Garbage, refuse, waste, trash—we are living in a world filling up and rotting away with it. As archaeologists, there is nothing more iconic of our research than garbage; we know the past by studying people’s trash. From this perspective, archaeologist Sarah Newman is ideally positioned to excavate the history and meaning of trash. Her pathbreaking first book, Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things, demonstrates that there is so much more to trash than meets the eye, even for an archaeologist.

Refuse, it seems, is everywhere—at least today. However, Newman’s book shows us that trash is neither universal nor self-evident. As is the case for so many other aspects of life that are ever present, it is easy to take trash for granted and think that it has always been the way it is now. Skillfully weaving together evidence from a wide range of disciplines that include archaeology, history, art history, ethnography, and linguistics, Unmaking Waste details how contemporary western Euro-American concepts of waste are just that: one way of thinking about waste that is historically, contextually, and geographically situated. Dirt, filth, disease—these contemporary ideas about garbage shape how we think about and what we do with our trash. By placing contemporary Western and precolumbian Mesoamerican ideas about garbage into conversation with one another, Newman shows us how diverse and distinctive ideas about trash can be. Objects do not have to lose their value through time; old things can be useful, reused, and valued in ritual and remembrance.

Unmaking Waste does just what its title says across six chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion. Its six chapters can be seen as having two parts: chapters 1 and 2 unravel Western Euro-American ideas of trash, and chapters 3 through 6 introduce us to ideas derived from Mesoamerican archaeology. Whereas traditional histories of waste have focused on waste in the modern Western world, Newman complicates and subverts this Euro-American-centric picture by bringing deep histories and archaeologies of Mesoamerican waste to bear on the discussion. The variability and historical changes in both the Euro-American and Mesoamerican cases underscore how ideas about garbage are historically and culturally specific for any group of people. The juxtaposition of Mesoamerican and Euro-American perspectives illustrates additional variability, specifically as Newman reveals alternative Mesoamerican viewpoints about trash that are discontinuous with Euro-American ones. Newman’s meticulous exposition of Mesoamerican perspectives on garbage seen through her own fieldwork at the ancestral Classic Maya city of El Zotz, Guatemala, are key to demonstrating alternative ways of understanding trash.

Chapter 1, “Throwaway Living,” examines “our” (Western Euro-American) constructions of waste and how they have developed through time from ancient Rome to the present day. Chapter 2, “Archaeologies of Waste,” situates the field of archaeology as practiced in the West in relation to changing ideas about waste to show how archaeological ideas about waste have changed alongside social changes in ideas about waste since the late nineteenth century. Chapter 3, “Cleanliness and Godliness,” starts to move us from Euro-American to Mesoamerican ideas about garbage by examining the new ways of understanding waste that were created when European and Indigenous Mesoamerican ideas confronted each other during the Spanish invasion, starting in the sixteenth century AD. Chapter 4, “Dirty Work,” goes further to show how colonial ideas and polices about waste operated in practice to subjugate Indigenous people in the Americas. Chapter 5, “Things Left Behind,” takes us to before the Spanish invasion to document how Mesoamericans conceived of “waste” as embedded with human action, potent for reuse and remembrance, and critical for the continuation of time and the cosmos. Discard did not mark the end of the usefulness of an object; it could produce new meanings. Chapter 6, “Anamorphic Archaeology,” provides critical analysis from Newman’s own research at the ancestral Maya city of El Zotz to demonstrate the efficacy of thinking through Mesoamerican ideas of trash for archaeological interpretation and practice. Bringing the book full circle, Newman’s conclusion asks us to consider how we could think about waste differently today and what implications that might have in the present and future.

Unmaking Waste is a beautiful read, which is not always the case for academic books. Poetry, literature, history, and archaeology commingle across its pages. A set of color plates in the center of the book provides a rich visual entry into the book’s themes. It is a must-read for archaeologists—or “past-living” people, as Newman puts it—which includes anyone who studies the past or lives today with vestiges of the past, as we all do. Students and classrooms within and beyond archaeology will find fruitful discussion about the past, present, and future in Unmaking Waste.