Plastic Archaeology

Scholars Involved:

Description:

In collaboration with Dr. Eric Deetz, another archeologist at UNC, and Robin Frohardt, a visual artist, Dr. Agbe-Davies has been working on an effort to explore how used plastic materials can and should serve as artifacts. Unlike more traditional archeological objects like stone or pottery, there has been little work to understand and study plastic objects as artifacts (https://onezero.medium.com/the-future-of-archeology-is-plastic-80fc689161de). One of the goals of this project is to think about how archaeologists can classify plastic objects, and how proper categorization and identification of those artifacts may be recorded. By expanding the scope of what constitutes an object worthy of archaeological study, this team hopes to think critically about the diversity of these artifacts and how current tools may or may not be adequate to study them. Dr. Agbe-Davies hopes that a RDF (Resource Description Framework) can be developed to better tag and identify plastic objects.