This article contributes to the ‘archival turn’ in the worlds of academia and the arts, by exploring the great, latent creative potential of the material and immaterial archives produced by doing a PhD thesis in history. While much of the material archive is already productive — it contains the documentary evidence that proves whatever the researcher is arguing — even more of it is often seen as unproductive, a (waste) paper trail leading to various dead-ends. What can a researcher do with this archive once their doctorate is over? Beyond the challenges of recycling or storing all the material objects, this article looks at what historians and other researchers might do with all the offcuts, outtakes, scraps, remnants and other waste products generated by a PhD or any other large research project. It argues that material on the margins of our scholarly work, the bits we discard (or hide in footnotes) might actually be the best starting point for historical writing that is imaginative, risky and fun.This a...