A New Methodology for Archaeological Investigation of Human Activity in Space: The International Space Station Archaeological Project

Summary

Our project is the first major archaeological study of a space habitat: the International Space Station. It is a locus of intercultural interaction at the level of both individuals and states, "a microsociety in a miniworld" (National Academy of Sciences 1972).

Remoteness and cost are obstacles to employing traditional archaeological techniques in Earth orbit, so we are developing new methodologies. Chief among these is the use of the millions of images generated by space agencies showing life onboard the station. We will classify the associations between objects, spaces, and crewmembers by cataloguing them from the images into a database, indexing them for time using the images’ metadata. The enormous number of images makes classification by human researchers time- and cost-prohibitive. We are exploiting recent advances in machine-learning algorithms and crowdsourcing for classification of non-machine-readable data to solve this problem.

Ultimately, we will be able to choose any moment and study the station’s development and occupation. We can then map changes in the function of spaces, or the associations of people and objects with particular spaces, over time. Such insights into how crew members adapt to the microgravity environment have never been available before, and have applications for future mission design.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20413