101 - The Plastic Age

Context 101 The Plastic Age - This was the topsoil and turf layer in the garden, and therefore the most recently laid down deposit. Here are some of the finds from the layer:

This is an assortment of late 19th Century and 20th Century pottery, flowerpot fragments, window and bottle glass, roof slate, and a clay pipe fragment. Also in the layer was this more modern assemblage of finds:

Here we see some much more modern finds. I would suggest that overall this is a typical late 20th Century garden soil finds assemblage; it contains flowerpot fragments, clothes peg and hanger fragments, a children's toy (dated 2010), chocolate bar wrappers (dated 1989), and evidence of a sneaky back-garden smoke break in the form of cigarette cellophane wrappers! The date of any deposit is generally indicated by the find with the latest date, in this case the toy car dated 2010. In this case however the car was probably lost and trampled into the topsoil. This demostrates how a deposit can be constantly "re-worked", and shows that the garden topsoil has probably been acquiring finds from the late 19th Century to the present day. Earthworms have an important role in the movement of such objects around in the soil; Charles Darwin wrote a paper on the subject in the 19th Century.

One feature of late 20th and 21st Century finds assemblages that will make it extremely easy to date by future archaeologists will be the huge amount of plastic rubbish.  I suspect that late 21st Century assemblages will not contain any where near as much plastic as it becomes much more costly to produce.