Living With Latent Waste
Archaeology in a Permanently Polluted World
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19213268 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Haeden Stewart (0000-0002-6319-8507, University of Massachusetts Amherst, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 128 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 401-415 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-21 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Anthropologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/aman.70079 |
| OpenAlex | W7155185191 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 54 |
Humanity lives amid the sedimented remains of two centuries of industrial waste. This is the so‐called “Anthropocene,” an age in which every inch of the globe has been transformed by an industrial capitalist system that demands accelerating production, endless frontiers of extraction, and the constant disposal of waste. While “disposed of” from the perspective of capital, persistent waste retains biophysical capacities that transform landscapes and the lives of adjacent communities. Waste accumulates unevenly; its presence is often hidden—a deliberate murkiness built into its disposal. In some cases, waste's persistence provides novel opportunities; in many, it distributes serious harms. Drawing on archaeological studies of two marginalized communities living in waste‐filled landscapes in the 1930s, this paper argues that waste's murky latency mediates how communities reproduce their everyday lives. Rather than seeing the social effects of living with waste as simply an extension of uneven capitalist logics, the excavated histories of these two sites show how waste landscapes are the terrain for much more contingent relationships that emerge out of the affordances of latent waste as simultaneously a frontier of unexpected value, a vector of unseen harms, and a source of affectively potent uncertainties
Affordance · Frontier · Globe · Industrial Revolution · Perspective (graphical) · Terrain · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Mining and Resource Management
Wasteocene
Consumerism
Flammable
Global Entanglements of Recycling Policy and Practice
From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History
Sacrifice Zones
Environmental Justice
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene
Flows of Injustice
Slow violence and toxic geographies
Out of sight, out of mind
Abandonment
Archaeology in the age of the Anthropocene
Pollution Is Colonialism
Knowing Waste
Anthropocene – a cautious welcome from environmental sociology
WITHDRAWN – Administrative Duplicate Publication
Geopolitan Democracy in the Anthropocene
The Ecological Life of Industrial Waste
Toxic politics
Human acceleration of animal and plant extinctions
Engineered landscapes of the southern Murray-Darling Basin
Diachronous beginnings of the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene, hyperobjects and the archaeology of the future past
Political Ecologies of the Precarious
Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene
Toward a New Theory of Waste
The Climate of History
Waste and Its Disguises
Life on the fence line. Early 20th-century life in Ross Acreage
Climate change? Archaeology and Anthropocene
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |