Earliest village-dwellers faced a "garbage crisis"

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="4">“Garbage crisis” may have afflicted first village dwellers</font></b> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">Posted Sept. 23, 2004<br> Special to World Science</font> <font size="2" face="Arial"><b><br> <br> </b></font> <font face="Arial" size="2"><b>When humans first settled into villages, their trash disposal practices took a long time catch up with the new way of life, researchers have found. The result may have been a “garbage crisis” that took a few millennia to resolve.</b></font> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2"><b>Researchers with La Trobe University, Australia, studied sites of the world’s oldest known villages, focusing especially on Wadi Hammeh 27, a hunter and gatherer village community living in the Jordan Valley 12,000 years ago. Its residents, part of a cultural group believed to be direct ancestors of some of the world’s earliest farmers, were far from tidy.</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2"><b>The site is rife with debris, including remains of food, tool-making activities and bits of collapsed structures, the researchers say.</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2"><b>These people, called Natufians, “had not yet tailored their indifferent household refuse disposal practices to the long-term requirements of sedentary living,” the researchers wrote in a paper to appear in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Only around 2,800 years later did organized garbage disposal practices become standard in some villages, the researchers write.</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2"><b>Phillip Edwards, the lead author of the paper, said it probably rarely occurred to the earliest village-dwellers to worry about trash, because their recent forebears had lived as nomads for millions of years. Nomads don’t need to move their trash away; they just move away from it.</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2"><b>“It’s not an obvious thing to people in a lot of societies that you would spend all this time picking up and cleaning up,” he said. Early village-dwellers “just didn’t have an ethos of doing this.”</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2"><b>The same has been true of some semi-settled societies in recent history, he added. Eighteenth-century Spanish chroniclers in the Americas told of Pueblo villagers who, rather than dispose of trash, would fill up one room after another with it until they were forced to move out.</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2"><b>T</b></font><font face="Arial" size="2"><b>he earliest village-dwellers probably didn’t live in fully permanent settlements, Edwards said, but rather moved every few months among two or a few living sites. This might have made it easier to put up with garbage for some time. But as villages became more permanent and bigger, the trash problem would have eventually become overwhelming.</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="2"><b>That’s when regular garbage disposal might have arisen. It appears to have taken root by the so-called Neolithic era, about 10,000 years ago, Edwards said.<o:p> </o:p> </b></font></p> <font face="Arial" size="2"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA"><b>By this time, “you have really big villages, double-story stone house, and thousands of people living in single village,” Edwards said. “It’ll become fairly obvious to them after a while that epidemics will spread rapidly through lack of sanitation, sewage and so on. They’ll get pretty aware that ‘we can’t live like this anymore.’”</b></span></font> </body>