From planet to planetarity: why I think archaeology needs a 'planetary turn'

This is a talk I presented at the AusTAG (Australian Theoretical Archaeology Group) conference in Adelaide, 22 May 2026, for the panel 'Planetarity and the technosphere: a ‘planetary turn’ for archaeology' with Professor Tracy Ireland and Dr Sean Williams. No AI was used to research or write this post.

Artist's impression of Sputnik 1 in Earth orbit. Image credit: unknown

I propose that archaeology takes a planetary turn. 

Many people have looked at Earth at the scale of the whole planet. In the 1920s, Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere became popular. In the 1970s, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed the Gaia hypothesis, where the entire Earth was a self-sustaining cybernetic mechanism. If the Gaia hypothesis tended to the utopian, then the Anthropocene, a concept introduced by Paul Crutzen in 2000, tended towards the dystopian. Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz has characterised the Anthropocene with the very archaeological concept of the technosphere, a system comprising all the objects manufactured by humans, calculated to weigh thirty trillion tons.  

So this planetary scale of thinking isn’t new. 

Armillary sphere. Image courtesy of Hoika Mikhail

Many disciplines, however, including archaeology, are still geocentric. Even though geocentrism was abandoned after Copernicus displaced Earth as the centre of the universe in 1543, we haven’t yet taken the Copernican leap. We look at Earth as the only case, instead of one planet among many. 

So what is different now? Why should we adopt a planetary turn or perhaps, even, an interplanetary turn? 

For one thing, since the first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet in 1992, we now have over five thousand to compare Earth with. This tells us something: for example, at the galactic scale, Earth counts as a low-grav planet (Gorman 2023). 

Image credit: ESA

In addition, our planetary boundaries are increasingly being breached. Earth is surrounded by a halo of satellites and space junk. A small human population has lived in Earth orbit for 25 years. Spacefaring nations are proposing to return to the Moon to stay, and to use the Moon as a base to travel to Mars. Colonisation, resource extraction and a frontier mentality are again being mobilised to justify an expansion of human industries. Elon Musk has even stated that humans should become a multiplanetary species. 

But I don’t think this turn should mean just adding space, while keeping Earth as the unit of analysis. I think it’s more complex than that. 

Image credit: Martin Vargic

The concept of planetarity was introduced by Gayatri Spivak in her 2003 book Death of a Discipline. She described it as ‘the intuition that the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system’. ‘Its alterity,’ she said, ‘is mysterious and discontinuous—an experience of the impossible’. Rather than the cultural homogenisation of globalisation, planetarity combines ‘alienated localism and global unification’ as anthropologist Adam Fish says. It speaks to Indigenous theories and practices of relationality, that are neither anthropocentric nor geocentric (Fish 2024). 

Not everyone lives on the same Earth and we have no single species-wide experience of it – not even animals, plants and other living organisms have that. There are many planets and many Earths, and hence, many Moons and many Mars. Planetarity is an anti-Musk weapon: the geological certainty that he requires to assert the conquest of Mars evaporates even as he tries to fix it in time and space. 

Image credit: NASA

Images of Earth from outside, such as we see in the famous Earthrise and Blue Marble photos from the Apollo missions, show Earth as a fragile entity of incredible beauty. Astronauts who experience the Overview Effect of looking down on Earth talk of how you can’t see national boundaries or conflicts. Humanity appears as a united species all sailing on Spaceship Earth together. It’s our only home that needs to be protected. 

Spivak takes this in a different direction. She talks of “planetarity as making our home unheimlich or uncanny”. This draws on the original Freudian definition of unheimlich, which doesn’t just mean scary or unsettling. It’s literal translation is ‘unhomely’. The unheimlich is scary because the familiarity of home becomes unfamiliar. Unfamiliarity marks another aspect of the uncanny – repetition or doubling, walking in circles because you fail to recognise the streets already passed (Freud 1919). You can’t return home because you can’t recognise it. 

Planet vs sphere. Image credit: Alice Gorman

But the real question is, how we do a planetary archaeology and an archaeology of planetarity. We’ve been leading towards this with the development of space archaeology, which takes in the entire solar system. A planetary turn in archaeology both centres and decentres the planet as a unit of analysis. 

In the image above, I've tried to capture some of the relationships between the different theoretical versions of Earth, with possibly less success that I hoped. 

The planet and the lithosphere, as studied by geologists, are roughly equivalent. 

The planetary takes in the Anthropocene, where planetary boundaries – literally spatial boundaries but also thresholds – are being exceeded, affecting the stability of the biosphere, all of the affordances of lithosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere, on which current life on Earth has come to depend.

The technosphere is in dialogue with all of the other 'spheres', but I am not sure if this simple graphic represents its relationship to planetarity. At this point the singular planet spins out of control into other dimensions. My attempt to make a sort of mathematical progression doesn't really work.

Of course, what I don't have represented here is Vernadsky's noösphere, a concept also developed by Teilhard de Chardin. You can see I have some thinking and work to do.

But I thought I’d share with you what my ‘planetary turn’ might look like. 

How essential is bipedality to being human?

Terrestrial archaeology takes the influence of gravity for granted. But once you move off-Earth, human bodies and human material culture have to adapt to different kinds of gravity: microgravity in orbit, 1/6 of Earth gravity on the Moon and 1/3 Earth gravity on Mars. I’ve been exploring artefacts which I call gravity invariant, which function as designed no matter the gravity environment they are used in (Gorman 2023). I’ve also been thinking about what stripping gravity out could show us about human culture. Perhaps what survives irrespective of the planet or gravity regime is what is truly human. 

Image credit: NASA

Finally, let's have a look at the latest whole Earth image from the Artemis II mission which flew around the Moon in April 2026. I think this image (which I've also written about here) demonstrates something about the planetarity of Earth. 

If you look at the poles, you can see the northern and southern auroras as a thin greenish tinge, and zodiacal light on the lower left side, where there is an arc illuminated by the Sun. 

Aurora are caused by cosmic rays – high energy particles from the our Sun, the Milky Way and other galaxies beyond – travelling through the atmosphere to create the striking visual phenomenon that so captivates people. 

Zodiacal light is the reflection of the Sun’s rays through interplanetary dust created by comets and collisions between asteroids. This dust may also now include – in negligible but present quantities – dusts created from the breakdown of satellite and spacecraft material.

'Hello World' shows Earth in relation to things beyond itself. It makes visible the warp and weft of the cosmos. But it also stands in relation to other images from space, each representing a different cultural understanding of Earth.

A planetary turn is not an option. It’s a necessity.

References

Fish, Adam 2024 Planetary media: Decolonizing the space industry through Indigenous ownership. EPD: Society and Space 42(5-6) 

Freud, Sigmund. 1919 The Uncanny. Imago V: 297-324.

Gorman, A., 2023 A Post-Geocentric Gravitography of Human Culture. In Juan Francisco Salazar and Alice Gorman (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space, pp. 480-492. London: Routledge.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 2003 Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press

The Moon in the 1870s

'MOON: Inspires melancholy. Is it perhaps inhabited?'

- Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas, 1870s

'This Plain Would Be Nothing But an Immense Ossuary' by Émile-Antoine Bayard, 1870, illustration for Jules Verne's From The Earth to the Moon.

From 'Influence of the Moon on Plants', Border Watch (Mount Gambier, South Australia) Saturday 9 April 1870, page 2. I am not responsible for the typo.

'The Moon shines forth with peculiar brilliancy'.
 James Glaisher, Camille Flammarion, W. de Fonvielle, and Gaston Tissandier, 1871 Travels in the Air (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott).

From 'Is Our Moon Inhabited?', Wagga Wagga Advertiser and Riverine Reporter (NSW), Saturday 16 September 1871, page 4

How did Pluto become the symbol of oppressed white men and US ownership of the solar system?

It's the 20th anniversary of Pluto's plummet from planet to 'dwarf' planet.

A composite of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left), taken by New Horizons on July 14, 2015. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

In 1930, the ninth planet was discovered by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh and spent nearly a century as part of our expanded solar system. If you're 100 years old in 2026, you were born into a solar system without Pluto, but it's likely that you don't remember it, as you would've been four when it was discovered.

In 2006, Pluto was kicked out of the ranks of the planets. The astronomer Mike Brown, who was largely responsible for this change of status, gleefully calls himself Plutokiller! Ever since, it's been a 'dwarf' planet.

In 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto and turned it from a few pixels into an incredible planetary surface. It was thrilling! I wrote about the experience in this post. But despite all the Pluto-love this mission to the outer darkness generated, it was still a 'dwarf' planet. 

In April 2026, as the success of the Artemis II mission to the Moon caught the imagination of the world, NASA chief Jared Isaacman re-opened old wounds by stating that he supported making Pluto a planet again.

The deeper background here is that Isaacman was responding to a question from US Senator Jerry Moran from Kansas, where Clyde Tombaugh grew up. However, I don't think this detracts from the interpretation I'm about to put forward.

I'll come clean and declare my interest here. I would love Pluto to be a planet again. I was sad when it lost its planetary status. It seemed unfair. I think many of us felt that Pluto was an underdog in the planetary world, not like the other planets with it's odd orbit and outsized moon, and we felt we were sticking up for it because no one else would.

The demotion was also hotly contested. I'm not going to revisit the arguments but I want to remark on the fact that people are very emotionally invested in Pluto. It represents a lot of things to different communities. I'm quite happy to admit my own investment. But I'd want Pluto's elevation to be for scientific, not political, reasons. I want Pluto to be a planet on its own merit.

So I'm not sure how I feel about it becoming a US conservative symbol - the planetary equivalent of a white man who's been discriminated against by the woke. How did that happen?

I was contemplating Isaac's statement in the light of the Trump government's war on what is called in America Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI. (Let's also be clear that this is US terminology that has been popularised because it has become so controversial). 

This has got to the point where there is a claim that white men are being discriminated against, and every woman, person of colour, person with disabilities, LGBQTI+ and other diverse people have been unfairly employed, promoted and preferred - because they have no merit and took the place of a white man. The right chooses not to understand that a person can be qualified for the job AND belong to one of those categories.

So instead of DEI measures attempting to create a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity based on merit, anti-DEI is returning the US to a world where discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality etc is actively encouraged. So you don't actually get the best person for the job!

This argument is beyond ridiculous. To the privileged, equality feels like oppression, as they say. If you disagree with me on this, there is plenty of information out there to help you understand how wrong you are.

So ..... how does overturning a 20-year-old decision by planetary scientists and the International Astronomical Union fit into this agenda?

By analogy, if the Trump administration is overturning anything where marginalised groups are given equality, then Pluto must have been unfairly demoted and must be restored to achieve the right moral order. Pluto's an honorary white man. Or dog. (What does this make the other planets? I dare not ask).

The International Astronomical Union, of course, is in charge of things like planet definition and planetary nomenclature. Isaacman has to go through the same channels as everyone else to change definitions. Could there be something else going on here?

I believe there is. The reinstatement of Pluto is an assertion of US space power.

The US has felt it owned the Moon since it 'won' the Space Race with the Apollo missions in the 1960s. Isaacman reiterated this sentiment when Artemis II went to the Moon.

But it's not just the Moon. When New Horizons visited Pluto in 2015, there was a very nationalist message. The quote below is from my blog post here.

Science journalist Elise Cutts has noted how the likes of William Shatner and Elon Musk, famously an opponent of DEI, have jumped on the 'Make Pluto Planetary Again' bandwagon.

Pluto was demoted by the woke left, so reinstating it is a symbol of the Trump administration's commitment to white colonialism - from the Moon to the ends of the solar system.

Addendum: an additional factor that @casmilus.bsky.social and @drmlharris.bsky.social highlighted: Clyde Tombaugh was, of course, American, so it was the only planet discovered by an American that got booted out of the club. This helps make sense of the MAGA/nationalist connection.

@valwrites.ca points out that 'dwarf' planet is a problematic term. They're right. It could be a minor planet instead.

See also:

The day Pluto came to breakfast: Venetia Burney and a life in mathematics

Dr Space Junk's Guide to Voting For Names of Surface Features on Pluto

The Pluto pom-pom parameter