Archaeology in a Vacuum: Obstacles to and Solutions for Developing a Real Space Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The practice of archaeology in outer space seems as far "outside the box" as it is possible for the discipline to go. There are major challenges to carrying out field research in off-Earth contexts – among them, remoteness, hostile conditions, cost, and the demonstrable bias of space agencies against the social sciences. Developments in the field have therefore come in fits and starts. The year 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the twentieth anniversary of the first space archaeology endeavor, Beth O’Leary’s Lunar Legacy Project. Her team identified and described the 106 objects left behind at Tranquility Base by the crew of Apollo 11. The initiation of the International Space Station Archaeological Project by the authors in late 2015 marked another step towards implementing archaeological approaches to studying human life in space. We have developed a series of strategies to surmount the obstacles presented by doing space archaeology. These include photoethnography, training a future crew member to carry out a survey by proxy, interviews of past crew members, and study of artifacts returned to Earth from the International Space Station. This paper will describe our strategies and results to date.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23314