Landfill Hills

Abstract

This paper investigates a waste landscape in the Marston Vale, Bedfordshire, UK, consisting of a range of landfill hills. The hills originated as vast holes in the ground created by clay extraction, which presented suitable receptacles for the dumping of landfill waste. Although of much larger scale than evidence normally dealt with by archaeologists, these are treated here as archaeological features within an archaeological landscape. While other papers deal with important aspects of political ecology of waste landscapes, the present focus is on the upscaling of methods that is necessary to cope with such mega-scale contemporary waste landscapes, in order to make them more susceptible to archaeological analysis.