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Dr. Space Junk vs the Universe: Archaeology and the Future

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.8.1.0094

2166-3556

Mitchell Allen,

Archaeological Research and Protection

The imposing marketing arm of National Geographic has loudly crowned our own Sarah Parcak as The Space Archaeologist. Their adulation of Sarah's work is not misplaced. Her use of enhanced satellite photos to uncover sites, settlement patterns, landscapes, and underground features has made significant contributions to Near Eastern archaeology. But the label Space Archaeologist might be incorrect. After all, Parcak is using more advanced versions of the same tools that nineteenth-century archaeologists seeking a broader view of a site did. Balloon photography morphed into aerial photography into satellite photography into LIDAR photography, and we expanded our ability to use aerial tools for archaeological understanding.Terrestrial archaeology from space is not really the same as space archaeology, a new subfield of contemporary archaeology that seeks to understand the history and importance of the space industry since the first Sputnik was launched in 1958. Alice Gorman, a Senior Lecturer at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, is a pioneer of this movement and author of the first book on the subject. Eschewing the label of space archaeologist, she's instead taken the moniker Dr. Space Junk for her studies of the various abandoned satellites, space debris, and even human waste floating above our atmosphere.Dr. Space Junk vs the Universe is every bit as quirky and inviting as the title suggests. A series of interlinked essays, it provides the logic, practices, and theory behind the field of space archaeology, with numerous examples of how archaeologists have been able to enhance our knowledge of the history of the space age through their work. It is quirky not only because of the topic, but because of Gorman's multidisciplinary and popular-culture approach to it—she cites everyone from James Deetz and Carl Sagan to I Dream of Jeannie and Douglas Adams as sources. It is also an important work not only for those engaged in contemporary archaeology, but for all archaeologists.With tens of thousands of years of prehistory and ancient history to uncover, Near Eastern archaeologists have been slow to incorporate contemporary archaeology—the archaeological study of the modern world—and space archaeology in particular, into their analytic frames. In other parts of the world, this area of study is accepted as an important part of the archaeological record and worthy of concentrated study. Gorman's book shows convincingly how archaeologists' toolkits can significantly contribute to the understanding of today's world in the same effective manner as they help us elucidate Assyrians, Amorites, and Arameans.Gorman describes her own journey from a rural girl in New South Wales, who didn't become an astrophysicist because girls weren't encouraged to do science, to becoming a consulting archaeologist surveying Aboriginal sites around Australia (Ch. 1). The star-studded nights in rural Queensland brought her back to her initial love of space and the decision to become a space archaeologist. A chapter covers the history of the space era through artifacts representing 80 years of its development: the German V2 rocket, Sputnik-shaped cocktail appetizers of the 1950s (and a recipe for Sputnik cocktails), and Elon Musk's red Tesla roadster shot into the void in 2018, among others (Ch. 2). She points to the wide range of space-related opportunities for the archaeologist from surveying satellite-tracking stations to studying rocket-themed children's playgrounds in Australia (Ch. 3). Chapter 4 covers space junk, Gorman's totem, both in terms of their heritage value and in terms of the dangers they represent to future space exploration. Other chapters speak of space activity, space detritus, and metaphorical meanings of the moon (Ch. 5), distant space goals beyond our immediate targets of the moon, Mars, and Venus (Ch. 6), and the legal and heritage issues of our neighboring orbiting bodies and of space itself (Ch. 7).Possibly the most important element of Gorman's work is her anticipatory stance toward heritage management. This should draw the attention of archaeologists who might otherwise stand by as bulldozers destroy sites from our era that readers of history in future generations will want to know more about. Apollo 11's remains—from jettisoned gear to space boot footprints—have been sitting untouched for the half century since we watched Neil Armstrong descend from the landing module. But what will happen when Musk's SpaceX rocket, filled with a dozen billionaires paying handsomely to be the first tourists on the moon, lands at the Apollo 11 site in the not-too-distant future? From our knowledge of how other heritage sites are treated, we can expect them to bring home souvenir bits of astronaut flotsam discarded in 1969, tromp all over the few precious footprints, and shoot selfies with the American flag left there. Gorman notes that the flag has fallen down, presumably from lunar winds, but is otherwise still in situ.This issue will become even more crucial as human activity in space increases. When mining companies begin extracting precious elements from the moon, who will consider the effects of the space dust raised on important moon heritage sites or on the lunar scars left by strip mining seen by a preteen looking at it with her first telescope? Without binding international legislation in place, how do we ensure that spatial bodies don't become future sites of territorial conflict as various nations set up space colonies? The process for finding solutions to these issues should allow us to create similar global legislation for issues protecting Earth's cultural heritage.The same holds true of the thousands of space vehicles and many more fragments of other vehicles floating in the upper atmosphere, many of which are over 60 years old and are the material evidence of the history of the space movement, one which Gorman has shown does not document its activities as thoroughly as one might have expected. Future historians and history buffs will want to know the histories of these objects. But that requires a global heritage management strategy to catch, preserve, and/or document them (as well as locating them well enough that some future space mission doesn't disastrously crash into one of the 23,000 objects in orbit).A good example of the creative use of archaeological methods to enhance our understanding of the world of space exploration is Gorman's study of cable ties. These are the little plastic pieces that were (and still are) used to gather and order a snake's den worth of electrical cables that run all space equipment and observatory sites, ubiquitous at most space-era sites. First produced in 1959, they date almost to the beginning of the space age. Not surprisingly, they were often discarded if broken or after the equipment was moved, upgraded, or dismantled. These are the plain-ware potsherds of the twenty-first century. Gorman creatively examines stylistic differences, distribution patterns, use patterns, and evidence of destruction and decay to help document different kinds of cables, their placement, function, and removal procedures. She examined the ties used on current equipment, studied photographs of these ties on disused devices, and talked with facility construction people to assemble a list of clues identifying these processes: ethnoarchaeology in action. There can be no better case of the utility of archaeological methods in understanding the contemporary world.At one point, Gorman takes the role of an alien archaeologist trying to analyze earth's most distant artifacts, the Golden Records carried by Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977 and now outside our solar system. The Golden Records contained images, text, and music of our world for the edification of some distant society that might find them floating around the universe sometime in the future. If you were from the planet ZXYXX, how would you date these objects, a snapshot of human society in time—after all the vinyl records on which these are based are now largely technological artifacts—to get an idea of how long they had been in space? Use Uranium 238, Gorman advises. Painted over the records to protect them and with a half-life in the billions of years, the regular disintegration of uranium isotopes can be used as an archaeological dating tool. And how would the ZXYXXians find where the space ship came from? Layers of “sticky” space dust vary in different parts of the universe, and its accretion over the light years of travel will provide a stratigraphic story of its travels, possibly including its origins on Earth when some future alien archaeologist scrapes off enough dust and reaches the lowest layer.I write this review as missiles fly out of Gaza into southern Israel and after other missiles from an Israeli warplane killed an Islamic Jihad leader in his apartment. From the standpoint of archaeologists, all of those missiles will leave their material traces that any archaeologist working in the region will come across. Many archaeologists working in this region have already encountered detritus of the space age from wars of the past half century. Casings of fired missiles, fragments of launched ones, destroyed buildings from contested sites are all material objects whose stories ask to be told. In future years, space launch and tracking stations already located throughout the Middle East will also become part of the archaeological record. Only archaeologists have the tools of material-cultural analysis to properly study these locations and objects, an important corpus of material from the contemporary world to add to our research agendas. Gorman's book shows us the way to do this.