Dr. Rathje (also known affectionately as "Captain Planet") and his students studied the contents of Tucson residents' waste to examine patterns of consumption.
The results have shown that information people freely volunteered about their consumption habits did not always tally with the contents of their waste bins.
Such findings cast doubt on the reliability of historical record when applied to archaeological sites in general and follow a processualist approach stressing the benefits of scientific analysis.
Rathje's landfill project proved this idea to be incorrect: when resources are scarce, people tend to buy larger quantities of -for example- beef-meat, when they are on sale, only to end up throwing it out again as they have bought too much to consume before the expiration dates.
Rathje showed, however, that paper is typically a bad degrader: newspapers dumped in landfills as much as over half a century ago, turn up again as fresh and as readable as the day they were issued.