Editorial

ABSTRACT

Native American descendants, archaeologists, non-profit organisations and environmental activists have joined forces to call for landscape-scale studies before government agencies allow further leases. Perhaps the most obvious of these new materialities relates to personal protective equipment, or PPE—plastic face masks, gloves and aprons—as well as the vials and syringes now used to deliver life-saving vaccines. With billions of items of plastic waste generated since the start of the pandemic, the authors argue that archaeologists can bring a distinctive perspective to the problem—one that threatens to reverse recent trends away from single-use plastics—by working with other specialists to influence public policy (Figure 1). In Islands of abandonment life in the post-human landscape, Cal Flyn travels to a series of places around the world, from Pripyat near Chernobyl to Paterson, New Jersey, which have been abandoned for a variety of reasons.5 Surprisingly, she finds these deserted towns and industrial complexes full of life;in the absence of humans, even the most toxic and polluted of built environments have been recolonised by animals and plant life.