Theorising Space Archaeology

Mar 27, 2010 Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment Anthropology, Archaeoastronomy, Astronomy, Contemporary Archaeology, Space Archaeology, Theory, UFO

The future archae­olo­gical site of Spa­ce­port Amer­ica. Photo (cc) Jared Tar­bell

There’s a thought-provoking post on Space Archae­ology about how you define the term Space Archae­ology. I’ve gen­er­ally just thought of it as the archae­ology of remains asso­ci­ated with space­flight, but I’ve never seen the need to give the defin­i­tion any ser­i­ous thought. It’s a small enough field as it is without draw­ing up bound­ar­ies. Steve Wilson (I assume, the blog is uncred­ited) has given it more thought, and he’s come up with a much more inter­est­ing way of look­ing at it. He sees Space Archae­ology as being made up from Aerospace Archae­ology (the bit I was think­ing about), Xenoar­chae­ology (the mater­ial remains of alien civil­isa­tions) and Exoar­chae­ology (any mater­ial remains that are offworld).

My first reac­tion was does this add any­thing? Adding in Xenoar­chae­ology is awk­ward as there are no known alien arte­facts. There’s crank mater­ial of ancient astro­nauts and vari­ous forms of SETI which are anthro­po­lo­gical con­cerns and not spe­cific­ally archae­olo­gical. Adding Exoar­chae­ology only adds fic­tional mater­ial. Things like the archae­ology of ter­ra­form­ing would fit in this cat­egory. As it stands it only adds an archae­ology of things that don’t exist. The dia­gram also excludes Space Her­it­age and Space Junk, which do exist. As a defin­i­tion, I’m don’t think it helps. How­ever as an ana­lyt­ical tool, I think it could be very clever.

I’ll start with Xenoar­chae­ology, because that’s the field that’s easi­est to dis­miss as barmy. What’s the evid­ence of palaeo­con­tact? There isn’t any really. But think­ing about how people do Xenoar­chae­ology, and what would be neces­sary to show the pres­ence of alien mater­ial on earth could be use­ful. Tools developed in this area can then be applied to ‘crash sites’ like Roswell in the dia­gram where Xenoar­chae­ology and Aerospace Archae­ology inter­sect. You won’t learn any­thing about alien civil­isa­tions by study­ing Roswell, but you could learn about how humans react to per­ceived alien vis­it­a­tion. Such research could have helped at Caran­cas. Like­wise a ser­i­ous study of how xenoar­chae­ology is prac­ticed could give genu­inely use­ful insights into the assump­tions in SETI programmes.

Sim­il­arly Exoar­chae­ology poses its own prob­lems when look­ing at inac­cess­ib­il­ity. Think­ing about these issues could high­light how the archae­ology of space­flight in orbital space makes demands and chal­lenges that we simply don’t have on the ground. Think­ing about it this way Space Her­it­age and Space Junk could straddle every zone between Exoar­chae­ology and Space Archae­ology. It depends on whether you class the human waste mat­ter on the Moon as part of Aerospace Archae­ology or not. I’d include Space Junk / Exog­ar­bology too, because a lot of ter­restrial archae­ology is the study of junk.

While Space Archae­olo­gists might not need bound­ar­ies, draw­ing up defin­i­tions can high­light what makes a field inter­est­ing and also throw some basic assump­tions that need ques­tion­ing. The one that both­ers me is the idea of Xenoarchaeology.

Oddly, it’s not the Xeno bit. I could be pedantic and say archae­ology is the study of the human past through mater­ial remains. Still, the stick­ing with human is a throw­back to the early nine­teenth cen­tury when Man (prefer­ably with a mous­tache and stovepipe hat) was a cre­ation apart from the anim­als. Early palaeo­lithic archae­ology, palae­on­to­logy and prim­ato­logy are sim­ilar enough that it’s look­ing more and more like an arbit­rary dis­tinc­tion about where human ends. It’s the archae­ology bit that troubles me. The study through mater­ial remains when, so far as is known, there are no known mater­ial remains of extra-terrestrial activ­ity near Earth. I think study­ing the human reac­tion to pro­posed alien inter­ven­tions is an inter­est­ing research prob­lem. We study ancient faiths, so why not study mod­ern faiths too? It’s just that archae­ology isn’t always the best way of doing it. Some­times a bet­ter approach is anthropology.

Think­ing about Space Anthro­po­logy could have two advant­ages. One is that it recog­nises the inter­est­ing work done by eth­no­graph­ers. Alice Gor­man has poin­ted out that indi­gen­ous peoples have a rough enough time as it is get­ting any recog­ni­tion in their sac­ri­fices for space explor­a­tion. Tak­ing American-style four-field anthro­po­logy as a model also points to some other inter­est­ing research top­ics. For example is there any­thing bio­anthro­po­logy could con­trib­ute, and how do bio­anthro­po­lo­gical con­cerns integ­rate with research that is already being done?

I real­ise that by now my response is a bit longer than the ori­ginal post, which was flag­ging up an idea and not inten­ded as a fully formed model of Space Archae­ology. Even so I think it’s an inter­est­ing way of think­ing about what archae­olo­gists of space explor­a­tion do. I’d love to see it developed further.