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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 but as evidence of the impact people are having on the planet.

Archaeology is the study of people and how they behaved, which is represented by what they leave behind. Stone tools and pottery fragments, for example, reveal how people lived and worked in the past.

But the past is always accumulating. People continue to leave traces, just as they have done for millennia: objects are dumped, lost and discarded. The archaeological record never stops forming.

Since single-use plastics became more common in the early 1950s, plastics have been an increasingly significant part of the archaeological record. That is why the period from then until now is referred to by archaeologists as the , in much the same way as the bronze and iron ages are defined by their distinctive metals.

But unlike bronze or iron, these materials are leaving behind a toxic legacy. Micro- and nanoplastics are found in human organs and blood, and are everywhere in the environment: even in in places like or on remote mountaintops to which they have been carried by air. Microplastics also exist in . Plastic bags are found in the of the ocean. And because plastics can also alter carbon cycles in the , they’re even speeding up climate change.

An archaeological record

In our recent – in collaboration with Flinders University in Australia – we used archaeological theory to investigate how the plastic age is leaving its record behind, and how best to understand it. We looked at the many different places where that record is accumulating, from city landfills to farms or remote coastlines, from human bodies to space. And we examined how people’s everyday actions – using, losing, discarding things – shape how the present day appears to archaeologists.

Our main argument is simple: to tackle plastic pollution we have to understand how and why it is being created. And archaeology can help us do that.

We built on the work of anthropologists like Michael Schiffer in the 1970s, who used archaeology to and the archaeological signatures that it creates. We use this influential work to describe how objects move from a “systemic” context – where they’re part of daily life – into the “archaeological” context, once they’re lost or thrown away (at which point these items become “artefacts” to archaeologists).

An archaeological record is therefore forming in real time. Perhaps the packaging on your last meal will be part of it. The device you’re reading this on certainly will.

But the relationship between artefacts and human behaviour isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Artefacts do not necessarily remain where they fall, but can be shifted by nature or by people. Ocean currents, for instance, carry plastic waste around the globe to places like the , while human actions such as waste collection deliberately moves plastics from one place to another. Understanding these processes is crucial for interpreting archaeological traces.

Working with other scientists through the Galapagos Conservation Trust, we used this archaeological approach to investigate plastic waste in the World Heritage listed . We wanted to better understand where the waste was coming from and how to reduce its impact. By treating plastics as artefacts and tracing the processes that they had been subjected to, it was possible to untangle the many forces that contributed to the growing sense of contamination in such a fragile and important landscape.

Wicked futures

Our research also raises questions about the future. Archaeologists are already studying plastics, but how will they be viewed by archaeologists hundreds or thousands of years from now? Looking back from the deep future, will those fragments of plastic document a technological advance or a situation spiralling out of control?

Plastic pollution is what researchers call a : complex, interconnected and hard to fix. Helping to resolve such problems requires creative and interdisciplinary approaches. Taking an archaeological lens to plastics provides just that – a new way to understand how our everyday actions are producing this toxic legacy, while at the same time providing evidence of our time on Earth.

, Director of Studies, Cultural Heritage Management, ; and , Principal Research Fellow in Biogeochemistry and Environmental Pollution,

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