Introduction

Providing an introduction to the planning process for the Waste Isolation Pilot Project and the marker design that continues to be the basis of nuclear waste repository proposals in the United States, including for Yucca Mountain, this chapter lays the groundwork for consideration of the contradictions between opinions produced through expert consultation and the expertise of archaeologists. US government efforts described enlisted a variety of “experts” to propose alternative futures, identify models for communication over long spans of time, and assess the likely durability of proposed designs for a marker over nuclear waste repositories. To understand these expert reports, this chapter introduces the concept of an anthropology of common sense as a way to understand how government experts understood the archaeological sites that they offered as models.

Interlude 4

IN 2009, AN AUSTRALIAN art historian meditated on the prospect of contemporary Aboriginal art being used to mark a nuclear waste repository that might be built in that country. He began his essay with a summary of the plan for marking nuclear waste in the US:...

Conclusion

The concluding chapter explores the visions of the future that experts involved in advising the US Department of Energy developed, as formal parts of their planning documents. These narratives are almost the only place in the planning process where the specific local populations are mentioned. Turning to the question of the people who live in these areas, this chapter explores Native American responses to nuclear waste disposal planning. It contrasts the vision of the US West as an empty space appropriate for waste with indigenous ontologies in which space is full of animate force. The chapter explores the way fiction, narrative, and performances have been cited as possibly better ways to ward off intrusion in dangerous waste sites than any passive system of markers.

Interlude 5

LAND ART MAKERS AND Australian aboriginal painters were not the only artists whose work became entangled with proposals to mark nuclear waste disposal sites. In 2002, the director of the Desert Space Foundation in Nevada, Joshua Abbey, carried out an art competition for designs for a possible marker system for the Yucca Mountain site....

Interlude 1

Stone from the outer rim of an enormous square is dynamited and then cast into large concrete/stone blocks, dyed black, and each about 25 feet on a side. They are deliberately irregular and distorted cubes. The cubic blocks are set in a grid, defining a square, with 5-foot-wide “streets” running both ways. You can get “in” it, but the streets lead nowhere, and they are too narrow to live in, farm in, or even meet in. It is a massive effort to deny use. At certain seasons it is very, very hot inside because of the black masonry’s absorption of the desert’s high sun-heat load. It is an ordered place, but crude in form, forbidding, and uncomfortable....

Rosetta Stones and Cuneiform Tablets

This chapter examines the role in the marker design of buried objects intended to be inscribed with messages. Modeled on works like the Rosetta Stone, the stele of Hammurabi, and cuneiform tablets, this part of the design turned the marker system into an artificial archaeological site. Debates are explored about how meanings are effectively communicated, with an emphasis on parallel languages as securing transmission of meaning countered by historical evidence of English literary texts that rapidly became difficult to read. The chapter explores how Rosetta Stone came to be treated as a metaphor for a key to decipherment that would have been familiar to the expert consultants. Archaeological context demonstrates that the models used never actually were aimed to communicate into long-term futures. An interlude after the chapter explores the experts’ understanding of how Land Art worked, and how the artists creating such works understood them.

Stonehenge in Nevada

This chapter explores the understanding of Stonehenge, the support for major features of the proposed design for markers for nuclear waste repositories. The proposed design would have two concentric lines of stone monoliths justified explicitly by a claim that Stonehenge’s contemporary remains survived as indications of its original plan and intention. Drawing on archaeological research, the chapter shows that this image of Stonehenge as composed at one moment is untrue to its complex history of transformations. The chapter follows one part of the design proposal—the suggestion that the monoliths be made of granite, not the original material of Stonehenge—to demonstrate that the experts were drawing on a history of understanding of monuments and commemoration that developed in the United States in the early 19th century. It ends with an interlude introducing the alternate design proposal, based on a theory of archetypes that would arouse universal emotional responses.

Indelible Messages from Newgrange to Kakadu Park

This chapter examines the diverse features cited to justify the idea that inscriptions on the surfaces of the monoliths could convey meanings into the future. Experts and government agencies changed their cited models multiple times, finally arriving at the Athenian Acropolis and Australian aboriginal rock art as unlikely paired models, after considering the tomb at Newgrange and Spanish Levantine rock art. All the archaeological sites mentioned were either named or nominated as UNESCO World Heritage sites, suggesting a shared common sense about archaeological sites. In addressing these varied analogues of the marker, the experts employed specific theories of communication based on presumed universals in the use of pictographs and narratives, understood today to be questionable. The chapter ends with an interlude considering Australian response to plans to place nuclear waste repositories in aboriginal land, and how aboriginal art can be understood in relation to such planning.

Interlude 3

THE GOAL THAT THE markers experts imagined for the nuclear waste repository marker was for it to be imposing, impressive, yet unattractive. They wanted to produce a physical installation that could convey these meanings through its form. In Team A’s designs, this involved using “menacing” features like sharp pointed elements, made of materials like stone or metal, disrupting any kind of orderly layout. Where Forbidding Blocks worked as an installation of a kind of “city” that would be physically uncomfortable to live in, and Menacing Earthworks would crowd and overwhelm the visitor, a third design concept, Spikes Bursting through Grid, was more directly threatening (...

Enduring Meaning

This chapter provides a deeper discussion of the theories of meaning and communication that were employed by the experts involved in developing plans for nuclear waste repository marker systems. These linguistic, semiotic, and psychological models were more important to planners than archaeological models for the material form. These models emphasized the intentions of people creating messages with the intention of having them be understood by receivers. The models used are contrasted with the kind of semiotic approaches, especially those rooted in the work of pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, that contemporary archaeologists employ, in which rather than having preformed meanings conveyed by a vehicle, meanings are constantly emerging in practice.