A Rubbish Heap Is More Honest Than a Palace
A king has a stone carved. It says he was beloved by his people, that he defeated a great enemy, and that the harvests were rich in his time.
You can read every word of it. Should you believe any of it?
Somebody meant you to read that
The stone was expensive. Someone chose the wording, someone approved it, and someone stood over the carver while it was cut. It was set up where people would pass it.
That does not make it a lie. Plenty of monuments say true things.
It does mean the stone is a claim, and claims have to be treated like claims. A king who lost a battle does not usually pay a stonemason to say so. What you are certainly learning is what the king wanted people to think, which is a real and interesting fact — just not the same fact as what happened.
Nobody meant you to read this
Now go round the back of the same building to the place where the kitchens threw things out.
Nobody arranged that heap. Nobody chose what went into it or in what order. Nobody was thinking about you at all. It was, to everyone who made it, the least important thing on the site.
And that is exactly what makes it trustworthy. A rubbish heap has no opinion about how it should be remembered.
Archaeologists call one a midden, and given the choice between a palace floor swept clean for centuries and the tip behind it, plenty of them would take the tip.
What a heap keeps
A midden holds the things a household could not be bothered to keep.
- Animal bones, snapped for the marrow, showing what was eaten and which parts, and whether the animals were young or old when killed.
- Fish bones and shells, which say how much of the food came out of the water and how far away that water was.
- Seeds and charred grain, tipped out of a fire, showing what was grown and what was ground.
- Broken pottery, and crucially the cheap pottery — the everyday cooking pot nobody displayed, rather than the fine painted jug kept on a shelf.
- Things simply lost: a pin, a bead, a bent nail, swept out with the floor sweepings without anyone noticing.
None of it was chosen. All of it is evidence.
Every one of these survives from the same town. Put each into the group it belongs to. The question is not whether it is true, but whether somebody was arranging it for an audience.
- A stone slab listing the ruler's victories
- Sheep bones split open for the marrow
- A painted tomb showing a full harvest
- Burnt grain raked out of a bread oven
- A coin stamped with the ruler's face and title
- A cracked cooking pot mended twice, then thrown out
- A child's shoe dropped down a well
The left-hand group is not worthless. It is the best evidence there is for what people wanted believed. The right-hand group is the check on it.
Deeper is older, if nobody has dug
A heap grows from the bottom. Today's rubbish lands on yesterday's, which is already lying on last year's. So the deeper you go, the older the layer.
That gives you order for free. Even with no dates at all, you know that whatever is in the bottom layer was thrown away before whatever is in the top one.
It only holds if the ground has been left alone. Somebody digging a post-hole, or a drain, or a grave, will punch straight through the layers and drop new things into old ones. So the first job on a dig is not lifting finds — it is working out which layers are undisturbed and which have been cut through.
The birthday party
At Vindolanda, a Roman fort near the northern edge of Britain, the ground is waterlogged. Water keeps air out, and without air the things that normally rot wood and leather and paper cannot do their work.
So Vindolanda's rubbish kept something almost nothing else has kept: writing. Thin slivers of wood, written on in ink and thrown away, have come out of those layers in their hundreds. Orders for supplies. A grumble about the state of the roads. A list of who was off sick.
And an invitation, written about 1,900 years ago, from one officer's wife to another, asking her to come to a birthday party.
Nobody carved that in stone. Nobody expected it to last the week. It survived precisely because it was thrown away in a wet place, and it tells you something no monument in the empire tells you: that ordinary people were there, and what they said to each other when nothing important was at stake.
Why does a heap of kitchen rubbish often make better evidence than a carved monument?
- Rubbish is older, because it sinks deeper into the ground over time
- Nobody arranged rubbish to make an impression, so it was not shaped by what anyone wanted believed
- Monuments are usually written in languages nobody can read
- Rubbish survives better than stone in almost every kind of ground
You need both
None of this means the monument should be thrown away.
Read on its own, a stone that claims a great victory tells you what a ruler wanted believed. Read next to a rubbish heap from the same years, it starts telling you much more. If the heap shows good food, imported pottery and healthy animals, the boast has something behind it. If the same years show thin cattle, less grain and mended pots kept far too long, the stone is still evidence — of a ruler who needed people to believe something that was not so.
The trick is not picking the honest source over the dishonest one. It is knowing which is which, and never letting the loud one answer on its own.