Archaeology has always been about the planet, but hasn’t always been planetary. A ‘planetary turn’ both centres and decentres the planet as a unit of analysis, giving archaeological geocentrism the opportunity to truly become Copernican.
Space archaeology is not just about studying the expansion of the human material record off-Earth. It’s also about contextualising terrestrial conditions as only one instance in a plurality of worlds, where moons, planets and exoplanets have their own unique environments.
Despite the rhetoric of ‘for all mankind [sic]’, the environmental and cultural impacts of space debris and interplanetary colonisation are not the responsibility of all humanity. The so-called ‘spacefaring nations’ often map onto former colonial powers, and many First Nations and others challenge a framing which erases them.
How do we do space archaeology in this context? I propose that Gayatri Spivak’s 2003 concept of planetarity offers a path forward. Planetarity foregrounds ‘the intuition that the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system’, speaking more to relationality than hierarchy.
The philosophy of the ‘Overview Effect’, ‘Spaceship Earth’ and ‘Pale Blue Dot’ emphasises a united humanity on a planet which is our only home. Planetarity fractures the conceit of a single humanity, acknowledging that not every being experiences the same planet.
We need to both zoom out to the solar system scale, and zoom in to the local scale, to see outer space as a structuring element in everyday life on Earth.
Note: this is my paper abstract for the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage conference at the Macao University of Tourism, China, 2026. Unfortunately I was not able to give the paper due to illness. I started developing these ideas in another paper for the AusTAG conference in May 2026 - you can read that abstract here.