Barometers, dip compasses, pressed flowers, dead birds: Alexander von Humboldt and multidisciplinarity

The name Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) first crossed my eyes as a pre-teen, when, after pestering my mother for something good to read, she gave me The Kon Tiki Expedition. I was instantly hooked and read it over and over again as a teenager. Thor Heyerdahl's daring 1947 expedition to South America on a balsa wood raft relied on the Humboldt Current to carry them part of the way. Thus I learned of the existence of this legendary scientist and humanist.

There seems to be a lot of Humboldt around at the moment, and I'm currently reading a round table critique of a 2009 book about him, The Passage to Cosmos, by Laura Dassow Walls.  

Humboldt had what seems to be a rather modern view of the planet Earth, which prefigured the vision of the International Geophysical Year. He saw grand global processes and the connectedness which created a unitary Earth; this was reflected in his final (unfinished) five volume work entitled simply Cosmos.

He was so famous in his time that the state of US state of Nevada was almost named after him! This is how round table contributor Felipe Fernández-Armesto describes him:

He had started his scientific career like an encyclopaedist of the Middle Ages, gathering the learning of the world. He became the last magus of the Renaissance, attempting the blasphemy of comprehending the cosmos.

Michael F. Robinson notes his collecting obsessions: Barometers, dip compasses, pressed flowers, dead birds: they fill the Baron’s world. This is the kind of list which appeals to my archaeologist's heart through the contrast of artefacts hard, soft, dead, half-alive and never alive: equal weight given to the cold scientific instrument and the petals of an ephemeral flower.

Part of what resonates in this round table is the discussion of how Humboldt defied divisions between science and humanities, which were not as hard and fast then as they are now. I have been pondering this lately because, as a space archaeologist, I make it my business to read the relevant literature in the space science and engineering journals. I need to in order to pursue my research; it's as simple as that.

I notice, however, that this is often a one-way flow. Numerous of my colleagues in the space world will happily write and publish on themes of history, social sciences and environmental sciences without referring to the research carried out by scholars in those fields. Hence a lot of it reads as rather naive with undergraduate assumptions about human behaviour and the nature of scientific enquiry. They get away with it because their peer reviewers are equally unaware of scholarship outside their own fields. So it's nice to contemplate a great thinker who would have had none of these silos - even if he inadvertently helped create them.

Walls argues that Humboldt invented 

a way of speaking, about nature that we now call ‘environmental’: namely, a planetary interactive causal network operating across multiple scale levels, temporal and spatial, individual to social to natural, scientific to aesthetic to spiritual (2009:11).

Human impacts - clearing vegetation, altering water flows through irrigation - were also part of Humboldt's conceptualisation of the world: very Anthropocene, we would now say. 

The message of Walls' book is that the divisions between science and the humanities no longer serve the world well. As someone trying to bridge these divisions myself, I cannot but agree.

Reference

H-Environment Roundtable Reviews Volume 2 No. 4 (2012) www.h-net.org/~environ/roundtables Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 

A map of all the space junk that has re-entered over Australia

Today someone wrote to me to ask for help in identifying a piece of space junk which had been found in Queensland some years ago. Dr Space Junk is always happy to help, so I sent off a brief explanation.

This made me think, though, of how interesting it would be to map the location of all known re-entry events. There'd be a whole bunch of Skylab in Western Australia, some material from the Europa launches from Woomera in the 1960s in the Northern Territory and Queensland, and many pressure vessels used in rocket fuel systems - globally, these are the most common component to survive re-entry as they're usually made from titanium, stainless steel and/or carbon-carbon. Because of Australia's location, many rocket bodies fall back to Earth over our landmass. We're well situated for observing and tracking the LEOP (Launch and Early Orbit) phase of launch so it makes sense that the second and third stages are likely to re-enter in our vicinity.

You could compare the distribution of this junk with the meteorite entries being mapped by the Western Australian Fireballs in the Sky project, which asks citizen observers to send in data whenever they see some flaming object heading towards Earth. And of course there's also the tektite strewn fields.

I might just expand it to include anything that falls from the sky, as it's likely there's stuff that my Friday-arvo brain has forgotten about at the moment. The more I think about it, the more I think this could be an extremely interesting map to create and I wonder why I've not thought of it before. Such a deliciously simple idea that could lead to - well I don't really know just yet, but it's sure to be something!

'This last wild place': Michael Dransfield on heritage, race, technology and landscape

Some years ago I was on a Michael Dransfield mission, having heard a poem of his that I was sure referred to Woomera. I found it eventually after trawling through many volumes of his work. Here it is, from his Collected Poems, published in 1987.

Dransfield dug deep into ideas around heritage, race, technology and landscape. Readers may be struck by his use of a term, once common enough, that is fortunately no longer acceptable in referring to Aboriginal people in Australia. There would be nothing in this poem that is left to chance, and I presume to read this as a comment on the deep legacy of colonialist racism, as well as the impacts of alienation from country. The Army weapons range referred to must, of course, be Woomera. 

Little has changed, you might think, in the thirty years or so since this was published.

Outback

When your skin is worn away
by wind, by time, like the MacDonnell Ranges,
what will emerge
what will be left to face the sun?
Worthless quartz stripped back
may reveal an opal. But you are an island,
your shores are fences built by foreign cash,
you are ripped into beef roads and investments;
the abos move to the cites, their homesickness
cauterised by cheap wine and promises of jobs.
Speculators will ruin this last wild place,
few will protest, for profit eases consciences.
In thirty years
there will be nothing to distinguish this
from mined and gutted countries anywhere.
Our leaders will betray us, sell our heritage,
what remains is not worth stealing,
and so becomes an Army weapons range.



As always, I could write a lot about these images from a historical and landscape perspective, but I will leave their interpretation to you, dear reader. 

Albert Namatjira, Mount Sonder, MacDonnell Ranges c.1957-59
Watercolour and pencil on paper. National Gallery of Australia

The archaeology of not-quite-there: Pluto and the human gaze

why did you glance back?

why did you hesitate for that moment?

why did you bend your face

caught with the flame of the upper earth

above my face?

HD, Eurydice

In 2006, a spacecraft the size of an industrial fridge was launched on a remarkable mission: to zoom past the ninth planet in our solar system and show us its face for the first time. The New Horizons mission to Pluto caught the imagination of the world for a couple of epic weeks in July 2015. But as the spacecraft continues its journey beyond the formerly elusive and controversial planet and on to the Kuiper Belt, I’ve been thinking about what this means from an archaeological perspective.

This mission has turned Pluto from a fuzzy disc of reflected light into a place that we can see and read with our own signs and meanings. Already, there’s such a wide range of interpretations. Some are geological – craters, valleys, mountains. Others are geometric: rectangles, lines, circles, shapes, smoothness, spikiness. Then we have the zoomorphs: a whale’s tail, the head of a cartoon dog. Perhaps the most charming is that which sees the large icefields, now unofficially called Tombaugh Regio, as a heart.

Image from http://www.universetoday.com/121436/youthful-frozen-plains-cover-plutos-big-heart-spectacular-new-images-from-new-horizons/

We could also look at Pluto from a heritage/landscape perspective. Using the World Heritage Convention’s definitions of cultural landscapes, you could argue that that it is an associative landscape – with no actual physical human traces, it is still the repository of beliefs, dreams, visions and ideas. Some of these relate to its location so far from the light of the Sun. It’s said that midday on Pluto is as bright as Earth after sunset. It is a cold, dim planet, like a deep sea fish that lives and swims in darkness all its life. Since it was given the name of the ancient Roman god of the underworld, the International Astronomical Union has decreed that all place names on it will relate to this theme (which includes exploration). So already we have a set of metaphors and associations that shape the planet in our minds.

what was it that crossed my face

with the light from yours
and your glance?
what was it you saw in my face?
the light of your own face,
the fire of your own presence

HD, Eurydice

Our gaze creates Pluto as a place. I’ve written before about how the process of identifying distinct features and naming them creates a map of values. Assigning names to features on Pluto is a colonial process of mastery that draws the dwarf planet into a web of geopolitics. Despite the efforts of the International Astronomical Union to diversify the cultures represented in named things across the solar system, there is still a long way to go.

When telemetry showed that New Horizons had successfully completed its flyby, many in the mission control room waved American flags. Nationalism and national prestige are still among the main drivers of today’s space industry, despite the growth of private and crowd-funded space enterprises. As I watched the flag-waving, I thought that, for some people at least, the passage of a piece of space hardware has been the equivalent of planting a flag – as it was on the Moon – to stamp the outer solar system  as part of an American colonial landscape. And indeed, one of the ‘cultural artefacts’ on board the spacecraft was also a US flag, in stark contrast to the universal symbols on the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft.

Against this is the discourse of space exploration as a global human endeavour which everyone shares, the undeniable excitement generated in social and traditional media across nations and age groups, and NASA’s always brilliant open access, with all materials available to anyone with an internet connection. Possibly more people than ever before have waited with bated breath for the unique experience of gazing on the face of another planet for the first time, like a distant relative they’d longed to meet.

what had my face to offer

but reflex of the earth,
hyacinth colour
caught from the raw fissure in the rock
where the light struck

HD, Eurydice

Pluto is a ‘natural’ object that existed for billennia (is that a word?) before there were sentient beings to observe it. But since its existence was first hypothesised in the 19^th century, it has become a cultural artefact too. Like an archaeological excavation, the cameras of New Horizons excavated it from obscurity in the darkness of the night sky and brought it into the light. Space scientists and the public speculated about this strange new artefact: what was it made of? How had its surface markings been created? Its composition, history and appearance were compared to other planets and moons to gauge its character and hence the genesis of the landscapes captured by the LORRI camera. Deep time was being decoded from a surface of mountains, ice plains and craters: four dimensions being raised up from two.

The images, received as radio signals, converted and processed into pictures that we can view and understand, are a type of heritage or archaeological object in themselves. In one sense they are ephemeral, composed of numbers inside computers. In another sense, their endless duplication and proliferation gives them a digital resilience. Pluto, in our homes and at work, is a place we see and visit through a flat screen, almost as if we are inside our own spacecraft.

When we turn off the device, does Pluto still exist?

Pluto map by Snowfall-the-Cat
http://snowfall-the-cat.deviantart.com/art/Pluto-Map-Sept-10-2015-546286799

If you had let me wait

I had grown from listlessness
into peace
if you had let me rest with the dead
I had forgot you and the past

HD, Eurydice

New Horizons only came within 12 000 km of the planet’s surface. No human trace has been left there as a footprint of the Anthropocene. For a fleeting moment, New Horizons was part of the Pluto-Charon system. Perhaps a few molecules of material are left behind in a tenuous wake within the orbit. Now that the spacecraft has passed, there is nothing to indicate that it was ever there, save for the images, words and memories of people closer to the Sun.

I’m thinking about this ‘nearly there-ness’ of human interaction. Many planets in the solar system have only ever been ‘flown past’:  Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and until the Messenger spacecraft crashed into the surface in April 2015, Mercury too. Similarly, there are places on Earth, like the deep sea, that we know only from remote sensing, probes, and flyovers. There are also places we could visit, but haven’t yet, like World Heritage sites. We feel it’s important that they exist, even if we haven’t had any personal encounter with them, and many people feel strongly about protecting such places.

This is what characterises space archaeology too, at least at the present time. It’s all an archaeology of ‘not-quite-there’, where we use historical and proxy data in order to make hypotheses about what lies beyond our reach in space.

Can there be an archaeology of the ‘not-quite-there’? How do you analyse something you can’t touch? It doesn’t bother planetary scientists: few of them will ever have anything other than data acquired from remote sensing. But as Matt Edgeworth has pointed out, archaeology is made of human dimensions. We dig using our bodies: the artefacts we scrutinise are made to fit in our hands, accommodate similar-sized human and animal bodies. This is partially why the pyramids, and other such wonders of the ancient world, seem so extraordinary and even, to some, alien. Their scale seems to defy the human capacity. In the modern industrial world, there are many such structures: bridges, buildings, mines, rockets, giant offshore gas rigs. Of these objects, Edgeworth (2010:140) notes that 'The sheer scale...is such that it is impossible to fully grasp either in a visual or tactile sense - to see all of it at once or to touch more than a tiny part of it'.

John Schofield, an archaeologist, and David Jenkins, a physicist, have written about the vast differences in scale between sub-atomic particles and the deep galaxy maps that almost show the beginnings of time, all coalesced around the CERN research facility on the border of France and Switzerland. This massive complex of buildings and installations, where the highest of high science takes place (such as the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson in 2012) also contains dilapidated chairs and shabby rooms, forgotten corners where an archaeologist finds the empty space redolent of human presence.

Image courtesy of NASA

In a recent conference paper, I mused about the solar-system-scale Matrioshka Brain and how humans might interact with it as ‘natural-born cyborgs’. Something incomprehensibly large and complex, whether ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’, can still be held in our minds when it is what is called transparent technology: we use it intuitively, without thinking, as an extension of ourselves. This is pretty much what smart phones and other devices are for us now. We're not aware of the vast network of infrastructure that supports them, from satellites to the tiny chips inside - we use them as an augmentation of our bodies.

you who have your own light
who are to yourself a presence
who need no presence

HD, Eurydice

So what are we to make of this? At the end of this disquisition, I'm left with the feeling that we're becoming very good at bridging these differences of scale. Spacecraft like New Horizons give us dimensions of both time and space to get our heads around. They present the act of focusing, through the feeble jellies of our eyes, as a temporal act. We draw closer and closer to the planet's surface, like the process of focussing a microscope objective, and when the object precipitates into our field of view, we assess, name, categorise, analyse - and dream. Pluto becomes part of our personal solar system, the full extension of our gaze, and we are one step closer to becoming truly cosmic.

And then we stumble through and past, like Orpheus, and turn our gaze elsewhere.

Note: the full text of HD's extraordinary work Eurydice can be found here.

you who

who are to yo

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

When the New Horizons mission reaches Pluto and its moons in July 2015, there'll be hundreds of surface features that have never been seen before and which will need new names. The theme for these names is exploration and the underworld.



New Horizons. Image courtesy of NASA

The International Astronomical Union is in charge of allocating names in the solar system. But the New Horizons mission team have got together with the SETI Institute to get the public to contribute to a shortlist for their consideration.

'Pluto belongs to everyone', says New Horizon science team member Mark Showalter, also a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute.  'So we want everyone to be involved in making the map of this distant world'.

You're my kind of guy, Mark Showalter.

But of course, one of the questions that immediately arises, to me anyway, is how many women-type of people will get a look-in in this process. So I went to the list to see what the representation was like. Let's just say, no surprises.

So with this in mind, I've done the hard work so you don't have to! Here is a list of women or female beings who are part of the longlist so far. And yes, you can vote for more than one. I'm also going to include some honourable mentions at the end that are just so cool you couldn't not want them to be the name of something on Pluto or Charon (the largest moon).

Happy voting! And remember to do it before April 24th. Full instructions are here.

History of exploration

Jeanne Baré (or Baret; botanist; first woman to circumnavigate the globe)

Alexandrine Tinné (Dutch explorer of Egypt)

Sacagawea (US Native American - Lewis and Clarke guide)

Fictional Explorers and Travelers

Eleanor Arroway (from Contact - Carl Sagan)

Alice (from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll) VOTE FOR ALICE. As someone who has identified with Alice from earliest childhood, I most certainly will be.

Arthur Dent/Trillian/Zaphod Beeblebrox (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). She was smarter than the rest of them put together.

Candide/Cunegonde/Pangloss (from Voltaire's Candide)

Dorothy Gale & Toto (from Oz books - L. Frank Baum)

Kaguya-hime (Japanese folktale) You get double value with this one, as it's also the nickname of a Japanese lunar orbiter (separately listed).

Kathryn Janeway (from TV's Star Trek: Voyager)

Skywalker/Solo/Leia/Kenobi (from Star Wars films)

Exploration Authors and Artists

Octavia E. Butler (US - author of Xenogenesis trilogy) I've never read Octavia Butler, but I really, really should.

Madeleine L'Engle (US author - A Wrinkle in Time) Now I'm sorry, but I will brook no opposition on this. Vote for Madeleine. If you were not moved to fear, horror, compassion and love by A Wrinkle in Time, you are barely human. If you have not read it, get thee to a library forthwith.

Anne McCaffrey (US-Irish author - Pern and Talents series) Rollicking good science fiction-fantasy yarns that entranced millions. 

Alice Sheldon (US author - A Momentary Taste of Being) AKA James Tiptree Jnr, a wonderful science fiction author. Her family background is also discussed in Donna Haraway's Primate Visions.

Travelers to the Underworld

Proserpina (kidnapped by Hades) I prefer the Greek Persephone but whatever.

Inanna & Dumuzi (from Sumerian mythology)

Orfeo & Euridice (from Greek mythology) Please read this poem about Eurydice by H.D (Hilda Dolittle), but be warned it will break your heart.

Virgil & Beatrice (from Dante's Inferno)

Underworld Beings

Tuoni & Tuonetar (Finnish mythology)

Ereshkigal (Sumerian mythology)

Alecto/Megaera/Tisiphone (Furies or Erinyes - Greek mythology)

Ammit (Devourer of Souls - Egyptian mythology)

Melinoë (Bringer of nightmares - Greek mythology)

Honourable Mentions

Phileas Fogg (from Around the World in 80 days). However, it should really be Passepartout, who did all the hard work anyway.

Tintin (from graphic novels by Hergé)

Gallifrey (Planet of the Time Lords - Dr Who)

Heart of Gold (Infinite Improbability spaceship, from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Dawn Treader (by C. S. Lewis)

Chesley Bonestell (US space artist)

Hieronymus Bosch (Dutch painter of Hellish scenes) This is so obvious I don't know why it's even a matter of voting.

Stanislaw Lem (Polish science fiction author) Because I love that man's writing so much.

Maurice Sendak (US author - Where the Wild Things Are) Nuff said.

Baralku (Yolngu culture, Australia) Baralku is the Island of the Dead. You must vote for this because it is from the same region of Australia as the Aboriginal music on the Voyager Golden Records.

Sun Wukong (Monkey King - Chinese mythology) MONKEY. Do you hear me? This is Monkey.

Cthulhu (from H. P. Lovecraft)

Notes: on the official website, they mostly link to Wikipedia, but I've linked to other sites where I think there is more interesting or nuanced information. Sometimes, Wikipedia does have the best information online so I've stuck with that.

The longlist is quite long, and it's possible I've missed a few - if so, let me know and I'll add them.

If you think there are women/entities who ought to be on the official longlist but aren't, it's worth checking the Gazetteer to see if they haven't already been used elsewhere in the solar system.

My list here, and the commentary on it, are of course my personal views, and you are free to disagree or ignore them as you wish.

Naming a crater on Mercury and the politics of Indigenous identity

The Mercury-orbiting Messenger spacecraft, a collaboration between NASA, the Carnegie Institute for Science, and the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, is celebrating its tenth anniversary. As part of the celebrations, they're having a competition to name a crater (it closes on 15 January 2015).

It's a celebration but it's also a swan song. Somewhere around March this year, the plucky little spacecraft will run out of fuel and end up as a smear on the planet's surface.

Features on our solar system's innermost planet are named for artists. There's five craters that need names. This is how it works:

According to the IAU rules for Mercury, impact craters are named in honor of people who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to the Arts and Humanities (visual artists, writers, poets, dancers, architects, musicians, composers and so on). The person must have been recognized as an art-historically significant figure for more than 50 years and must have been dead for at least three years. We are particularly interested in submissions that honor people from nations and cultural groups that are under-represented amongst the currently-named craters.  See the current list of named Mercury craters.

I was lying in bed one Saturday morning, lazily turning various thoughts over in my mind, when inspiration struck. I should propose the Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira.

Most Australians would be familiar with his work, even if they're not aware who the artist is. Here's a couple of examples:

Alice Springs Country. Watercolour on paper, by Albert Namatjira. Credit: Australian Art Auction Records

The Finke River Gorge at entrance to Glen Helen. Watercolour and gouache over pencil, on paper.  Credit: Queensland Museum

I thought Namatjira would be a good name for Crater C, which has yellow-orange volcanic deposits, not unlike the colours of central Australia in the scenes that became Namatjira's most iconic. And Aboriginal people are definitely an under-represented group in the names not just on Mercury, but in the rest of the solar system.

On looking up the list of existing names, I discovered that there are two Australians already on Mercury (so to speak). They are Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett, a painter, and James "Frank" Hurley, a photographer, and both fascinating people in their own right as you can see if you follow the links. One criterion was met already: only two Australians in a gazetteer of 372 names, and neither of them Aboriginal.

So I started researching and writing, and finally submitted the following 2000-character blurb on Namatjira:

Albert Namatjira (1902-1959) was an Arrernte man born in the Northern Territory of Australia. He was the first Aboriginal artist to become well-known to the white Australian public, and his work won international acclaim. Growing up on the Hermannsburg Mission, he was initiated into Aboriginal cultural law at 13.  In his 20s he learnt to paint from artists visiting the mission and quickly became proficient. His first solo exhibition was held in Melbourne in 1938, and a school of artists built up around him. His paintings represented the colours of the Australian landscape like no other. His distinct style combined Aboriginal approaches to country with modern European landscape painting. He is best known for his paintings of the McDonnell ranges. In his lifetime he received honours such as Queen Elizabeth II's coronation medal (1953) and honorary membership of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales (1955). In 1968, he was the first Aboriginal person on an Australian postage stamp. As an Aboriginal man of this era, he experienced the tensions between expressing his Aboriginal identity and Australia’s administrative regime which tightly controlled the freedoms of Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, he became one of Australia’s most well-known and popular artists with his work represented in major galleries. In 2002, the National Gallery of Australia mounted a major retrospective of his work. This is how they described his art: 

"Namatjira's paintings express his relationship with the Arrernte country, particularly the Western Arrernte lands, for which he was a traditional custodian. Through his intense scrutiny of specific places and his sensitive response to their individual qualities, Namatjira enables us to see the Centre as a multi-faceted region of Australia. A region of extremes, central Australia is far from a 'dead heart'”. 

These words could equally be applied to Mercury: the eye of the artist allows us to see beyond the superficial to the complexity within.

For more details, see his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which was a major source for the above.

My opinion is that this is an absolute winning proposal, and I really hope the committee thinks so too.

It's interesting, though. The rules of naming are very clear: the name should not have any 'political, religious or military significance'. That's fine as it stands. And Albert Namatjira wasn't a general, or used as a rallying point for radical Aboriginal resistance, or the centre of a cult. Events on Earth won't be upset by having a crater named for him.

But he was an Aboriginal man who lived through a period where Aboriginal people were treated like livestock, and were assumed to be on the verge of extinction. He grew up on a mission, one of the aims of which was to Christianise Aboriginal people and destroy their culture. (You'll notice my subtle attempt to describe these complex issues in the submission). He was treated as if he had given away his Aboriginality by working in a contemporary modernist tradition; yet if he had painted in a 'traditional' way, he would have been constructed as 'primitive'. You can read about how Australia's policies about Aboriginal people affected his life in the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry.

The International Astronomical Union, which administers the naming of planetary features in the solar system, is definitely right to be targeting groups who are marginalised or overlooked.

But there is a sense in which just being Indigenous in the modern world is already political. You can't be neutral as an Indigenous person in a colonial society. The very act of becoming outstanding in some way only serves to bring into sharp focus the inequalities that exist, and Namatjira's life illustrates that.

I hope I've walked the fine line of acknowledging the appalling treatment of Aboriginal people in White Australia while representing Namatjira for what he was: a brilliant artist with a unique vision who deserves to immortalised on Mercury.

Keep your eyes out for the results of the competition in late March/early April!

Insert Namatjira's name here.



Image credits:

1. Australian Art Auction Records

 http://www.artrecord.com/index.cfm/artist/478-namatjira-albert/medium/2-works-on-paper/?page=9

2. Queensland Museum.

 http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/collection/indigenous_australian_art/albert_namatjira

3. Enchanted Learning

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/planets/mercury/mercurymap.shtml

Shadows on the Moon: an ephemeral archaeology

A picture of the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 got me thinking about shadows on the moon as part of the archaeology of the six human landing sites.

Apollo 17 panorama. Image courtesy of NASA

The peculiar character of light on the Moon of course forms part of the corpus of conspiracy theories claiming the lunar landings were faked. It's argued that the shadows seen in photographs and film footage are caused by the lighting in the studio where actors lumbered about pretending to be in low gravity, rather than the Sun. Or something like that. To be honest, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the conspiracy theories.

(But I will offer this gem from the sublime Mitchell and Webb).

Shadows on the Moon are, however, of great interest from a completely different perspective. Years ago, I was in the library at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation headquarters here in Adelaide, and found a book that has stuck in my memory. It was a study written for US Congress, in the 1980s, on warfare in space. The chapter on the Moon was all about how lunar conditions would affect hand-to-hand combat. The author, a military expert, noted that many of the properties of lunar light would make a sort of shoot-out situation particularly interesting. For example, if you hid from someone in a shadow on Earth, you would still be visible. Light diffuses through our heavy atmosphere and shadows can be all sorts of colours (vide Goethe: 'colour itself is a degree of darkness').

On the Moon, shadows are as black as Hades. Although reflection from the lunar surface will still illuminate objects in shadow, if you go deep enough into one, for example, under a boulder overhang or in a crater, you can be invisible to observation.

You're also cold. The temperature in shadow drops markedly.

In a battle with human protagonists, terrestrial instincts may lead you far astray.

But let's move on from this gloomy topic and get back to the archaeology.

One thing the astronauts from the Apollo missions brought to the Moon was new shadows, shadows that were cast by machines and bodies and flags and rovers, in an interplay of movement and stillness. The speed of the shadows differed depending on the activity being carried out. Some were solid black and some were textured. They crossed and uncrossed with the angle of the sun and the movement of the astronauts around the tiny landscapes that constituted their lunar experience.

The shadows were captured and frozen in many, many photographs of all Apollo missions; in these photographs, they became a different type of artefact. I would be curious to know if anyone (apart from conspiracy theorists) has analysed the shadows in these images.

Apollo 12 ALSEP instrument package. Image courtesy of NASA

Apollo 14. Note the beautiful transparent shadow of the mesh antenna, like a flattened sea creature. Image courtesy of NASA. 

And then some shadows left, never to return, and other shadows stayed to be swallowed by the lunar night and to emerge into day again. The shadows of the flags, descent modules, rovers, cameras, and other equipment are now cast over the lunar regolith until something causes the object to decay in tens, hundreds or thousands of years. The objects left behind don't move, but their shadows circle them in diurnal devotion, sundials without a mission.

The shadows may, however, be of more than passing interest in considering the taphonomy of lunar sites.  There's some evidence to suggest that dust levitates as the terminator passes over, due to changing electrical potentials. There may be small-scale surface dust movement as shadow boundaries change, creating sub-millimetre electrical fields that cause dust particles to accelerate and collide with each other (NASA 2011). So the dust environment of the objects left on the Moon may be not static, and we don't know what the long-term impacts on material degradation are.

Now, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter uses the shadows to detect the presence of these orphaned items of material culture.

Apollo 15, photographed by the LRO. Image courtesy of NASA.

There's only one way to finish this post: with a quote from Cat Stevens' classic hit Moonshadow:

Did it take long to find me? I asked the faithful light.
Did it take long to find me? And are you gonna stay the night?


References
NASA 2011 NASA’s Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities: How to Protect and Preserve the Historic and Scientific Value of US Government Artefacts. Human Exploration and Operat6ions Mission Directorate, Strategic Analysis and Integration Division, NASA

Note: updated 16/12/2014 to include paragraph on photographs. Updated on 21/1/2015 to include paragraph on dust levitation.

Simone de Beauvoir in the Night Land

I've been reading a paper by Yi-Fu Tuan about 'The significance of the artifact'. He quotes the following from the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir:

The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and which will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can still be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me. Here and there, I see occasional pieces whose melancholy beauty enchants me. They do not suffice to populate this emptiness that Chateaubriand calls 'the desert of the past'.

This catches so much about the arrow of time, the past as a foreign country, and the ruins of memory.

The 'desert of the past' reminds me of The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson's haunting evocation of a dying Earth under the twilight of a dying Sun. The landscape of the Night Land is stripped back to a stark formless grey, empty of almost everything except cypherous entities which possess only one or two qualities, like the Watching Things and the Silent Ones.

The Nightland, image courtesy of http://www.thenightland.com/

De Beauvoir's landscape of the past is not haunted by the horrors of the Night Land, but it has its own perils. Do not look back with fond nostalgia expecting rolling green downs with hidden copses; you will find instead crumbling hills and dales in a silence near absolute zero. There is no solace here.

Forget Satre, Simone is where it's at.

References

de Beauvoir, Simone 1972 The Coming of Age. New York: C. P. Putnam's Sons, p. 365

Hodgson, William Hope 1912 The Night Land.

Tuan, Yi-Fu 1980 The significance of the artifact. Geographical Review 70(4):462-472

  

Dr Space Junk in da stratosphere: excavating my desktop

This is one of the results of me mucking around with graphics a few years ago. I found it while attempting to file all the stuff lying around on my computer desktop. At the time I made it, I was obsessed with vintage Russian space designs. (Well, still am, really).

Since I'm looking at random stuff, which I'm going to call an assemblage in fact, in Spit 1 of my computer, I might put a couple more artefacts up here. (Spits, for the non-archaeologists, are arbitrary excavation units. They might be 5 or 10 cm depending on the kind of deposit you're digging through. Typically Spit 1 is where all the grass roots, worms, sticks, and discarded rubbish is).

Here's a fabulous paper by Mark Edmonds about the archaeology and heritage of the Jodrell Bank telescope in the UK:

Full reference is

Edmonds, Mark 2010 When they come to model Heaven: big science and the monumental in post-war Britain. Antiquity 84:774-795

This is a picture of a cloud chamber. Cloud chambers are very exciting places where you can see the traces of sub-atomic particles like electrons. I think I was vaguely thinking of an archaeology of cloud chambers with some Schrodinger's cats thrown in for good measure.

Here's the first few slides of a lecture on cultural landscapes I used to give to the ARCH2108 Cultural Heritage Management class at Flinders University. The lecture is joint effort between me and my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis. The beginning is about the origins of the cultural landscape approach in geography (although there is another strand deriving from landscape painting) - later on the lecture covers cultural landscapes in archaeology and heritage management, including space, of course.

The final artefact from my desktop is an aerial image of the sewage works at the abandoned Orroral Valley NASA Tracking Station, from when we were doing a geophysical survey in 2010. Space sites can be more mundane than you might think. It was a rather peaceful place, slightly down slope and out of view from the main antenna and operations buildings. I thought that if anyone adaptively reused the site the tanks would make lovely water gardens.

Ground zero in the outback: return from Maralinga

Back from Maralinga yesterday.  An amazing journey and I don't really know where to start.  Have to go through my field notes, label all the photographs, gather my thoughts.

We spent time roaming through Maralinga Village on our first day there.   On the second day we attempted to get to Emu Field, but constant rain forced us to turn back only a couple of kilometres from the village as driving conditions had become too dangerous.  Needless to say, the following day was clear and sunny .... Finally, before leaving, we went out to the major test sites at Taranaki, and the airfield.  Our host at Maralinga Village, Robin Mathews, told us that this airstrip was the only one in the southern hemisphere suitable for the space shuttle to use as an emergency landing site.

The most interesting thing for me, possibly, was the inconsequential surface artefact scatters - broken ceramics, beer cans, spam tins, nails etc, the small things that indicated the everyday life of the Maralinga staff.

My publications on space archaeology

Thought I'd better update my publications list. Some new things coming out this year (see previous post).

Articles (refereed)

Gorman, A.C. 2007 La terre et l’espace: rockets, prisons, protests and heritage in Australia and French Guiana. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 3(2):153-168

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

Gorman, A.C. 2005b The archaeology of orbital space. In Australian Space Science Conference 2005, RMIT University, Melbourne, pp 338-357

Book chapters

Gorman, A.C. 2009 Beyond the Space Race: the significance of space sites in a new global context. In Angela Piccini and Cornelius Holthorf (eds) Contemporary archaeologies: excavating now. Peter Lang, Bern

Gorman, A.C. and Beth Laura O’Leary 2007 An ideological vacuum: the Cold War in space. In John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft (eds) A fearsome heritage: diverse legacies of the Cold War. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California pp 73-92

Gorman, A.C. In press The heritage of orbit. In Ann Darrin and Beth Laura O’Leary (eds) The handbook of space engineering, archaeology and heritage. Taylor and Francis

Gorman, A.C. In press The cultural landscape of space. In Ann Darrin and Beth Laura O’Leary (eds) The handbook of space engineering, archaeology and heritage. Taylor and Francis

Gorman, A.C. In press The archaeology of space exploration. In Martin Parker and David Bell (eds) Space Travel and Culture. Sociological Review Monograph, Blackwell Publishing

Short publications and notes

Gorman, A.C. 2007 Saving Woomera. Australasian Science, June pp 38-40

Gorman, A.C. 2005 Space cowboys: the Wild West and the myth of the American hero. The New England Review, February, pp 10-12