Let’s see. Last week two orbiting satellites collided in space, and yesterday two nuclear subs collided in the Atlantic. Not to worry. Nothing bad really happened in either incident. (Bloggers were suggesting launching a giant vacuum cleaner to suck up satellite debris.) Meanwhile, most committed environmentalists don’t think any of this if very funny. They warn that collisions like these are leading us toward catastrophe — or at the very least to a 21st-century in which trash is deadly.
When I was a small girl, my family visited an historic pueblo in New Mexico, where I learned about “kitchen middens.” These are what’s found in the covered-over dumps of household trash from previous civilizations, preserved for centuries in mounds of earth. Middens are to archaeologists what tree growth rings are to arborists — silent evidence of long ago events. By carefully studying the layers in these mounds, archaeologists often are able to figure out what a given people in a given time ate, what they made, and even how they made it. Middens hold the key to the rise and fall of civilizations even when no written records exist.
A few weeks ago, I read Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2005), a very readable book by an Oxford scholar who’s both historian and archaeologist. Unlike recent revisionists who argue that the end of Roman civilization was a fairly easy time — more a matter of Roman accommodation to invading Germanic hordes than of subjection to them — the author argues that Rome’s collapse, at least in the Western empire, was indeed the nasty and brutish affair a lot of us were taught it was all along.
Although he never uses the word “middens,” Ward-Perkins traces the rise and fall of the material wealth of average, middle-class Romans in large part by studying the broken fragments of pottery (called “potsherds”) retrieved from mounds found at the sites of Roman settlements in what’s now Britain and France. He argues that the decline in quality and quantity of Roman pottery is evidence of a steep economic decline beginning in the Roman West in the 5th century, concurrent with the invasions. The fall of Rome, according to him, was precipitous, extremely stressful, and decidedly impoverishing for rich and poor Romans alike.
Reading a book on the fall of Rome inevitably invites ruminations about whether, or to what extent, we moderns are like the Romans. (What’s the fun in reading about such things if you can’t speculate a little afterwards?) The story of the colliding subs and satellites, considered in light of what I learned in this book, prompted me to ponder what someone coming along a thousand years from now will conclude about us from scrutinizing our middens — especially our stockpiled nuclear waste and fragments of satellite junk. Perhaps they’ll think it strange we were in such a to-do about the economy while ignoring what we were doing to our planet. Then again, modern middens might very well destroy us before anyone has a chance to sift through them.
“Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged,” Ward-Perkins writes at the conclusion of his book, adding, “They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.”
(Brainstorm illustration incorporating an image from noaa.gov and a photo by Flickr user Joe Geranio)
