archaeology

...in SPACE!

Shawn Graham

shawn.graham@carleton.ca

follow along at

https://shawngraham.github.io/talks/space

space archaeologist

Space Archaeologist

Dr. Alice Gorman, Flinders U.

Space Archaeologist

Dr. Justin Walsh, Chapman U.

more space archaeologists - bibliography

(member of the Continuum)

Q

not space archaeologists

(I mean, really. How'd they even get into space?)

PAKLEDS

...I'm more what you might call 'space-archaeology adjacent'

Me

The Plan

Space Archaeology, eh?

The Gravity of the Situation

ISSAP & The First Off-World Archaeological Experiment

Recording Space Archaeology

To Infinity... and Beyond!

material culture floating around up there
material culture lying around down here enabling us to get up there
not remote sensing
the investigation of human duration as it relates to the cosmos

Space Archaeology is -

PEENEMÜNDE

1936
V2 Rocket Development Site
during the war, used slave labour
now a site of space tourism

Colonialism

Gorman, A.C. 2005 The cultural landscape of interplanetary space. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85-107

see also Gorman's list of space archaeology bibliography

Minor Sites

& Other Nations in Space

Hey, Canada!

Mercury

MESSENGER (2015)

Venus

Venera 7 (1970)

Earth

Asteroid Belt

Mars

Viking (1976)

Gas Giants

And

Beyond!

not to scale in any way shape or form!

A non-exhaustive list of humans mucking up the interplanetary neighborhood since 1957

space junk / orbital sites

...human race is put into relation with all
bodies through gravitation..."

Otis Tufton Mason 1894

When we consider actual human objects in outer space, grappling with space–time is unavoidable, particularly as orbit entails distances and speeds vastly greater than those possible on the surface of the Earth.

Gorman, 2009 The Gravity of Archaeology

https://issarchaeology.org/

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qtcxe/

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/11/11/611

Machine Learning & Computer Vision

Text

Justin Walsh at the ESA talking about this experiment

FAIL

fail unpacked

Every system I tried to build foundered because it imagined cartesian x, y space.

The edges of the photo aren't the boundaries of a trench. They're a pomerium, a projection within which to understand relationships

Things

'gathering' - agencement - a coming together - an assemblage

gravity: the weak archaeological force

velcro: the strong archaeological force

modified/

refactored VGG-VIA

export to graph database

(rather than 'relational')

Text

The photo is still, capturing a moment in time, but in this configuration we can read a series of decisions and actions taken by the crew before the photo, from which we can predict possible future actions too.