Tell el-Amarna,⁴⁶ Gurob,⁴⁷ and Memphis.⁴⁸ These brief mentions of rubbish disposal rarely dwell at length on the content of the depositions, the implications of such practices, or how people recycled or reused rubbish. These studies also did not use terms in a consistent manner to discuss the various types of rubbish that people deposited. The confusion between “garbage,” “trash,” “waste,” “refuse,” and “rubbish,” when used synonymously, makes it difficult to understand what type of material was deposited and whether there were disparities between various waste disposal areas. The end result is that one has to agree with Kemp and Stevens that “the management of waste is an aspect of ancient Egyptian society that is not well understood … and it is difficult to get a measure of the impact this had on the quality of life.”⁴⁹

Two recent articles provide lengthier explorations of rubbish in Pharaonic Egypt. Shaw simulated diversity among artifact types in his study of rubbish deposits at New Kingdom Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna).⁵⁰ He followed Schiffer’s terminology and distinguished between de facto, primary, and secondary refuse, although he did not use the Garbology Project terminology to classify the various types of rubbish he discussed. Adherence to this terminology would have clarified Shaw’s argument, since he determined that rubbish disposal varied according to the particular activity and types of material involved. Shaw also differentiated between “communal dumping,” such as in the “palace rubbish heaps,”⁵¹ and the individual burial of household refuse in pits beneath these same houses, as reported by past excavators. Significantly, Shaw cautioned that rubbish deposits at el-Amarna were probably unusual compared to other contemporaneous urban sites (e.g., Memphis and Elephantine); they were the product of a short period of human activity, and the most recent period of deposition was less likely to have been disturbed by later activity. Anna K. Hodgkinson built on Shaw’s earlier work in her recent article on waste management at Amarna.⁵² She employed Schiffer and Hodder’s terminology in her work, arguing that further study of the diverse methods of waste disposal in the Central City could be highly informative.

Felix Arnold explored the evolution of rubbish disposal by taking a diachronic perspective on the large number of houses excavated by the joint German-Swiss Mission at Elephantine and dating from 330 BCE to 900 CE.⁵³ Arnold did not draw from anthropological perspectives on rubbish, and he used the terms garbage, waste, and refuse interchangeably. He argued that the act of deposition itself was the only domestic activity to which archaeological evidence can attest accurately, be that deposition intentional, incidental, or accidental. Arnold did not draw on Schiffer’s terminology to disaggregate these acts of deposition, which partially obscured his argument. Even so, I agree with his assessment that rubbish deposition reveals how inhabitants perceived different spaces within the house and its courtyard. For example, he cited an example of long-term ash accumulation (ca. 2100–1950 BCE) in a courtyard that people used primarily for baking, but also for other activities.⁵⁴ Meanwhile, contemporaneous houses seem to have been kept much cleaner, suggesting that households maintained systems for removing and reusing ash accumulations. Arnold argued that people were inclined to keep a space clean if it was used for multiple activities that would have been disrupted by rubbish. Arnold further argued that the distinction between a “clean” house proper and an “unclean” auxiliary space appears to have become increasingly formalized over time.⁵⁵ This suggestion complements Dixon’s arguments.

These Pharaonic Egyptian and regional case studies indicate that there are cultural rules that govern the appropriate distance between living areas and waste disposal areas. Since garbage produces an unpleasant odor and can serve as a health hazard, people appear to have kept it outside of habited areas for most of Egyptian history. Pigs, which were prevalent in most Egyptian settlements in antiquity, served as an efficient means of converting food waste into eatable protein.⁵⁶ These animals, among others, may help to explain the absence of garbage in most settlements.

Waste material that did not produce an odor seems to have been subject to more change over time. Typically, people make a division between human and animal bodily waste and trash consisting of objects, such as broken ceramics, glass, figurines, and objects of personal adornment. In most ancient societies, people or animals consumed all food before it could be thrown away.⁵⁷ Likewise, people often used papyrus items, such as textual papyri and baskets, as fuel rather than throw them away. Obviously, however, this rule does not always apply, as Oxyrhynchus so clearly illustrates with its mounds of papyri found within middens. Additionally, some materials, such as religious paraphernalia, carry sufficient meaning that they are discarded separately from other materials. Some apparently “ordinary” materials may also be invested with meaning because of religious context and are also disposed of in distinct ways.⁵⁸

The results of these prior studies of rubbish suggest a few common human behaviors, regardless of locality or time period. First, efficiency has an enduring influence on rubbish disposal. A study in the Kalinga Province of the Philippines argued that individuals are only willing to walk short distances to throw away rubbish on a frequent basis.⁵⁹ We find that efficiency guided the habits of Romano-Egyptians also; inhabitants commonly dumped household rubbish in abandoned houses and streets unless there was a civic mandate to send rubbish elsewhere.

For example, the rubbish deposits found at Memphis (Kom Rabi’a), mentioned above, include examples from a disused silo and an open courtyard.⁶⁰ It thus seems that disused functional areas such as these were prime locales for rubbish deposition. It is clearly important to understand the mechanisms of refuse distribution in such areas, since they are closely entwined with the organization of production and consumption. Indeed, evidence from current and recent excavations at El-Amarna confirms that much of the craftwork actually took place in courtyards and open areas, which are precisely the areas that tended to be neglected by the 1907–37 excavators.⁶¹ As more well-published courtyard excavations come to light, we can expect to understand more about production, consumption, and discard.

Second, there are cultural ideas about what is considered to be “dirty.” The concept of cleanliness appears to have evolved over time in Egypt, as the diachronic studies by Dixon and Arnold demonstrate. The act of rubbish deposition is also a culturally constructed judgment of cleanliness. In Roman Egypt, the location of middens and the probable creation of civic mandates relating to rubbish disposal developed over time and according to settlement type. The division between garbage, which produces unpleasant olfactory sensations, and trash, which produces no such smells because it is inorganic, appears to be the most enduring of these evolving cultural practices. Visual disturbances created by rubbish might also have been a concern. While trash depositions in abandoned houses and courtyards may not initially appear to be motivated by aesthetics, these depositions are not readily visible from the street or other houses. By contrast, large middens on the edges of settlements, such as at Oxyrhynchus, were highly visible due to their enormous size. Inhabitants may have preferred local depositions of rubbish because they were easy to deposit items there and because it prevented rubbish from being highly visible in the surrounding landscape.

Third, cultural ideas about utility also may have shaped rubbish disposal. It seems to have been common to reuse rubbish for construction and renovation projects in Roman Egypt. Rubbish was useful for leveling, constructing floor layers, repairing walls, creating vaulted roofs, and even for making mud bricks. For this reason, Romano-Egyptians may have viewed the trash deposited in abandoned buildings as a form of communal “cold storage” for later reuse. Certainly, this type of rubbish reuse is not uncommon in the ancient Mediterranean. For example, the main harbor zone of Hellenistic Delos was developed from 217 BCE onward through the reuse of refuse to fill in the waterfront to the west of the sanctuary of Apollo. Other regions of the city, such as the southern extent of Delos, also experienced massive landfilling through the reuse of rubbish.⁶² Even modern cities, such as New York City, have been known to reclaim land through the use of rubbish. Battery Park City in the southwest of Manhattan Island was created by dumping rubbish on the edge of the island in order to create more land. Since such reuse was so common, it is entirely possible that the rubbish deposited within unoccupied space was understood as communal building material.

Fourth, cross-cultural studies reveal counterintuitive results that require more exploration. For example, the Garbology Project demonstrates that people tend to hoard in times of scarcity. This hoarding may result in the wastage of precious goods; organic goods have a limited shelf life, and even inorganic goods may lose value over time. This form of wastefulness is surprising and could change our interpretation of wasted materials in other global contexts. Instead of interpreting waste as evidence of bounty, perhaps we should interpret it as an example of stockpiling gone awry in times of scarcity.

Revisiting House B2

With these larger global insights in mind, I suggest that the rubbish in and around Trimithis House B2 reflects some of these global trends. First, the inhabitants prioritized their time by finding the shortest path to discard. There was probably a Ptolemaic/Early Roman midden nearby, which people reused in order to level the site surface before building House B2. We also see this expediency reflected in the reuse of Courtyard C2 for rubbish disposal by neighbors after it was abandoned.

Second, there are cultural ideas about cleanliness and discard. We see this cultural influence in the selection process by which inhabitants kept some rooms clean (Room 7) while allowing others to grow messy (Room 5). People also seem to have kept Street S1 clean, in front of House B2. This cleanliness of a public space was probably due to a city mandate, since people tend to throw rubbish in streets if not forbidden to do so. Such civic mandates appear to have been in place at other settlements in earlier phases of Egyptian history. For example, the streets of Elephantine appeared to have been kept clear of refuse, only rising because of the accumulation of windblown sand rather than the deposition of rubbish.⁶³ Arnold suggested that donkeys transported rubbish to the limits of the city and deposited it at the shores of the island.⁶⁴

We also see selectivity in the types of rubbish that were found in and around House B2. Faunal remains were minimal, suggesting that they were reused or that there were laws about how faunal remains could be discarded within the city. Meanwhile, other garbage was also missing. Inhabitants may have fed this organic material to pigs in order to safely convert it into a consumable protein. Finally, it seems probable that inhabitants removed figurines from B2 on abandonment; we did not find them within the house walls, although they were common in the courtyard and the street. Comparisons with mesoscale data in Roman Egypt, such as Thomas’s study (chapter 9, this volume), suggest that there may have been cultural guidelines about how to dispose of figurines. This hypothesis would be worth exploring in more detail in future studies.⁶⁵

Finally, I suggest that the “missing middens” at Trimithis probably can be found in abandoned houses and courtyards on the basis of comparisons to other Romano-Egyptian sites (e.g., Karanis, Soknopaiou Nesos), the cross-cultural tendency to dispose of rubbish as quickly as possible, and the evidence from Courtyard C2 itself, which shows signs of post-abandonment dumping.

Rubbish and Material Habitus

As shown here, an individual house and neighborhood, as well as surveyed rubbish disposal at three other sites, can provide essential insights into Romano-Egyptian domestic life. This research also demonstrates the advantages of studying domestic discard within a multiscalar framework.

Rubbish disposal is a profoundly cultural practice, but there are certain commonalities that cut across cultures. People are typically efficient about disposing of items that they intend to discard, throwing them away as quickly and with as little effort as possible. This tendency explains why littering remains a problem in contemporary cultures and why so many people struggle to change their own rubbish disposal practices. Cultural specificities emerge from within this general behavior. People within specific groups formulate different ideas about what constitutes “dirt,” what disposal practices are “wasteful,” and which items need to be disposed of with particular care and consideration.

The term material habitus refers to this life world of choices. It can be defined as “an enmeshing that combines persons, objects, deities, and all manner of immaterial things together in ways that cannot easily be disentangled or separated taxonomically.”⁶⁶ The materiality of houses involves the objects that households create for themselves and the material habitus that develops based on the object world, the ways in which objects in those worlds affect household members in terms of their sense of self and their presentation of self to others within and beyond the household, and the sentiments and attachments that people form with their belongings.⁶⁷ A careful study of domestic rubbish reveals cultural habits, the many forms of agency involved in domestic activities, and emotions, not just consumption.

The approach described here, exploring the material habitus of the B2 household by examining rubbish disposal, cleanliness, construction, scavenging, and abandonment, is somewhat different from how archaeologists typically explore household identities. Archaeologists, including myself, usually examine the material left behind within houses as their way of accessing the identities of individuals who once lived in those spaces. While I still believe in such interpretations, I suggest that we extend our conception of material habitus to include domestic discard practices.

There are many advantages to studying discard. Discard practices help to explain the creation of the archaeological record. To do so, we need to think of depositions such as dirt and ash accumulations as key elements of how individuals present themselves to others. We need to think about repaired and recycled items, as well as renovated architecture, to consider what things people valued preserving and reusing. We also need to consider the items that we do not find within houses: the voids in the material record. These items occupy two extremes in people’s emotions: objects that people wanted to discard from their lives, and those that they wanted to keep with them. The most precious materials of all, the ones that individuals took with them, are more difficult to locate. These items may be found in mortuary contexts, but not necessarily, and their identification is a topic worthy of future exploration. However, when we peruse the aggregated household middens found in abandoned houses and on the edges of settlements, we gain a greater sense of what may have constituted the voids of household assemblages—the material that people no longer wanted.

Notes

1Acknowledgments: Gregory Marouard and Miriam Müller kindly provided me with additional references on rubbish. Bethany Simpson shared her in-progress research at Karanis with me along with a photograph of rubbish reused for leveling material. The editors, as well as additional conference participants, shared helpful thoughts and ideas with me during the conference, which helped me to revise this chapter for the volume. All errors remain, of course, my own.

2Rathje and Murphy 2001.

3Beaudry 2015.

4See Fletcher 1992.

5E.g., on post-Katrina New Orleans, see Dawdy 2006a; 2006b.

6Contra Beaudry 2015.

7Lagerspetz 2018, 7.

8Cf. Bataille 1991; Douglas 1966; Lagerspetz 2018.

9Cf. Rathje and Murphy 2001, 9fn.

10Schiffer 1976; 1987.

11Hodder 2012, 73.

12Hayden and Cannon 1983.

13Such as Hammond and Hammond 1981.

14Schiffer 1987, 282.

15Depraetere 2002.

16E.g., Boozer 2012a; 2010; 2015b.

17Ruffini 2015.

18Barile and Brandon 2004.

19On discard and ash, see Hodder 1987.

20Boozer 2015c.

21Boozer 2015a.

22Rathje and Murphy 2001, 192–95.

23Rathje and Murphy 2001, 193.

24Fahmi and Sutton 2010.

25Cf. Simone 2004.

26Compare to Fredericks 2018.

27Cf. Miller 1990.

28Boozer 2015a; Dixneuf 2015.

29Boozer 2016; Dixon 1972b.

30Miller 1990; 2013.

31Boozer 2012b; 2013; 2015a.

32Boozer 2007; 2010; 2019; Bagnall et al. 2016, 86–104.

33E.g., Husselman 1979, 15, 25, 29.

34Bethany Simpson, personal communication.

35The dating of Karanis layers is notoriously difficult. Various chronological revisions have been suggested over the years (e.g. Husselman 1979; Pollard 1998), and more can be anticipated.

36Boak, Peterson, and Haatveldt 1935, 5ff.

37Boak, Peterson, and Haatveldt 1935, 5ff; Boozer 2017.

38Grenfell and Hunt 2007, 349.

39Grenfell and Hunt 2007, 349.

40Rathje and Murphy 2001.

41Beck and Hill 2004; Beck 2006.

42E.g., Hodder 1987; Rothschild 1994; Needham and Spence 1997; Cordier and Dieudonné-Glad 2003; Shillito et al. 2011; Aja 2018.

43Dixon 1972a.

44Cf. Petrie 1890; 1894.

45Cf. Bruyère 1939.

46Pendlebury 1951, 233; James 1984, 229; Kemp and Stevens, 2010, I, 499–503.

47Thomas 1981, 13–14.

48Jeffreys 1985.

49Kemp and Stevens 2010, I, 501.

50Shaw 2012.

51Cf. Petrie 1894.

52Hodgkinson 2021.

53Arnold 2015.

54Arnold 2015, 152–53.

55Dixon 1972.

56Miller 1990.

57Dixon 1989.

58Halstead, Hooder, and Jones 1978; Needham and Spence 1997.

59Beck 2006.

60Jeffreys 1985.

61See Stevens and Eccleston 2007, 153.

62Zarmakoupi 2018, 34.

63von Pilgrim 1996, 219.

64Arnold 2015, 158.

65On figurines in domestic religious practice, see Boozer 2021, chap. 7. On rubbish depositions primarily of ceramics from cultic contexts during the early dynastic era, see Müller 2017.

66Meskell 2005, 3.

67Beaudry 2015, 7.

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