It is often seen as the scourge of modern society, but now a new study argues that modern plastics are a valuable archive documenting activities and behaviours at a crucial time in human history.
The UN estimates that 400 million tonnes of plastic is produced every year, posing one of the biggest threats to the environment. And apart from the environmental impact, microplastic particles routinely infiltrate water, soil and air and connect with humans, animals and plants.
However, lead author Professor John Schofield from the University of York in England, says plastics also help to tell the story of the modern era.
"It is easy to view plastics as a toxic legacy and the cause of environmental harm, which of course they are. But as archaeologists we can also view them from another angle entirely – as a valuable archive that documents human impacts on planetary health," he says.
"Plastics are everywhere - from the deep ocean to high mountains - so are ubiquitous, resilient, and toxic as they continually break down, eventually to nano scale."
The new paper, including Flinders University experts including archaeologist Associate Professor Alice Gorman, questions how society should view an archaeological record that represents such a valuable archive documenting activities and behaviours at a crucial time in human history, while at the same time being a dangerous contaminant, threatening planetary health.
Professor Schofield, who is also affiliated with Flinders University, worked with a cross-disciplinary team of researchers from archaeology, history, chemistry and earth sciences at Flinders to carry out the study.
Along with fellow UK academic Dr Fay Couceiro, and Dr Alessandro Antonello from the University of Tasmania, the paper explores the potential to use the planet's Plastic Age as a way to study people's relationship with the world, in the same way that archaeologists study these relationships in the deeper past, through the evidence of stone tools, metal and ceramics.
The Plastic Age, in contrast to earlier named periods, started simultaneously all around the globe in the 1950s and is thus a global phenomenon which is deeply entrenched in other contemporary global issues such as consumerism, habitat destruction and the combustion of fossil fuels.
The study, published in the journal Cambridge Prisms: Plastics, argues that archaeology is in a perfect position to shine a light on the processes of plastic pollution as well as create a record of contemporary events and human behaviours: an 'archaeology of us'.
In recent years, archaeology has come to be defined more broadly, to not only study the deeper past but also how people in contemporary societies interact with the world around them, through studying the material culture they leave behind.
The authors of this study say we should view the environment as an archaeological archive whose record can be studied with a view to both understanding and helping to reduce plastic pollution. To do this, they suggest focusing interventions at the moment when plastics move from everyday use to discarded contexts.
Professor Schofield adds: "Only recently have archaeologists started taking an interest in plastics, and it is vital that they do. We need this archive, both to help us understand and try to reduce our impacts now but also to ensure people can understand these impacts in the future."
Flinders University Professor of Archaeology Alice Gorman says: "Our aim is to show how plastics are more than just pollution – they're a record of human behaviour in the contemporary world that extends from the deepest oceans to the furthest reaches of the solar system, everywhere that spacecraft have travelled. There are even plastics on the Moon.
"Archaeology ties all these environments together because it looks at how human materials decay in different conditions.
