UNESCO

In the 1970s, garbology spearheaded, as an avantgarde, the archaeology of the contemporary world. Today, contemporary archaeology (as it has widely come to be known) has long been established as a subfield of archaeology.

Now, Leila Papoli-Yazdi published A New Garbology Manifesto (2025). So, what’s new in garbology?

Papoli-Yazdi’s book sets a new agenda for the archaeological study of waste and the way it contributes to archaeology and to society, at large. For one, this garbology is not conducted solely in the narrow framework of science. The manifesto contains the story of the personal struggle of its author in Iran and other countries including Sweden where she is currently associated with us.

For the other, this garbology is about the struggle for justice and against poverty of marginalised people. The voice speaking in the book is therefore not the voice of objectivising statistics and methodology but the voice of Leila and others telling stories about their lives. There are many anecdotal memories and dialogues in the book, with much direct speech that makes the text very readable.

The new garbology asks: “What can we, as archaeologists, do for the people who are suffering?” (p. 86). This, then, is about people in a different way than garbology was back then. Yet the new garbology’s agenda is avantgarde once again:

“In a system that buries us beneath toxins, garbage and silence, we reclaim the right to breathe, to organize and to imagine. Together, we build a future where no one and nothing is treated like a piece of garbage and to do so, we study, touch, feel, sort, smell and discover garbage” (p. 117).