Garbology Lab Response Template (2)

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Western University *

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1022

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Economics

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Feb 20, 2024

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Lab 3 – Garbology – Response Template After carefully reviewing the materials from at least 4 different households in London Ontario, answer the questions provided below and upload your worksheet to the Assignments tab in OWL. We suggest examining the materials from more than 4 households, if time allows, to give you a better sense of the variability between households, and to allow you base your response on those households you find most interesting. Remember to upload this template as a Word document ( do not submit as Pages or PDF ). Please respect the word limits for each question. We will stop reading after the word limit, so extra words will not count towards your mark. Learning to write clearly and concisely is an important skill. Be sure to prioritize the most important information in your response. Question 1 • Select 4 of the 8 households and delete the other four from the box below. • What do the items from each of these four residences suggest about the people who live there? Think in terms of the following characteristics: age, gender, ethnicity, socio- economic status, dietary choices, how many people live in the house, and anything else you think is relevant. • How does the evidence support these interpretations? Provide specific examples of how certain items support particular interpretations. Also indicate if there are things from the list of characteristics above that the available evidence does not allow you to interpret. Note: 150 word limit = range 135-165 words ( limit is for all 4 households , not each household) Household 1: Refuse mainly indicated healthy people of higher economic status, due to expensive food brands such as Farm Boy and little sugary foods. There were also two tickets to a wine tasting, which indicates a middle aged couple with no kids. Household 4:Likely composed of two young roommates of East Asian descent, who were lactose intolerant because of the abundance of asian food that could be quickly prepared and no lactose. Household 5: Upper-middle class white family of five. Lots of yogurt, Indicating young kids, and refuse from a package of boys socks. Likely no girl children because all the snacks were Star Wars and Cars themed. Financially well-off because the food was name brand and plentiful. No food from countries out of North America. Household 8: Likely a lower class family. There were no fresh fruits or name brands. The foods were in bulk so we can assume it was a large family. Likely white due to lack of ethnic food. The word count of my response is: 163 Question 2 • What are some of the challenges when making such interpretations? • What assumptions did you have to make in formulating your interpretations above? Note: 100 word limit = range 90-110 words. There were a few challenges in drawing these conclusions. Firstly, not knowing the time-frame the

garbage was taken from. This presented difficulties because if the refuse had been collected over a longer period of time, it could indicate a lower number of people in the household than if it had been taken over a shorter period of time. We chose to approximate that the garbage was between 1-2 weeks worth. Additionally, we assumed that because a household discarded no packaging from ethnic food, the residents were white. For example, as we did in household 5. The word count of my response is: 95 Question 3 • What other kinds of material evidence (besides garbage) could you use to evaluate (provide additional support for or contradict) the interpretations you made based on the garbage presented in the PDF file? Note: 100 word limit = range 90-110 words. Helpful material evidence to support or contradict our interpretations would be a look at the households we were investigating. We could use this to more accurately gauge the socioeconomic position of the residents. We could also be more accurate with our interpretations if we were given access to clothes that the household occupants wear. This could help give us an idea of ethnicity. For example, if we were to find a saree in one households wardrobe, it would be fair to assume at least one of the residents is south asian. It could also be beneficial to see a households tv, or lack thereof. It could give us insight into their income, as well as how many occupants of the household there are. The word count of my response is: Question 4 Now put yourself in the shoes of archaeologists 2000 years in the future. • How would material bias affect the garbage items from each of the four households you selected ? Be specific about how particular kinds of objects would be impacted. • In the absence of other kinds of evidence, how would these changes impact your interpretations? Note: 150 word limit = range 135-165 words. The garbage we looked at today was made from a variety of materials. Different materials break down in nature in different types of ways. This would affect the amount of garbage an archeologist two thousand years in the future had to base their assumptions off of. For example, a lot of the garbage we

looked at today was cardboard. Cardboard breaks down a lot quicker and easier than plastic, meaning that by the time the future archeologists investigated the garbage they would only be looking at plastic. If I was that archeologist from the future, this would have impacted my ability to determine that household five was a family with young children. The evidence I used to support that claim was cardboard containers of kids yogurt tubes and a cardboard sock package. Without these, my interpretations would have been made on much thinner evidence, and I may not have even arrived at the conclusion that children lived in the home. The word count of my response is: 160

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