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For many people in the world today, “Globalization” is seen as similar to what a

Melanesian Highlander reported to anthropologist Edward LiPuma: “The West is

the whale that swallowed us” (LiPuma 2000: 221).

SECTION 1 - Why are we suggesting an archaeology of globalization

focusing on the debris the whale leaves in its wake?

Here we only have time to mention three:

First, because super-modernity (Augé 2002) is responsible for the generation of

more archaeological sites and archaeological remains in a shorter time gap than

any other period in human history – just look at your local landfill.

Second, archaeologists have been increasingly concerned in the last two

decades with issues of colonialism, from Uruk in the third millennium BC (Algaze

1993) to the modern European expansion.

Third, social anthropologists and sociologists record and analyze primarily what

people say about globalization. It is left to archaeologists to confront the tidal

wave of material culture that carries globalization along. It is important to note

here that “garbology” (see Rathje & Murphy 1991, Rathje 1996) has proven that

what people say and what they actually do may be very different, usually with no

actual intention of concealing the truth. Thus, an archaeology of globalization

would analyze trash to tell another story – or to tell the old stories in a different

way. Sometimes, however, people, especially powerful people, tell lies or just

half the story. By digging battlefields, mass graves and refugee camps (Schofield

et al. 2002), archaeologists can produce narratives that challenge official

accounts.

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In this paper, we will be dealing with material culture moving around the world,

whether physically or through media images. We are aware that globalization is

much more than westernization (Inda and Rosaldo 2002: 21), but we will mainly

focus here on how material culture from developed countries affects the lives of

people elsewhere. We will approach not only consumption, but also destruction.

SECTION 2- The colonialism of consumption.

So, what is “globalization”? One side of it is a new kind of colonialism – a

“Colonialism of Consumption,” largely without foreign priests, replaced by the

incessant liturgies of “boom boxes” and i-pods; and with few foreign soldiers,

replaced by weapons in the hands of local surrogates and the barely more subtle

bombardments of cable television and the internet.

Archaeologists have long been aware of the attraction of the “bright lights of the

big cities.” Often, today, that attraction has been found to be based on

perceptions by foreigners that are taken from movies, TV and ads (Schensul et

al. 1968). Note here that since these images were/are designed to “sell”

consumption mores that are often not yet the norm, whether the media is ten

years out-of-date or just premiered ten minutes ago, the images create a “new

culture” among immigrants based on “mediascapes” (Appadurai 2002: 52) that

exist only in cyberspace.

So what happens when immigrants from the outlands arrive in a setting where

contemporary urban life is lived? Their traditional mode of buying is of limited

value, so they model their behavior in large part on glorified media images of city

consumption. The “Hollywood Model” (Rathje 1988, Rathje and Murphy 1992:

147-150, and Jameson 1998) suggests that immigrants will create unique new

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culturescapes as they combine unfamiliar materials and ideas from different

cultures in novel ways that don’t match existing traditions.

For an example, let’s examine Garbage Project data to compare contemporary

household refuse from Mexico City, from Mexican-American neighborhoods with

a high percentage of recent immigrants in Tucson, Arizona and from typical

Tucson Anglo neighborhoods (Rathje and Ritenbaugh 1982, Rathje et al. 1987,

Phillips 1984). Any versions of assimilation theory (Wallendorf & Reilly 1983,

Reilly & Wallendorf 1987) that follow the “melting pot” concept would expect

immigrant garbage to be somewhere on the gradient between refuse from

Mexico City and that from Tucson’s Anglos.

Oops! The garbage records from recent-immigrant Mexican-American census

tracts were nowhere in the ballpark of either Mexico City or Anglo Tucson.

Instead, they were far a field. Normalizing for household size differences,

household residents in recent immigrant neighborhoods consumed significantly

more beef and more soda, as well as far heavier loads of convenience food,

high-sugar cereal, and white bread than both Mexico City or Tucson Anglo

households.

This view of the “exceptional qualities” of the “bright lights and the big cities” can

go even further (Restrepo et al. 1982). To the garbage sorters’ great surprise,

several households in the two upper income sample neighborhoods in Mexico

City had both packaged food products with English names, such as “Frosted

Flakes” vs. “Zucaritas,” and cash register receipts from Supermarkets in

Houston, Texas.

The next area of garbage research, the “oncology of gluttony,” fits right in with

Mexico City residents grocery shopping in Houston. Epidemiological studies in

both Cali, Columbia (Haenszel et al. 1975), and Hong Kong (Hill et al. 1984)

found that supra-rich residents had a significantly higher rate of colon cancer.

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Interview-surveys with such residents in both cities also found that they reported

a significantly higher consumption of food. This is not surprising, since cancer

researchers have found among laboratory animals, that highly-elevated food

consumption – regardless of nutrient mix – leads to higher rates of cancer. What

was questioned was whether the respondents could really eat as much as they

claimed.

In its refuse study of Mexico City, the Garbage Project used crosschecks to

document that the same super-consumer pattern existed among Mexico City’s

households of the very rich. Residents in truly wealthy neighborhoods consumed

3 or more times per person than residents in other neighborhoods (even

accounting for servants)(Rathje 2005). And, yes, the cancer rates (mainly for

colon cancer) for these neighborhoods were exorbitant.

Our detailed studies of household refuse in Mexico City’s most wealthy

neighborhoods, demonstrated a “layering” aspect of the Hollywood Model. In

other words, rather than replace the local foods they were used to eating, the

very rich would simply add new foods to their diet – such as canned peas and

high-sugar cereal and microwave dinners – modeled on their view of a US diet,

(see Rathje et al. 1987; Rathje and Murphy 1992: 147-150; Rathje 1988, 2005).

This realization adds a new dimension to the “Hollywood” behavior of Tucson

immigrants. It seems very likely that their super-consumption of beef, soda,

convenience foods, and white bread may, in fact, be add-on behaviors. Note, for

example, that the immigrants continued to purchase plenty of tortillas. This

raises an interesting question: Are the immigrants to the US and the elites in

Mexico City consuming differently from Americans because they are chasing an

moving media target or because in some ways they are headed in different

directions altogether?

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It is also clear that all of us alive today are being affected by the Hollywood

model, where families in different landscapes create their own “new world” based

on widely shared mediascapes that exist only in cyberspace. We argue here that

as globalization picks up speed, we are all immigrants to an unfamiliar world that

is not Kansas or Tucson, and not even Mexico City or Addis Ababa.

3- The globalization of destruction.

Important as they are, consumption studies do not show the whole picture (Olsen

2003). The idea that “mass consumption increasingly becomes a primary

mediator in the ‘encounter’ between peoples and cultures from around the

planet” (Inda and Rosaldo 2002: 3) is beautiful, but only partial. At least, it does

not allow a full view of the character of these encounters, which is often sinister.

In fact, another side of globalization is that sometimes people seem to be

consumed by material culture, rather than being the consumers themselves.

Achille Membe (2001: 23), referring to Africa, says that there is now a

disconnection between people and things, in which the value of things usually

surpasses that of people. Let’s think of all the wars unleashed in Africa for

diamonds or coltan (a mineral used in cellular phones), which basically profits the

Western world. We have already begun to see the negative side of globalized

consumption with its harmful effects on health. But the globalization of material

culture can be pernicious in other ways and it can have other kinds of colonial (or

neocolonial) implications. For understanding them, we also have to study

garbage.

The idea that things are always better somewhere else, and especially in very

developed countries, has become widespread thanks to emigration and media. In

Spain, emigration through the 20th century put low-income people in touch with

the technologies, artifacts and ideas produced in the most industrialized

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countries in the world, including the United States. The impact that this had in

their imaginations was deep and far-reaching (González-Ruibal 2005). Once they

returned home, the former emigrants set out to transform their rural birthplaces

into Hollywood fantasies. “Hollywood”, says Frederic Jameson (1998: 63; see

also Rathje and Murphy 1992: 147-150), “is not merely a name for a business

that makes money but also for a fundamental late-capitalist cultural revolution, in

which old ways of life are broken up and new ones set in place”. Generally,

anthropologists have focused on the new ways of life, not on the broken remains

of the past. That’s archaeologists’ work. In Spain too, the impact of the

industrialized western world has had creative effects, that can be observed

through the appearance of new styles of cooking, new ways of building houses

and the introduction of new artifacts, especially after the 1960s.

The emergence of this new world, however, has given rise to a new category of

garbage: all that does not fit the “global modern” standard is thrown away. This

includes everything, from vernacular houses to pots. In the northwest of Spain,

hundreds of thousands of traditional houses have been abandoned. Some of

them have been vacated as a result of the emigration process; others were finally

abandoned only when the emigrants returned home. The emigrants felt that their

houses embodied all they had striven to overcome: poverty, marginality and a

pre-modern culture they were ashamed of. They abandoned them packed with

things (ploughs, carts, sickles, furniture, letters), now perceived as garbage.

Globalization, then, produces garbage, ruins and trauma.

When we think about the flow of things made easier by globalization, we usually

consider televisions, soft drinks or t-shirts in the first place. However, we should

also think about other more deadly �rtefacts: tanks, machine guns, landmines,

bombs, and missiles. Not only do they reach any place in the world, no matter

how remote, but they also skip traditional ways of distribution (from Europe or

America to the Third World) and create new links (e.g. China to Africa), that do

not allow for the monitoring of the West.

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A study among the Muguji, a small tribe of pastoralists of less than a thousand

people, that live in a secluded area of southern Ethiopia, recorded 93 automatic

weapons, belonging to 7 types of Kalashnikov rifles produced in China, Russia,

Yugoslavia and Bulgaria (Matsuda 2002: 180, table 9.1.).

All wars today are globalized wars. By globalized wars we do not necessarily

mean wars which take place in several distant countries at once – such as the

two world wars. On the contrary, most globalized wars are very localized in

space: western Sudan, the eastern Congo, the Ethiopia-Eritrea borderland.

However, these wars are always vested with multinational interests and

concerns, usually driven by neo-colonial policies. Through war, the global

impacts the local. Few would consider this scenario as the object of an

archaeological research.

Nonetheless, there are several reasons why archaeology may have something to

say in the study of super modern wars. We can point to at least three: 1)

archaeology through the study of material remains can evoke and manifest the

nature of war in all its crudeness; 2) any war, but especially globalize wars,

mobilizes an appalling amount of material culture (from bombs to trenches)

produced in a variety of places. This materials usually end up being rubbish

littering devastated landscapes turned archaeological 3) archaeology can tell

alternative stories and even overtake other disciplines in the study of modern

wars which leave few – if any – documental traces. Think of the war in eastern

Congo (1998-2002) in which more than 4 million people died.

An archaeology of globalized war may be an empiric undertaking, as any other

archaeological project: we can map war debris, make accurate plans of trenches,

destroyed tanks and scattered shell casings. We can thus recover, in a sort of

forensic exercise, very specific events, which, combined with oral data and texts

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might provide very textured accounts of particular battles, accounts that really

convey the drama and trauma of war in all its disturbing detail.

4- The colonialism of development.

Finally, one of the ways material culture from the Western world reaches other

parts of the planet is through development projects. Theoretically at least, they all

have the goal of producing an improved standard of living and consequently

reducing poverty. This implies the construction of hospitals, schools, roads, water

wells, irrigation schemes, etc. and also the distribution of food, medicines and

other western goods. Sometimes these laudable operations are a way for the

First World to get rid of its garbage: surplus food or outdated weapons. What

underlies most of these projects is a very modernist notion of progress deeply

entangled with material culture. Thus, it is widely believed that development is

necessarily a blessing and that it has to imply a certain set of western goods.

How can archaeology study development schemes? We can do an archaeology

of a third side of globalization -- of failed and destructive development projects --

which shows the vulnerability and dangers of the super-modern technology we

are so proud of and that we trust so much. The image of Western aid rotting

under the sun in some secluded African village is not only becoming common

now, but also very archaeological (see Hotchkiss 2001).

An example of this is the Tana-Beles project devised by the Italian government in

1987 in lowland Ethiopia (Wolde-Selassie Abute 2005; González-Ruibal 2006). It

was a phenomenal undertaking that involved the construction of dozens of large

structures (warehouses, factories, buildings), roads and an airstrip in the middle

of a forest. It also implied the resettlement of 80,000 peasants. The project went

awry and eventually failed – only four years after its beginning. Three hundred

million dollars, tens of well-prepared western engineers and the most advanced

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technology could do nothing to save this ill-advised project that collided with war,

ethnic conflict, peasant resistance, malaria and other tropical diseases, all mixed

up with global politics including the fall of the Berlin wall and Egypt’s zeal in

keeping the Nile’s water. The Tana-Beles region is now scattered with useless

Western garbage.

Archaeology can also show in a poignant way how lives were destroyed or

changed forever by wrong-headed development projects: the Grande Carajás

project in northeastern Brazil included open mining at a colossal scale and the

construction of a railway through the rainforest (Treece 1987). It was funded by

the World Bank and the European Union in the mid-1980s. The project made the

arrival of illegal miners, peasants, landlords and timber merchants easier. They

invaded Indian lands, killed thousands and brought in new �rtefacts and ideas

that deeply affected local cultures. Some groups disappeared: they were reduced

to the state of archaeological cultures in a few years. A disturbing example of that

are two Indians I met living in a reservation, whose language nobody

understands, whose culture nobody knows, and who spend most of their time

making arrows. These arrows will be all that it is left from an unknown culture

annihilated by globalization.

5- Conclusion.

Except in the most dramatic cases, people are not simply shattered by western

goods and ideas, as anthropologists (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993, Inda and

Rosaldo 2002: 15-18) and material culturists – especially Daniel Miller (1987,

1997) – have often pointed out. They still have agency to create new things out

of the �rtefacts and concepts that pour over them (Thomas 1991, 1997). Even

an RPG in Afghanistan or a pick-up truck armed with a machine gun in Somalia

are subjected to local renegotiations and cultural re-inscriptions. However, this

view is probably too optimistic.

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Maybe the urban Mexicans or the Spaniards are in a good position to be

somewhat imaginative and to contribute their bit to the creation of “other

modernity’s” – as the Comaroffs(1993: xi) would put it. Nevertheless, as LiPuma

(2000: 297) reminds “While local agency is alive and vibrant (…), it is still the

West that is imposing itself, not the other way round”. This justifies the portrait of

globalization as colonialism without colonies. For many cultures, rather than a

new space of creativity and cultural production, globalization is like the

Melanesian Highlander’s whale.

As archaeologists, we will examine the garbage that the whale leaves in its wake

– from “Frosted Flakes” in Mexico City to Soviet T-55 tanks in Ethiopia – and

relate stories nobody else will tell.

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