ABSTRACT
Waste, landfills and rubbish tips, has long been recognised as a source of cultural data. Listed and heritage sites include places of buried waste assemblages as varied as prehistoric shell middens and modern sanitary landfills. What sets these sites apart as something worthy of protection is the framing of the waste as evidence, an archive of the past. The most common archaeological excavations in Iceland are not Viking age longhouses but middens. The middens include broken or unwanted objects, food remains, ashes from fires, dust and muck of floors and sometimes animal dung and human excrement. These assemblages also include items which were not deposited there on purpose: windblown seeds and grasses, insects and even the remains of scavenges. In this chapter I will explore this curatorial work, teasing out different actors: landscapes, objects and soil. The aim is to complicate the interpretations of midden assemblages as more than proxy data for human lives. By paying attention to the other species and things that curate midden assemblages the varied existence of waste can be explored, potentially mobilising new solutions to the so-called waste problem.
