mobile hunters to sedentary town folk and city dwellers. But prehistory demonstrates that these cultural thresholds, once crossed, are not inevitably permanent.
. . .
In the last six decades, we Americans have doubled our rates of consumption and we are paying the price. Measured in constant 1982 dollars, the average American spent $6,600 on consumption in 1947; in 1990 that number had grown to $14,400.14 Which means that although the average American house size has increased (see chapter 5) and the average American family has decreased, we literally have tons and tons more stuff.
If you move from your comfortable three-bedroom, 2,000-squarefoot house, you will need to schlep about 16,000 pounds of stuff (this is after the garage sale and the trip to the dump).15
Our most mobile home-owning fellow Americans—people whose only homes are their recreational vehicles—calculate that their RV’s must be sufficiently sturdy to accommodate 1,500 pounds of stuff per person (and remember, this doesn’t count their already built-in beds, fridge, stoves, and other furnishings).16
Correlated with our consumptions is the growth in self-storage facilities, now a $20 billion business.17 Worldwide there are approximately 60,000 self-storage facilities; 52,000 of them are in the United States. In 1984 there were 6,601 storage facilities with a total volume of 289.7 million square feet. By late 2008 this had increased more that 800% to 2.35 billion square feet. The single largest self-storage facility in the United States is thought to be Alpine Storage, an enormous, sixteen-acre facility located in north Salt Lake City, with easy access from Interstate 15.
The burdens of the American dream are demonstrated by ongoing archaeological research into modern material culture. At the University of California, Los Angeles, the Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families includes a research group led by the archaeologist Jeanne Arnold. Arnold is an expert on the evolution of prehistoric Chumash chiefdoms on the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and on late prehistoric and contact period Sto:lo villages in the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia. In these regions, Arnold’s research frequently considered how ancient households were reshaped by changing patterns of politics and economy.
Since 2001, Arnold has applied archaeological methods to modern American households. Beginning with a sample of homes in Los Angeles, Arnold and her team carefully mapped houses with detailed locations of modern artifacts. Residents were video-interviewed about their ideas and uses of domestic spaces. The researchers systematically clocked how people used different parts of their homes and backyards, contrasting what informants said they did with what they actually did. Digital photos recorded interiors and exteriors, resulting in a 21,000-image archive of the use of domestic space in early twenty-first-century America.
Arnold and her colleagues have documented “archaeologically” the modern American “storage crisis.”18 The crisis has various causes—the increase in American consumerism, the explosion of goods—but also results from some unexpected factors illuminated by the modern archaeology of home.
Collecting data in the Los Angeles area before the recession-driven foreclosures of 2008–2012, Arnold and coauthor Ursula Lang noted that skyrocketing real estate prices had forced middle-class families into less-expensive housing, including older and smaller houses. Unlike homes in the Midwest and East, California houses rarely have basements for heaters, and attics are smaller because ridgelines are lower, since steep roofs are not necessary to shed snow.
So that leaves the garage.
As the garage was transformed from a carriage shed in the backyard or alley to an integrated sector of a house, the garage became, as the late landscape historian J.B. Jackson noted, “thoroughly domesticated, an integral part of home life and the routine of work and play.”19
And in that process, the garage’s function changed. No longer a place for protecting automobiles, especially in the mild weather of Southern California, the garage was transformed into home office, entertainment, and exercise areas, but preeminently a place for stuff.
Only 25% of the households in Arnold and Lang’s study actually parked a car in the garage, and nobody used the space exclusively for an auto.
Most families didn’t even try.
Some garages had been converted into bedrooms or recreation areas, but the majority of garages were exclusively for storage. “The garages of middle-class America,” Arnold and Lang write, “are suffering an identity crisis.”
The disorder of the middle-class American life is captured by the qualitative variable used to describe storage in 14 of the 24 houses in the study: “chaotic.”20
There is no doubt that American consumerism is excessive at a global scale. As the planet’s principal consumers of fossil fuels and everything else, one would expect no less. Even so, is ours the only society that has too much stuff?
Obviously, the spreading forces of globalization encourage the “global consumer culture.” Studies of global household wealth indicate the shameful inequalities: the wealthiest 10% of the world’s adults own approximately 85% of global wealth, while the poorest 50% scrape by with barely 1% of global wealth.21 So clearly, current consumption in the developed world—and particularly in the United States—is excessive by global standards.
But how does this translate into material possessions? The World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study provides national summaries for a number of developing countries, but a more visual if less systematic view of global consumption is found in the photography collection, Material Worlds: A Global Family Portrait.22
The project was designed by the photojournalist Peter Menzel, as “a unique tool for capturing cross-cultural realities.” In the early 1990s, Menzel and a team of photographers focused on thirty of the 183 countries that belonged to the United Nations. In each sample country, Menzel and colleagues chose families that reflected the national average according to location, type of dwelling, family size, annual income, occupation, and religion.
Menzel and fifteen other world-class photojournalists photographed these families at meals, at work, studying school lessons, and worshiping. But the key image was the Big Picture: “a unique photo of each family with all its possessions outside its dwelling.”23
Not surprisingly, the differences are striking.
The Thoroddsen family of Hafnarfjördur, Iceland, stand outside their three-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home in the violet twilight of a December afternoon. They are surrounded by two televisions, a pair of Icelandic horses, two cars in the driveway, a showroom’s worth of furnishings, a bevy of kitchen appliances, and two cellos. Still inside the Thoroddsen house are a baby grand piano, hundreds of books, miscellaneous housewares, and six canaries.
The Calabay Sicay family lives in San Antonio de Palopó, a village on the edge of Lake Atitlán in the highlands of Guatemala. They sit on the family bed outside their one room adobe house. A new corrugated metal roof, a glistening porcelain toilet perched above a latrine hole, and a portable two-speaker stereo all point to this family’s success. A large floor loom, a smaller loom, and a spinning wheel are tools the mother uses to weave bright scarlet cloth. The father’s farming implements—wide-bladed hoes, a single-bit axe, machetes, and a sickle—are in neat piles or hang from the wall. Just outside the separate, small, and smoke-blackened cookhouse are large clay pots, a stone metate, water jugs, and serving jars. A frying pan, a sieve, and a thermos dangle from nails in the adobe wall.
The poorest family photographed in Material
