The 'Archaeology' of the Plastic Age

The archaeology of our times

Lego Lost At Sea @LegoLostAtSea ·29 lip
Some of the plastic we find on beaches is decades old. The 1st figure here was given away with #SugarPuffs in 1957, the wagon driver is thought to date to the late 50s, the #RobinHood figure is 50-60 years old and the Tallon jet car is from 1962. #anthropocene #plasticarchaeology

Just as Bloomsbury tells us citizens can "do archaeology" (build a nuanced view of past societies) by finding metal objects with a metal detector, to what extent can the artefacts of just one type of material recovered from a specific range of deposits tell us about life today?

The Lego Lost At Sea twitter feed (2 086 Tweets) by Tracey Williams is quite thought-provoking, not only from the environmentalist point of view, but also on the nature of artefact hunting, study/analysis (narrativisation) and collecting in general. Worth browsing and/or following. The associated hashtags are also worth looking at   #anthropocene #plasticheritage #plasticarchaeology

Hat tip London Mudlark (Lara Maiklem)