ABSTRACT
In 1982, Kent V. Flannery ridiculed archaeologists – garbologists in particular – who had taken up the analysis of modern American artifacts. Despite Flannery’s denunciation, Rathje’s ‘Projet du Garbage’ and other modern material culture studies have survived and prospered. As a genre of archaeology, however, modern material culture studies have low visibility because, we suggest, they lack a thematic focus. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this situation by redefining modern material culture studies as the archaeology of consumerism, following scholars such as Martin (1993), Schiffer (1991), and Spencer-Wood (1987a).
