In Wild Air: Venus, Voyager, and more of my favourite obsessions

It's Monday <>, you are celestial. MOBILE VERSION — VISIT ARCHIVES Many thanks to the amazing Heath Killen for permission to republish this. You can find more of Heath's work here.  Alice Gorman is In Wild Air I’m an archaeologist who studies space exploration – the artefacts, the places, and the perspectives that lead to how we understand other worlds. Here I share some of my obsessions about space and time. PHOTO: ASHTON CLARIDGE / FLINDERS UNIVERSITY Help us spread the good word. TO FRIENDS TO STRANGERS TO LOVERS CULTURE The Venus of Willendorf The Venus of Willendorf, discovered in Austria in 1908, must be one of the most famous and least understood women in all of human history. She was made during the Ice Ages, between 30 000 and 28 000 years ago. The 11 cm high figurine is carved from limestone and was originally thickly coated in red ochre. Without facial features, or even feet, she’s all sexuality with great breasts and belly and a well-defined vulva. A multitude of theories have swirled around her: mother goddess religions, matriarchal cultures, Palaeolithic pornography, prehistoric selfies, the power of post-menopausal women, cross-cultural communication. But she’s also a massive Palaeolithic fuck-you to the ideas of female attractiveness that are often investigated by evolutionary psychologists. This branch of science often ends up justifying current human gender inequalities as some sort of evolutionary fitness. I think this is why I like her so much. She feels a bit like a revolutionary. She defies easy explanations. She is unique and herself. PEOPLE Woman with Microscope In 1977, two extraordinary spacecraft were launched on a mission to map the outer planets and then continue on to the space between the stars. Voyager 1 and 2 have become cultural icons, not only because they are the furthest extent of human culture and perhaps the most likely to make first contact with other sentient species, but also because of the Golden Records attached to them. The Records were the project of a team led by legendary science communicator Carl Sagan. They contain 90 minutes of music meant to represent the evolution of human culture, greetings spoken in many languages, and the natural sounds of life on Earth.  There’s also 116 images. One in particular captures my imagination. A black woman in a lab coat bends over a microscope, tiered earrings falling gracefully from her pierced ears. She is simply called “Woman with Microscope”. All I know about her is that the earrings were the subject of some debate: would an alien recognise the concept of “jewellery”, or think they were some sort of technology, or even a name tag?  She speaks to some very contemporary debates about women and other underrepresented minorities in science. Even today, little girls across the world are made to feel that they are not smart enough to be scientists, that space is the domain of men. The inclusion of a black female scientist on the Golden Records hence seems a bold statement about who gets to go to space. If only we knew her name. PLACES Voyage to Venus Venus has always been my favourite planet. As a child it was part of my atlas of the night sky and I was drawn to its association with creativity, passion, the arts of love, and mystery. And what lay beneath Venus’ impenetrable clouds was a mystery. It seemed a likely candidate for life, and many imagined a vibrant oceanic world populated with winged angelic beings who sang, telepathic frogs, or even dinosaurs. The USSR Venera landing missions of the 1960s and 1970s dashed hopes of a sister world with new solar system companions. Venus, under the clouds, was a pressure-cooker of dull brown rocks and slow soupy winds. Perhaps, most of all, my love for Venus was fostered by reading C.S. Lewis’ beautiful evocation of a new world, as a teenager in the 1970s. Published in 1943, Voyage to Venus (also known as Perelandra) describes a planet of floating islands and sensuous experiences of colour, taste, and touch that have philosophical dimensions. The reality of the Venusian surface did not deter me from falling in love with this vision. Every now and then I feel an urge to read Voyage to Venus again and relive the terror and desire of a world beyond human aesthetics. PRODUCTS Cable Ties I am obsessed with cable ties, as an artefact and a technology. There’s probably a stash of them in most households; and they’re used for everything from boning corsets to securing suitcases and backpacks. They seem so simple – a plastic strap that you thread and tighten to hold something together, cheap to buy and easy to throw away – yet they’re connected to larger currents of technology and politics that unite the worlds of aerospace and domestic space in the 20th century. Archaeologists are always looking at the ground. Once I would have sought the tell-tale angles of an Aboriginal stone tool; now I look for the characteristic t-shape of a severed cable tie lying in the streets. I’ve become shameless about picking them up from the ground and stashing them in corners of my bag, no matter who is looking askance at me. Cable ties were invented in 1958 in the US, for wiring aircraft. They migrated to Australia when NASA established a series of satellite tracking stations here in the 1960s. Antennas and computers needed a lot of cables. From there they insinuated themselves into everyday life, to the degree that most people don’t really even think about them. For me, they’re the quintessential space age artefact. And they are in space – inside the International Space Station, for example. Look more closely next time you watch a video of life on the ISS. Once you’ve seen them, they can’t be unseen – you’ll start to notice them everywhere. IDEAS Two Ways of Thinking About Space  1957-1958 was a significant year, or to be more precise, a significant 18 months. It was the International Geophysical Year, a massive effort of international scientific co-operation to understand the Earth and space. During the IGY, the first three satellites were launched – Sputnik 1 in 1957, and Explorer 1 and Vanguard 1 in 1958. And two books were published which explored the way we relate to space. Alexandre Koyré’s 1957 From Closed World to Infinite Universe is a work of jaw-dropping scholarship. It’s about the “replacement of the Aristotelian conception of space—a differentiated set of innerworldly places—by that of Euclidean geometry—an essentially infinite and homogenous extension—from now on considered as identical with the real space of the world”. Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 The Poetics of Space was rather a phenomenology of inner or experienced space, from corners, to attics, to the interior of shells. For him, the vehicle of space travel was the daydream: “One might say that immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. …And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity”. The mark of infinity is the geometry of our senses, the mathematics of our dreaming. WILDISM Microgravity You don’t have to go into space to experience microgravity. All you have to do is seek out your nearest amusement park. There you’ll find rides which simulate higher gravity and free fall. Scientific drop towers are experimental facilities where scientists test materials and chemical processes in microgravity; it’s the same principle used in amusement parks. For high gravity, try a spinning rotor – this is like the centrifuge that astronauts use in training, but fortunately you won’t be required to perform mathematical calculations at the same time. I tried this at Vienna’s famous Prater park and I can’t say it was a pleasant experience, but those around me were clearly getting a kick out of it. Free fall, on the other hand, was exhilarating! Until zero-g parabolic flights and space tourism become affordable for regular Earth people, this may be the closest we can get to microgravity, even if only for a few seconds. Start your astronaut training now! ELSEWHERE The Archaeology of the International Space Station The Archaeology of the International Space Station is a new project that I’m working on with Dr Justin Walsh. We want to investigate how a distinct space culture is created. You can read more about this project and keep up to date with it on our blog. Alice Gorman is In Wild Air VOLUME III | EDITION XXXV In Wild Air is a project by Heath Killen Thank you for being here now COPYRIGHT © 2017 All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed

Cable ties in literature: from the boudoir to the post-apocalyptic

It's no secret that I have an obsession with cable ties. The nice thing is that when I explain their fascinating history to people, they often catch the bug as well, coming to appreciate the stunningly simple design of this monumentally successful piece of technology. If you want to know the full story, you can read my paper on cable ties here.

Anastasia Steel and Christian Grey in the cable tie section of the
hardware store. I mean seriously. What a depauperate population
of the popular plastic fastening device.

Sadly, cable ties have not yet set the world of literature alight, unless you count their famous appearance in Fifty Shades of Grey. I would say that E.L James paid insufficient attention to cable ties as critical material infrastructure in her novel; and the range of cable ties available in the hardware shop in the film version is frankly disappointing.

Hugh Howey's Wool is a different proposition. I was lent this book by a friend and was astonished that I hadn't heard of it before. It was immediately enthralling, and there really is nothing nicer than finding a new author whose work just makes you want to read more.

So you can perhaps imagine my breathless excitement when I started Chapter 21 of Wool to find a description of CABLE TIES OF THE FUTURE.

Oh yes.

So here, for your delectation, is the passage in question. I don't think there are any spoilers in it if you haven't read the book.

The next morning Juliette arrived early at her desk having stolen little more than four hours of sleep. Beside her computer, she saw a package waiting for her: a small bundle wrapped in recycled pulp paper and encircled with white electrical ties. She smiled at this last touch and reached into her overalls for her multi-tool. Pulling out the smallest pick from the tool, she stuck it into the clasp of one of the electrical ties and slowly pulled the ratcheting device apart, keeping it intact for future use. She remembered the trouble she'd gotten into as a mechanic's shadow the day she'd been caught cutting a plastic tie from an electrical board. Walker, already an old crank those decades ago, had yelled at her for the waste and then shown her how to tease the little clasp loose to preserve the tie for later use. 

Years had passed, and when she was much older, she had found herself passing this lesson on to another shadow named Scottie. He had been a young lad at the time, but she had had a go at him when he had made the same careless mistake she once had. ... 

She loosened the other tie crossing the package and knew the bundle was from him. Several years ago, Scottie had been recruited by IT and had moved up to the thirties. He had become 'too smart for Mechanical', as Knox had put it. Juliette set the two electrical straps aside and pictured the young man preparing this package for her. The request she'd wired down to Mechanical the night before must've bounced back up to him, and he had spent the night dutifully doing her this favour. 

She pried the paper apart carefully. Both it and the plastic ties would need to be returned; they were both too dear for her to keep and light enough to porter on the cheap. As the package came apart, she noticed that Scottie had crimped the edges and had folded these tabs under each other, a trick children learned so they could wrap notes without the expense of glue or tape.

Scottie leaves her a note: Keep the ties - I got plenty. 

Where do I start? There is so much going on here, and although I believe there are some technical unlikelihoods, on the whole Howey has paid the cable tie much greater respect as an artefact than E.L James.

At this point I must digress. I searched for a link to Wool to include and discovered something that astonished me. Another reviewer HAS ALREADY COMPARED WOOL TO FIFTY SHADES OF GREY.

What.

Science fiction's answer to Fifty Shades of Grey, the review in the Guardian says. Perhaps I missed the BDSM scenes in Wool. I'm pretty sure I did. And I may be wrong, but I'm also pretty sure that few reviewers take the cable tie approach to literature. Well there's nothing for it but to read this other review.

Ah, now I read that the comparison is made on the basis that both works were initially self-published. There is no mention of cable ties. So I shall continue.

Juliette's cable ties are described as 'white electrical'. This is the industrial context in which cable ties were first invented, when Maurus C. Logan visited the Boeing factory in 1956 and watched the workers tying up the electrical wiring in an aircraft. He was employed by US electrical outfitters Thomas and Betts. Since their first manufacture, cable ties migrated into everyday life and a myriad of uses securing every kind of thing. Here, in the isolated culture of the silo, sealed off against the toxic world outside, cable ties have retreated to their original use.

Colour is significant in cable tie manufacture. Black cable ties are generally intended for outdoor use; their carbon content makes them UV resistant. In the silo, the cable ties are white. They will never be used outside, as no-one can survive outside in the poisoned atmosphere. They're like little pale fishes trapped in an underground pool.

There are two types of cable ties, those which have to be cut off and can't be re-used, and re-usable ones, which need to be undone with a special tool. It's not entirely clear from Howey's account which is intended here. If you loosen the ratchet head, will it really be useable again as it won't engage with the ridged tail? Juliette doesn't seem to be using a specialised tool, just the smallest one from her panoply.

This is a minor point against the real implications of the passage however: that in the closed world of the silo, an artefact that was once mass-produced and discarded without thought is now precious and valuable.

The cable ties are symbolic here as well: Scottie is using them as a material allusion to the history that he and Juliette share, knowing that they will make her recall the past. They symbolise the passing on of knowledge: the creation of new bonds - as well as their dissolution. They are used to secure the parcel, but they are part of the gift as well.

Fastening is an art when materials to secure objects are in short supply. The parcel is a contradiction of meanings. Scottie has used the valuable cable ties to hold it all together, but in the first layer he has employed the technique learned from childhood to fold the paper together. Here we see a discipline of alternatives in an alternative world.

I particularly appreciate the thought that has gone into this passage, projecting a social and technological context for an artefact of the present into the future. It's what science fiction does best.

So my Cable Ties in Literature Award today goes to Hugh Howey for Wool. It is perhaps not quite on the level of other literary awards, given the small pool of nominees. Nevertheless, I regard it as an achievement. Congratulations, Hugh.

From aerospace to everyday life: the trajectory of cable ties.

This is our poster for the World Archaeological Congress in Kyoto in a few days time! My co-author is the wonderful Aylza Donald, who has caught the cable tie love.

The birth of the cable tie and augmented reality: a synergy

I love it when random things turn out to have a deeper connection. One of the joys of research is falling into those rabbit holes where only you can see the significance of the jars on the shelves, because of the chain of events that led you to be in possession of certain facts. Or perhaps a strong desire for vegemite on toast. OK, perhaps I can only stretch this metaphor so far.

(Incidentally, one of my recurring dreams evokes the Sheep's Shop in Through the Looking Glass. Needless to say, I identify strongly with Alice).

Readers may be aware of how one such serendipitous chain of connections led me to understand the significance of the humble cable tie, following a survey of the Orroral Valley NASA Tracking Station in the Australian Capital Territory. My research on the cable tie's history led me to inventor Maurus C. Logan, who worked for electrical outfitter Thomas and Betts. In the late 1950s, he visited a Boeing aircraft factory and watched the workers fitting a wiring harness. One of their tasks was to secure bundles of wires (cables) together with waxed string. The string turned their hands into a bloody mess, a condition known as 'hamburger hands' because their resemblance to hamburger meat.

'There has to be a better way', thought the kind-hearted Maurus, and so away he went and invented the cable tie. (More of the story will be told in my forthcoming publication on cable ties in Frederick and Clarke (eds) That was then, this is now: contemporary archaeology in Australia).

At the moment, I'm trying to piece together another story about two unusual material things, congohelium and computronium. My methodology is anamnesis and metaphor. I'm reading widely to try and 'remember the future' and ferret out of the deep recesses of my mind and viscera exactly what I meant when I put these two unconnected things together. What I'm really trying to say here is that I concocted a paper title because it sounded good, then wrote an abstract, and now have to find out what it's really all about. I'm choosing to make a virtue of what is really lack of planning. The anamnetic technique is based on the assumption that my unconscious knew something about why I connected these two things, and by using literature as a catalyst, I'm trying to draw it into the shallows of my conscious mind so that I can give a coherent paper at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in New York in two days.

My research has not been systematic, but I have managed to read a couple of things that have achieved that crystallisation for me. Good for the progress of the paper. But in the process, a cyborg rabbit, using its watch as an external storage device, has led me to a small piece of information that probably has resonated only with me in this precise way.

In the early 1990s, some engineers and scientists came up with the idea of Augmented Reality. Not virtual reality - this was not an attempt to digitally recreate the experience of reality. Augmented reality is rather the overlaying of new information on what we perceive in the everyday world. It's the sort of thing that proponents of wearable tech are exploring.

Have three guesses where this concept emerged.

Please try a little harder!

Oh OK, I give in.

At Boeing. In the context of aircraft wiring harnesses.

I nearly fell off my chair when I read this.

Now, as well as the issue of the waxed string and its terrible impact on human hands, one of the problems created by the evolution of aircraft was how to get cables into inaccessible parts of the aerodynamic structure. I believe that ferrets were at one period trained to carry the cables to remote parts of the aircraft structure where neither human nor hands could get. The point of the augmented reality was to enhance the invisible and future parts of the system with the idealised plan for the location of the cables in the harness. I'm guessing they didn't need the ferrets after that.

In writing this I'm struck by the disjunction between the - probable - constraints of aircraft structure and the need to get certain components into it in certain ways. Basically, they don't go well together. It's a more-than-awkward fit. Something always gives, whether it's flesh or aircraft or poor little ferrets. The system is mashed together so that it works, but there's always something sticking out, not smooth. Push it back in and it pops out somewhere else. Technology is not a smooth ball of functionality: it's a bag of snakes writhing and twisting within their boundary conditions.

So with these thoughts, I'll get back to my reading!

A magnificent obsession: cable ties in space

Yes, I know I am obsessed. But you'll all be convinced of the archaeological importance of cable ties once my first paper on this topic comes out. Ursula Frederick and Annie Clarke are editing a volume called 'That was then, this is now: contemporary archaeology in Australia' (published by Cambridge Scholars), based on a fabulous workshop held at the University of Sydney two years ago. I spoke about cable ties as the quintessential contemporary artefact, so ubiquitous in the modern world that no-one even notices them.

This paper is far more riveting than you may believe at this point, particularly the history of the invention of cable ties. I'll say no more here so as not to spoil the surprise.

In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of space-qualified cable ties. I was with a few people walking through the Advanced Instrumentation and Technology Centre at Mt Stromlo last year, and of course could not fail to stop at this display. I think Roger Franzen thought I was slightly unhinged for wanting to photograph it.

Multilayer insulation blanket studs and cable ties (for attaching MLi blankets to spacecraft and minimizing the blanket-to-spacecraft conductance)

The blue colour is because the cable ties are manufactured from a radiation-resistant fluorine compound. More detailed descriptions of these materials will, of course, be in my forthcoming paper.

And the Advanced Instrumentation and Technology Centre is being officially opened next week! Sadly, I can't go, as I'm giving a keynote address at the Victorian State Planning Conference. This is very exciting, as former Australian Prime Minster Malcolm Fraser is also speaking, and I very much admire his opposition to our current government's loathsome policies on asylum seekers.

I haven't finished writing my talk yet (no surprises there), so I don't know if cable ties will get a look-in. You never know, though.

Presencing absence: cable ties and what's left behind

Thanks to Nicolas Laracuente (@archaeologist) for sending me this rather atmospheric photo of some cable ties on a lamp-post in Frankfort. Once, a poster or notice was attached using them. What it was about we'll never know (a concert or theatre advertisement? Wanted poster? Changes in bus timetables?): all that remains are the cable ties.

So cable ties really are the quintessential artefact of the contemporary past: they are always used to contain or fasten or attach some kind of thing, but we frequently find them unattached themselves, having become separated from the thing as it decayed or was taken apart or moved on to other uses, other occasions. Their very presence implies the absent thing.

The art of the cable tie

OK, I've already admitted I'm obsessed. But I really can't resist sharing these wonderfully creative uses of the cable tie. A few weeks ago, I bought a book on the basis that it had instructions on how to make one of those cafe-style fly curtains out of cable ties (I'm not actually going to do it, I just like the idea).  Here is what some other people have done with them.

Mia Mulvey, an artist based in Denver, Colorado, has made ceramic sculptures incorporating cable ties. She says she is influenced by "the intersection between art and science, its history, advancements and tools".  In the work you see below, she has tethered flying things like birds and butterflies to a tree with cable ties.

Heather Skowood is a contemporary jeweller and designer. Here are a couple of things she has made with cable ties.  You can read her blog to find out more about her philosophy.

Finally, even the cable tie itself can be designed so that it is both beautiful and functional (WHY can't they make watches and diaries like that. They are always one or the other but never both). My friend the Mess Goddess has sourced these gorgeous Italian cable ties with a leaf on the end. She loves cable ties as much as I do, but for different reasons.

I'm sure there are many more examples of exceptional cable tie creativity out there. Let me know if you find any.

Cable ties, the taphonomy of plastics, and the modern world

Truly I need a new life. I'm starting to notice cable ties everywhere. I was waiting at a bus stop last week when I spotted a broken cable tie in the dirt, my eye now being attuned to the characteristic L-shape. I picked it up and took it home (unlike other kinds of artefact, those of the contemporary past are usually 'rubbish'. There is no law against souveniring them). I think there may have been a construction site nearby, but my memory is a little hazy on this point.

Image courtesy of 4Cabling

Examining this orphan cable tie was interesting. The un-cut-off end suggested that it was a very long one indeed, but part of it was missing, as the stub was neither long enough or flexible enough to curve around to meet the opposing break. However, on the remaining length, there is no sign of a manufacturer's label or a patent number. This suggests that it belongs to a later period where cable ties are a generic technology, rather than proprietary.

The wear on the cable tie suggested that it had been lying around for some time; they are pretty robust little beasties, after all. I might interpret it as trampling wear, and abrasion from the stony/gravelly surfaces of the dirt and road where I found it. The flat surfaces are scratched and the smooth edges are roughened and squashed a little.  I don't recollect noticing this on the Orroral Valley cable ties, which were located in lovely soft sandy silt. Clearly this is another feature that needs recording in future fieldwork. This makes me think that it might be useful to examine a bit more closely the ways in which plastics deform and deteriorate. A taphonomy of plastics.

There's very little literature specifically about cable ties that I have been able to track down as yet, although I have no doubt that I shall find more once I get deeper into the technical journals. However, this is for me exactly the justification for taking an archaeological approach: the documents that tell the story of how they became such a ubiquitous feature of everyday life do not exist. No-one is, for example, going on a hiking trip, or building a house, and choosing to focus on the role of cable ties in what they write or photograph about their activities.

They're not just a useful string or wire substitute though - artists and crafters are using cable ties to make all sorts of fabulous things. That might have to be the subject of a separate post.

I'll be talking about cable ties at the workshop 'That was then, this is now' in Sydney on the 16th-17th February. How they'll thank me!

Valley of the Cable Ties: the material culture of the contemporary past

Back in November, me and my intrepid group of graduate students paid a visit to the former Orroral Valley Tracking Station in the ACT.

In the 1990s, what remained of the above-ground structures was demolished, leaving only the concrete footings of numerous buildings and antennas. Near the entrance to the facility, now used by tourists, hikers and other visitors, the grass is cut and the gardens sort of maintained. Deeper into the site, tall weeds and grasses are more prevalent and are invading the antenna footprints. 

In general, surface visibility is on the low side, and as you walk about, there's not much evidence of past human activities apart from the big stuff. No obvious artefact scatters; no personal objects; no bits of antenna support lying discarded.  Occasionally there's a bit of recent rubbish near the picnic/parking area. The Maralinga nuclear test sites are littered with lovely radioactive garbage, despite three remediation campaigns; by comparison, Orroral has been cleaned up and maintained in a well-ordered fashion.

But I wasn't so sure this tidy surface would yield nothing to the eagle eye of the archaeologist. On my last visit, we found an old scrubbing brush lying outside the canteen building, the sturdy bristly kind with a wooden back, as used in a million domestic and industrial kitchens across the land.  I was very keen to do a pedestrian transect survey of the entire site to see what else we could find relating to the tracking station period, and what its spatial distribution might tell us. I imagined we might be able to knock the whole site over in a day with 10 people.

You'll already have guessed that my expectations were confounded.

We started at what I thought would be the easiest part of the site, below the main 26 m antenna, which is fairly thickly grassed with few weeds. This was possibly the narrowest section of the main site, defined by fences, and with no buildings to confuse things. I really didn't think there would be much there; I thought it would be a nice, quick demonstration of the principles of surface survey.

The team walked 5 m apart, slowly observing the ground within their swath of vision, and placed a pin flag at every location where they saw human material or animal scratchings/burrows. The latter was so that I could get an idea of how disturbed the surface was. We had 100 pin flags (these are spikes of metal with a coloured plastic tag on top) and I thought these would last us a good while.  The line would move from one boundary fence to the next in formation, flagging everything of interest, and then we would look back and see how material was distributed by the density of the flags. Then, in small groups, the team would fully record each artefact or trace, including its coordinates, material, dimensions, shape, colour, likely function if known, etc etc, removing the flag as each location was completed (and leaving the artefact in situ). We'd then move on to the next 50 m traverse.

From L to R: Joan, Rob and Susan in their 5 m transects. (Author's photograph)

Well. Once you start looking ...... the 100 pin flags were running dangerously low before we had even reached the opposite fence. There was stuff everywhere, despite the low visibility as you see in the image above. I was amazed, and so were the students. There were bits of concrete, star pickets, bricks, lead, tin cans, insulation, wire, nails, leather, cable trenches (some of the rabbit scratches turned out not to be, once you examined them closely), metal steps, pipes, and much more. When we made a list of all the observed artefact materials or types, there were over 30. 

Southwest from the antenna footing, showing the location of pin flags. (Author's photograph)

This was all great, obviously, although now it was clear that we would be lucky to get through half of this small area in a day, let alone the whole site. But the best was yet to come. 

In the picture below, you see an erosion scar with a high density of artefacts, as evidenced by the density of pin flags.

Artefact density in the erosion scar (with Lance, Tom and Steve). (Author's photograph)

Obviously visibility was highest in this exposed area, and so we would expect a higher density of artefacts than the surrounding grassed areas. Some, at least, were being washed down or out of the slope; the presence of a small culvert under a path nearby attested to the movement of water through this area. But it was the content of this artefact scatter which was the biggest eye-opener.

Pretty soon, as the teams moved systematically through recording the artefacts, we became aware that there were quite a few cable ties present; so many that some people suggested that there was no need to individually photograph and measure every one. Tempting though that thought was .... I stuck to my guns. This was the methodology and we were going to follow it to the letter.! There was a little grumbling. Why record the same features on so many of them, when they were all identical? What would we learn?

Again, once you start looking...... the first thing to note was that these were used cable ties, not new ones. They had been removed from something. One team observed a tie that had been torn apart, as the edges were jagged. I then instructed everyone to pay attention to the ends and record their state. Three variations then became evident: some had been torn, some cut, and some melted. This tiny observation on a discarded piece of plastic translated into a decision and an action taken by a real person in carrying out a task.

From this starting point, as we compared the cable ties that occurred across the erosion scar, other variations emerged. There were different colours: black, white, translucent. There were different lengths and different widths, from the very skinny and short to the very long and thick. The length, and thickness could be an indication of the diameter and load that the tie was used for. Some had had the loose ends trimmed off. Some had patent numbers on them, or manufacturer's labels. Some were lying flat on the surface; others were actively eroding out, standing upright in a layer of silt.

I was delighted. This ubiquitous, seemingly simple object was raising all kinds of questions about how and why the cable ties had been used. How did they get there? Were they associated with the tracking station? What date were they? When, exactly, had cable ties been invented? None of us knew. We all knew what they were, but we knew absolutely nothing else about this very modern artefact type.

By this time someone had decided to start substituting cable ties in film names - such a shame that we had no mobile coverage or there would have been a great Twitter hashtag in it - #cabletiemovies - such gems as The Texas Cable Tie Massacre (Jonathan) and The Valley of the Cable Ties (Susan) raised much hilarity. (My own effort:  The Cable Tie, being a film starring Jim Carrey). But I could tell that despite their ostensible skepticism, everyone was getting caught up in the cable tie story.  I decided to have a brainstorm session.

First we considered when cable ties were invented. (We couldn't just look this up; out here our phones didn't have reception. The whole point of locating a satellite tracking station in this valley was its radio quietness). Like many things that people assume are very modern, I thought perhaps cable ties were quite old, 1850s or something like that. Others thought they might be 1950s or 1960s. Rob pointed out that an omega-shaped clip used to be used to secure pipes and cables to structures. Another question was mass production. While the technology may be old, their accessibility may be recent. Early cable ties, he proposed, may have been expensive, and those at Orroral may have all been imported from the US.  Perhaps they were not throw-away technology in the early days.

What were so many cable ties doing near the main antenna? Were they associated with the dismantling of the antenna? Steve imagined a bunch of blokes climbing all over the structure cutting the ties off, as they took it apart to be transported to Tasmania (where it became part of the Mt Pleasant Observatory). The prevailing wind over the last couple of days had been from the north east; if it had been so in the 1980s, then perhaps the cable ties were just whisked off to the ground, scattering over the grass to the south west of the antenna. It was a plausible theory.

Joan, however, drew our attention to the huge numbers of kangaroos throughout the area (they were all over the site - and of course Canberra is renowned for being the one city in Australia where you can actually see a mob of roos hopping through the streets!). What if the national park had culling programs? The cable ties might be used to tie the feet of the corpse together so it could be transported. (Sorry to raise this gruesome topic).

It was Tom who had first noticed the melted ends of some cable ties, and he told us that cable ties were commonly used by hikers and backpackers to secure their baggage.  They would then burn them off with cigarette lighters. Just to the right of us was a path that already we had seen several groups of outward bounders travel down to the other end of the valley. These groups of high school students were camping up near the old canteen, and every day two different groups would walk right past our erosion site. However, as someone else pointed out, they were just walking through: you would expect to see old cable ties more at camping locations.

So we had some reasonable hypotheses here, and would need to do some research to discriminate between them. It was no good making assumptions that antenna cables = cable ties. We had also to consider that many may have washed down from further upslope, and may not have blown down from the main antenna at all. A key piece of evidence was clearly going to be the distribution of cable ties over the whole site. What features were they most associated with?

We didn't get a chance to do any more transects, but we did investigate the 9 m antenna footing with a group of home school children who came out to visit us. Around the footing, we found a sparse scatter of cable ties. So clearly they were present elsewhere at the site, although the association with the actual antennas was not certain since we had only looked at two of them.

Later, we had a wonderful morning out at the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex with Glen Nagle. Towards the end of his talk to us, he asked if anyone had any questions. I saw a few significant glances exchanged between the students. Hello, I thought. I was pretty sure they wanted someone to ask about cable ties - but no-one wanted to be the patsy! Joan, though, was made of sterner stuff. The glances coalesced into consensus and Joan gave a wry smile before asking Glen how common cable ties were in the construction and operation of the antennas at Tidbinbilla.

Glen Nagle tells us about the history of the Tidbinbilla tracking station. (Author's photograph)

Now, I thought, my moment of vindication. I was a little disconcerted when Glen roared with laughter! But when he recovered, he had some interesting insights. On the main 70 m dish at Tid, he said, there would be 1000s of cable ties. They were in fact an OH & S issue, and one of their engineers was meticulous about enforcing this - if the ends are not cut off, then they can easily take an eye out, as had happened to one unfortunate employee. So we had another factor to consider in our assessment of the cable ties from Orroral. Then he sent his off-sider to the office to get us all a genuine Tidbinbilla cable tie! I was in seventh heaven.

It wasn't until Susan got to the airport and logged in that we found out when the plastic mass-produced cable tie was invented - 1958, as it happens, by the US company Thomas & Betts, to use for securing wire harnesses in aircraft.

Of all the things I expected to get out of using a very 'traditional' archaeological technique on a space site, the discovery of cable ties was certainly not amongst them. My initial field seasons to Orroral had led to me realise the importance of cables, as opposed to the fancy, obvious stuff like antennas (and don't get me wrong, I'm still completely in love with antennas), but it took the application of the archaeological eye and a systematic approach to recording to tease out the implications. It's so obvious when you think about it. Glen, once he had recovered from his hilarity, agreed: there is another story to be told about technology through cable ties, and part of that story is their dissemination throughout contemporary culture, their adaptation to all kinds of uses, leading to their virtual invisibility.

As far as I'm concerned, cable ties are the quintessential artefact representing the potential of the archaeology of the contemporary past.

I will make them visible again.


Postscript
A few weeks later, I'm having dinner with the president of the Australian Archaeological Association, my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis, in a regional Queensland town on a Sunday night. There's not many places open and we have to settle for a cafe which is also hosting a Christian a capella group.  'Lynley', I say, 'I have to tell you about my recent discovery concerning cable ties!'  'Keep your voice down', she replies.  'There's a lot of elderly Christians about who may not be comfortable overhearing such a conversation'. I'm nonplussed. Why would anyone care?  Then I realise: she assumes I am about to impart some revelation concerning kinky sex. And this, sadly, is the immediate association that many people have with cable ties:  restraint, whether in the boudoir, down at the police station, or in a hostage situation.