Sasquatch Archaeology Militia: Students study island trash
Published 3:19 pm Tuesday, June 16, 2015
By Candace Gossen
Special to the Journal
ProjectSAM is a Garbage Archaeology project, self-named by SAM (the Sasquatch Archaeology Militia) a group of 19 students studying archaeology at Skagit Valley College’s San Juan Center this spring term.
One frisbee golf disc with the namesake SAM, became part of the beach trash after I, professor and professional archaeologist Candace Gossen, serendipitously picked it up.
On my daily walk, at Deadman’s Bay aka Sasquatch Cove, with Wiley E. Coyote (my dog) over a five-month period I collected 12 cubic feet of “stuff” from the beach. How did the waste get there? Did it come by air? By water? Or did it get left behind by humans visiting the beach? The results you will find below, but if you’d like to know why I named the place Sasquatch Cove, well, you’ll have to ask me yourself.
Thousands of pieces of trash were inside four large bags awaiting sorting, identification and analysis. In the field of archaeology, taxonomy is what we call this rubbish, “divisive and judgmental” is the way we categorize the story of humans.
So, what exactly was washing up on the west side of San Juan Island? In volume, the grand total was 12 cubic feet; 16.8 pounds, 2,737 pieces with 51 percent being plastic, 39 percent foam, with the remainder being mixed metal, paper, nylon and glass. The plastic types included: water bottles, straws, hygiene, sheet plastic, hard plastic shards, plastic apparel, cigarette butts, bottle caps, 157 shotgun wads, 175 food wrappers, and nylon rope.
The students used divisive methodology to separate the waste by material, then by types and then further by attributes. Their research tracked the food wrappers to China, to the cargo vessels in Haro Strait, 35 percent came from Canada, being dropped by boaters, crabbers and fisherman in the San Juan waters and from the bad habits of people visiting the beach.
How does all this trash compare to American standards? Bill Rathje, a garbage archaeologist reported his findings in a 1991 National Geographic article entitled “Once and Future Landfills.”
His team discovered that more than half of the landfills’ volume were full of newspapers and phonebooks. Plastic only accounted for 10 percent.
His curiosity focused on what Americans were throwing away? What he discovered was interesting, alarming but not at all surprising.
For instance, in 1978 there was a beef shortage, and people bought a lot more meat to save from not having any at all. Well, much of that beef wasted and there was a layer in American landfill history with unwrapped slabs of meat dated by a newspaper that had not begun to decompose. Landfills are another problem all their own, emitting methane, leaking toxic chemicals, and the most virulent articles of waste.
At Deadman’s Bay, the students discovered a great deal about the human behaviors on San Juan Island, and that there is a lot more plastic found in the oceans than on land. They each came up with suggestions for eliminating waste. They say: “Be responsible, pack out what you bring in,” and that following that suggestion would eliminate most of the waste, and then it wouldn’t affect the birds, sea creatures and the ocean.
We’d like to thank Skagit Valley College San Juan Center and the archaeology students. On July 8, ProjectSAM’s findings will be presented at the Friday Harbor Whale Museum, beginning at 6:30 p.m.
Gossen is an environmental archaeologist. For over 12 years Gossen has been digging in the dirt on Easter Island, a southern hemispheric province of Chile, unearthing its rich history.
