Although broken pots, animal bones, and everyday leftovers make up much of what archaeologists find today, the role waste played in people’s daily lives is still not well understood.

“Today we see rubbish as a problem, but did early farmers see it that way too?” asks Professor Henny Piezonka from the Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology at Freie Universität Berlin. “We want to look at this question more closely and understand what were the challenges of having waste on the doorstep as well as the opportunities for repairing, reshaping, repurposing, and reusing it.”

Starting around 8,000 years ago, people in Europe began to farm and as a consequence stayed in one place for longer. These settled communities created and accumulated more things than ever before, and so for the first time, people needed a strategy on how to deal with waste. Unlike earlier hunter-gatherer groups that had led mobile lives in this region, these first farmers could no longer simply move on when their trash built up. But instead of moving the waste further away from their homes, as we do today, they often chose to keep garbage in a pit within the grounds of their homestead.

Professor Penny Bickle from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology explains, “Keeping rubbish close to the home, could suggest a sense of ownership – did they feel responsible for their waste and therefore chose to deal with it within the vicinity of their home? It may also mean that there was an understanding that some of these discarded items could potentially be used again. In the Western world putting items in a recycling bin and having others ‘deal with it’ is common, but not all cultures operate this way, and so it is possible that the ancient Neolithic farmers had the view that waste is the responsibility of the owner.”

The study could help archaeologists understand ancient sites more fully, while also inspiring new ways of thinking about and tackling our modern waste problem.

Using a sophisticated analysis technique developed by project researcher Dr. Bruno Vindrola-Padrós, archaeologists have already been able to detect that some pottery was indeed repurposed. Some of the earliest forms of recycling can be seen in pots that were adapted for other uses, but what experts do not know is whether early farmers knew the impact that trash had on the environment. Vindrola-Padrós puts forward a few hypotheses: “One possible explanation for keeping waste items close to the home is an emotional one – these possessions often carry meaning beyond their practical use, as demonstrated by their inclusion in burial rituals. By delving into these questions, we could help reframe the way we think about waste. Today we push it away from the home for mostly hygiene purposes, but not all waste is unsanitary, and so we hope that in understanding how societies in the past dealt with waste it could provide us with some new ways of thinking about our attitudes toward it today.”

The new project looks at how these communities dealt with their growing piles of waste, focusing mainly on pottery, which survives for thousands of years, and animal bones, which decay more easily. The team will develop and apply a range of cutting-edge scientific techniques to study the afterlife of these materials following their disposal and to understand how waste impacted homes, villages, and everyday routines.

The researchers will study four archaeological sites across Europe, from the Balkans to the Baltic coast. Using scientific techniques and digital tools, they will piece together the “life stories” of discarded objects, that is to say, how they were used, reused, broken, and eventually abandoned.

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This press release is an adaptation of the University of York press release from November 25, 2025, for Freie Universität Berlin’s website.