Archaeological and anthropological studies of disposal have focused widely on disposal in terms of the object being removed as defining notions of waste, excess, dirt, discard, pollution, refuse, ruin or ‘matter out of place’, as famously phrased by Mary Douglas. However, it may be suggested that it is not necessarily so much the classification of particular forms of anomalous matter that define waste, but maybe instead the practices circumscribing acts of abandoning or removing stuff. As such, disposal is a technology for allowing objects (whether human or non-human) to pass from one state of being to another, centred on qualities of transformation, transition and transience. This session invites papers addressing technologies of disposal by exploring the interstice between ‘ordinary object’ and ‘discard’, or the borderline processes that occur before an object is turned into waste. And just as importantly, we are interested in papers discussing places of disposal as cultural sites: what kinds of capital and contingency are nested in repositories for suspended or discarded matter?