Archaeologists uncover remarkable traces of the Plastic Age
Archaeologists excavating the site of a reconstructed
Iron Age village in Pembrokeshire were shocked by the amount of debris that had been left behind by visitors over the past 35 years or so. The village at
Castell Henllys is a popular tourist attraction and education centre, built on the site of an original Iron
Age village. When two of its roundhouses came to the end of their lifespan and were due to be demolished, the team from Liverpool University asked to excavate them so they could learn more about how original
Iron Age structures would have decayed. They had anticipated that during the excavation they’d come across some litter, but were taken aback by the sheer amount of it. Although the site is regularly cleaned, and the roundhouses had looked tidy, the excavation revealed well over 2,000 pieces of plastic, including 1,100 plasticised sweet wrappers; 22 plastic straws, and 254 bits of the plastic wrapping that affixes plastic straws to drinks cartons, along with plastic spoons, bottle caps and wrappers from Peperamis and Cheestrings. But the visitors hadn’t only feasted on junk: there were also 21 stickers from supermarket apples, says the paper – entitled The Iron Age in the Plastic Age. The oldest “best before” date they found was from 1999.
There is pressure on traditional materials, too. Building hydroelectric dams requires vast quantities of cement; electric cars require many times more copper than petrol ones. Were the UK’s 31 million cars all to become electric it “would require about 12% of the world’s entire copper output”, said Prof Richard Herrington, of the Natural History Museum. That’s why organisations are now looking at ways of exploiting deposits on the deep seabed. In the Pacific and Indian Oceans, there are areas rich in polymetallic nodules – potatosized pellets that contain magnesium, cobalt, copper and other materials. Millions of tonnes of ores could be harvested, but at what cost to marine life? Society may have to decide if it prefers to destroy marine ecosystems or land-based ones.