In this overview, we examine some of the ways in which archaeologists have increasingly turned their attention to the contemporary world, focusing not on ancient artefacts but on the material legacies that we ourselves are creating and what they tell us about ourselves, including the impact we are having on planetary and human health. One aspect of this “contemporary archaeology” is the study of modern waste, an area of research often referred to as “garbology.” Originating in the later 1960s, this study of modern waste is typically focused on the plastics that characterise what is now commonly referred to as the Plastic Age, a supposedly more familiar past aligning with both cultural experience and memory. The paper emphasises archaeology’s strong interdisciplinary traditions, particularly in its use of scientific methods, which make it easier for archaeologists to work within interdisciplinary teams and with other stakeholders and with policymakers, these being particularly relevant in studies that focus on the contemporary world. The paper concludes by describing how archaeologists are using these perspectives on the contemporary world to cast their eyes forward to the future.

At the turn of the twentieth century, American logging companies backed by the US colonial regime initiated extensive extraction in Bikol, Philippines. Industrial infrastructure and the involvement of a newly assembled Bikolano workforce left a profound imprint on the region's landscape. This article discusses a collaborative archaeological project that used archival materials, place-name analysis, ethnographic interviews, discussions with local scholars, satellite mapping, and drone-mounted lidar scans of former industrial sites. Findings shed light on the enduring ramifications of American logging in the early 1900s on settlement patterns, the infrastructure of routes and mobility, the state of industries from Philippine independence in 1946 through the 1980s, and ongoing environmental hazards. These findings emphasize the legacy of American empire, reveal the role of Filipino logging workers in shaping the landscape through settlement decisions, and uncover intricate connections across a pan-Pacific American colonial frontier that was shaped by both extractive and settler colonialism. This article adds to an emerging trend in Americanist archaeology in which archaeology investigates recent historical and even contemporary events.

Modern and contemporary archaeology, the French equivalent of historical archaeology, emerged in the 1970s. Subsequent attempts at theorising this sub-discipline have been hindered by a lack of broad professional recognition and funding. While the archaeology of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is now more widely recognised in France, studies of the post-nineteenth-century period remain limited to a few specific contexts. Here, the author offers an overview for the Anglophone readers of modern and contemporary archaeology in France and argues that greater theorisation, cross-fertilisation with other archaeological traditions and a diversification of the range of themes considered might enhance recognition of this sub-discipline within and beyond France.

Social inequalities and marginality often go unrecognised in the Nordic welfare states. This project examines the effects of neoliberalism and intersectional inequality in Finland from a contemporary archaeology perspective; the case study is a Second World War German military camp turned into a working-class community occupied until the 1980s.

For archaeology to survive in the present and for critical discourse on the past to thrive, archaeologists must advocate for the discipline's continued relevancy. In this Debate article, the authors illustrate the potential and challenges of such advocacy by examining contemporary perceptions of the Roman period Hadrian's Wall and how it relates to modern border landscapes—namely the US/Mexico border. They argue that archaeologists have not addressed the imagined continuity of socio-political narratives surrounding borderlands, calling for wider recognition of border materiality. The authors contend that the uncritical portrayal of the past, particularly in politically charged spaces such as border zones, can contribute to inequality and oppression in the present.

During a survey on the island of Öland in south-eastern Sweden, whose aim was to study the local waste-disposal practices, the authors recorded abandoned machinery and cars dating from the 1940s to today in locations close to residential areas and farms, and complemented the investigation by interviewing informants. This led them to conclude that dumping redundant objects in the surroundings of villages forms an entangled network with other behaviour, i.e. collecting things which had outlived their usefulness and embedding them in the landscape. The behaviour observed in Öland is compared with two other cases of collecting abandoned objects in Öland and southern Sweden. Using the location and chronology of the finds, the authors interpret the behaviour by borrowing the concept of heterotopia, as defined by Foucault.

This manuscript presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary material culture using digital data. Scholars interested in the materiality of past and contemporary societies have been limited to information derived from assemblages of excavated, collected, or physically observed materials; they have yet to take full advantage of large or complex digital datasets afforded by the internet. To demonstrate the power of this approach and its potential to disrupt our understanding of the material world, we present a study of an ongoing global health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on face-mask production during the pandemic across the United States in 2020 and 2021. Scraping information on homemade face-mask characteristics at multimonth intervals—including location and materials—we analyze the production of masks and their change over time. We demonstrate that this new methodology, coupled with a sociopolitical examination of mask use according to state policies and politicization, provides an unprecedented avenue to understand the changing distributions and social significances of material culture. Our study of mask making elucidates a clear linkage between partisan politics and decreasing disease mitigation effectiveness. We further reveal how time-averaged asssemblages drown out the political meanings of artifacts otherwise visible with finer temporal resolution.

Around the world, millions of people live with dementia. Archaeologists have advanced heritage engagement as a form of therapy, for example, through museum object handling. Here, the author proposes an alternative focus, arguing that archaeology can contribute to research on the materialities of care. Through a case study of a ‘dementia assemblage’ curated by an avocational archaeologist, the author documents the embodied and material traces of the collector's earlier archaeological practices, their increasing comfort in handling stone as dementia progressed and their sustained interest in the pareidolic properties of things. The results contribute to a wider understanding of the important role of materiality for those living with dementia.

This article shows how to record current events from an archaeological perspective. With a case study from the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway, we provide accessible tools to document broad spatial and behavioral patterns through material culture as they emerge. Stressing the importance of ethical engagement with contemporary subjects, we adapt archaeological field methods—including geolocation, photography, and three-dimensional modeling—to analyze the changing relationships between materiality and human sociality through the crisis. Integrating data from four contributors, we suggest that this workflow may engage broader publics as anthropological data collectors to describe unexpected social phenomena. Contemporary archaeological perspectives, deployed in rapid response, provide alternative readings on the development of current events. In the presented case, we suggest that local ways of coping with the pandemic may be overshadowed by the materiality of large-scale corporate and state response.

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating a viral archive—an archaeological record of history in the making. One aspect of this archive is increased environmental pollution, not least through the discarded facemasks and gloves that characterise the pandemic. This article—directed specifically at archaeologists—argues that an archaeological perspective on ‘COVID waste’ using social media analysis can help to highlight environmental pollution, and that by giving this waste the status of archaeological material and working with other disciplines, archaeologists can contribute to sustainable, policy-led solutions to combat environmental pollution.

Plastic entering the archaeological and geological record may be the defining signature of the Anthropocene. Amidst the growing awareness of the role of plastic in marine pollution, this study demonstrates its terrestrial ubiquity. The excavation of two experimentally reconstructed roundhouses built on their original sites at Castell Henllys Iron Age fort, Wales, reveals evidence of 30 years of heritage interpretation and visitor activity. The nature and extent of the cultural material recovered accurately reflects known activities at this heritage site, but also reveals an unexpected amount of plastic debris in archaeological contexts, indicating how, even in well-managed contexts, plastic is entering terrestrial deposits.

What are the circumstances through which we become archaeologists? In April 2018, Rui Gomes Coelho met with his former adviser, Randall H. McGuire, and his adviser’s adviser, Michael B. Schiffer, for a conversation about the reasons why they became interested in archaeology, about mentorship and about how they connect their experiences to broader social questions. This conversation is an affective reflection that crosses the emergence of behavioural archaeology, Marxist archaeology, the postprocessual turn and the context that shaped the origins of the archaeology of the recent past.

Marine plastic pollution is a global environmental concern. With reference to approaches in contemporary archaeology, object biographies and psychology, this article presents the application of a novel participatory (‘World Café’) methodology that aims both to understand how marine plastic pollution occurs and to demonstrate the value of the approach for encouraging behaviour change. As proof of concept, the authors present the preliminary results of fieldwork involving local people in the Galápagos archipelago to demonstrate the benefits of an archaeological approach in developing new frameworks to help mitigate this critical environmental threat.

How should we identify, protect and preserve contemporary heritage? Five years ago, comparisons in an Antiquity paper between the ‘simulations of scenes’ drawn on the wall of 6 Denmark Street by John Lydon, during Sex Pistols rehearsals in the 1970s, and the Palaeolithic cave art of Lascaux provoked a strong response. Less contentious was the recent listing of the building, bringing its punk artworks under statutory protection. In this follow-up to their earlier article, the authors review the initial reaction from the media, the public and the artist himself, and consider how attitudes may have shifted. They also offer a novel, ‘punk’-informed approach to the management of cultural heritage.