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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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