One of the earliest proponents of turning archaeological attention back upon ourselves was Bill Rathje, here at Stanford. From these early 'garbology' projects, a constellation of two principles charted the course for more recent studies: an archaeology as 'therapy', uncovering through material expression the sedimenting of the 'unsaid' or 'unacknowledged', and the attunement of archaeological practice to particulalry well-suited yet 'non-archaeological' subjects. First, as therapeutic process, an archaeology of contemporaneity was to uncover the veritable rubbish, the abject or unseemliness of social existence. Yet as so often with the '(material) unconscious', there lies more intention and information than is credited. Picked-up later by material culture studies at University College London, these early forays pronounced the now familiar dictum in anthropology: 'what you say you do and what you actually do may be quite contrary'; with the added enjoinder : '. . .and your materiality might be more truthful'. Rathje's 'material unconscious' was to confront a more guarded and routinized consciousness of modernity. Secondly, the methods of archaeology - eg. precision in temporal/spatial control of material and their inter-relationships to a larger social and environmental context - proved uniquely suited to contemporary Abandonment Studies. Progressing from and theoretically unifying these early formulations of 'garbology' and the archaeology of contemporaneity, Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas gave creedence to the field in their book on Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. Here, for instance, the two authors apply an archaeological methodology to a recently abandoned flat in a Council Flat Estate in Britain (~subsidized, low-income housing, or HUD projects in the States). Additionally, Michael Shanks has applied an 'archaeo-graphical', or a photo-blogged approach to an apartment in San Jose, CA. The current project (Bldg. 500) obviously shares in these two principles of an archaeology of contemporaneity, perhaps with the added dimension of reflexive attention to our own dwellings.

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