Plastic waste is a toxic legacy – and an important archaeological record

By John Schofield, Director of Studies, Cultural Heritage Management, University of York; Flinders University
Fay Couceiro, Principal Research Fellow in Biogeochemistry and Environmental Pollution, University of Portsmouth

Imagine a remote Galapagos beach, where iguanas stomp around between fishing nets, flip flops, baseball caps and plastic bottles. Stuck in the sand is the empty packet for food sold only in Ecuador, the nearest mainland hundreds of miles away. To most people, these things are rubbish. But to archaeologists, they’re also artefacts – traces of how people live in what some call the plastic age.

Using an archaeological lens allows us to question what we think we know about the contemporary world, and to see plastic as not just pollution…

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