I propose that a ‘planetary turn’ in archaeology is imminent and timely. At the same time as space archaeology was emerging as a discipline in the early 2000s, the influential theorist Gayatri Spivak put forward the concept of planetarity as a counter to globalisation, describing it as ‘the intuition that the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system’ (2003). Anthropocene and SETI scholars have since reconfigured the planetary system as a technosphere which erodes the boundaries between nature and culture. On Earth, the technosphere is three trillion tons of human-manufactured material which acts as a dynamic ecosystem at the planetary scale.
A planetary turn both centres and decentres the planet as a unit of analysis. It rejects the philosophy of the ‘Overview Effect’, ‘Spaceship Earth’ and the ‘Pale Blue Dot’, which emphasise a united humanity on a planet which is our only home, to highlight instead the uncanniness of the familiar made unfamiliar. It invites archaeological geocentrism to become Copernican, to see terrestrial conditions as only one instance in a plurality of worlds.
Note: this is my panel abstract for the AusTAG conference, Adelaide University, May 22-23, 2026. Panelists are Associate Professor Alice Gorman, Professor Tracy Ireland and Dr Sean Williams.