Digging through Twentieth-Century Rubbish at Hani, Ghana

Two 20th-century rubbish dumps were sampled at the modern village of Hani, in Ghana, located where the former city-state of Begho existed from the 14th until the 19th century. The dumps lay within a gallery forest surrounding the settlement, in a zone where village latrines are also found. The rubbish dumps contained material that provided connections between the archaeological data from Begho and the modern material culture revealed by a longitudinal ethnoarchaeological study of Hani. The exercise demonstrated the significance of rubbish-dump archaeology for understanding continuities from past to present. In scale, and from the organic nature of the refuse, differences are indicated with the well-defined “garbology” (Rathje and Murphy 1992) characteristic of developed industrial societies. The research also has the potential for throwing light on the impacts of colonialism on material culture in the first half of the 20th century.