A gallery of shadow astronauts Part 1

For the last few years, I have been playing with the idea of shadows as part of a site's fabric. It's not just about the hard materials. It's about the soft, the fleeting, the ephemeral, and the symbolic: about the interplay of darkness and light, presence and absence, loneliness and companionship.

Apollo 11. Shadow: Neil Armstrong. NASA

Apollo 12. Shadow unknown. NASA

Apollo 12. Shadow: Pete Conrad. NASA

Apollo 14. Body + shadow: Alan Shepard. Shadow: Edgar Mitchell. NASA

Apollo 14. Astronaut shadow unknown. NASA

Apollo 15. Shadows: Dave Scott and Jim Irwin. NASA

In these images, I'm interested in the astronaut who is not in the picture, whose presence is revealed by their shadow. It's also about the insubstantial shadow in relation to the hard and solid objects. In the image immediately above, it looks like the shadow of Jim Irwin is attempting to capture the solid stick-insect shape of the tripod with a shadow net. 

There's a pattern of elongated legs. The bodies are distorted, and also cyborg: in the shadow, flesh and camera meld into one amorphous shape.

The photos are silent, although we do have a beepy staticky soundtrack to them in our heads, implanted by the Apollo 11 television footage. Somehow the shadows accentuate the silence.

I particularly like Pete Conrad's shadow cast in the crater as he stands on the edge looking down. The angle of his body makes the shadow appear as if in profile, creeping silently along a shadow ridge to what end we cannot know. It has a dream-like quality.

We could say that of all the shadows, perhaps. Were they not caught in the photograph like a fly in amber, they would have vanished without trace in seconds, as evanescent as the dream on waking.

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!

Satellites are little knots of materiality in an invisible electromagnetic tapestry

Satellites go beyond the limits of human bodies to be our senses in the void. They are conduits of information in the form of signals in different wavelengths, mediated and managed by the hardware of transponders, antennas, modulators, processors, and data storage facilities. Without communication, they have no function, whether this is gathering data from the solar system or deep space to send back to earth, or transmitting terrestrial telephone and television around the planet. These signals are the real purpose of the hardware. Satellites are little knots of materiality in an invisible electromagnetic tapestry.

In the nearly 60 years since launch of Sputnik 1, the rara avis has become a veritable flock. There are over 23 000 tracked objects over 10 cm, and over 100 million particles less than a centimetre in size currently located between Low Earth Orbit and the so-called ‘graveyard orbit’, approximately 36 000 km above the surface of the Earth. A mere 6% of these objects are operational spacecraft. Their chronological range is from 1958 (Vanguard 1, the oldest surviving spacecraft, with its upper launch stage and a loose clamp) until the present time. In weight, the accumulated debris is estimated to be 6000 tons. But I argue that this ‘space junk’ represents far more than just a risk or hazard to operating spacecraft and satellites, as it is regarded by space industry, or an all-too-familiar pollution problem: it is the repository of human ideologies and values – capitalist, communist, mercantile, colonial, gendered, scientific, environmental and cosmological.  As junk, it is the proper study of archaeologists, who excavate through what is discarded in the garbage heaps of history, to find the significance in what people consider to be without value.



(This is a passage I removed from a recently submitted paper, but I quite like it despite that)

How would lunar mining affect the cultural significance of the Moon?

This is an excerpt from my (pre-revision) forthcoming publication Managing cultural heritage values in lunar mining? What are the issues?

Consultation with stakeholders is part of both assessing the social significance of cultural heritage and obtaining a Social Licence to Operate (SLO). Despite the best intentions, however, gaining free, prior and informed consent is frequently overlooked (Bice 2014). How could this be achieved for an entire celestial body, and with meaningful consultation with the ‘local’ community of Earth’s seven billion people? While the UN offers obvious mechanisms through the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOUS), UNESCO and the  advisory organisation the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), private commercial interests may prefer to undertake their own community engagement.

Lunar surface mining. Image courtesy of NASA

How will people feel if they look at the Moon in the night sky, and know that is being mined underneath their eyes? While diverse publics have been tolerant of scientific missions, commercial ventures may be received very differently. Mining and exploration will have impacts on the lunar environment much greater than the low level created by robotic and scientific missions to date.

While it is probably broadly true to say “humanity as a whole has embraced the historic events and objects associated with space research as part of our jointly held heritage” (Walsh 2012:234), this obscures deeply entrenched divisions between colonial/spacefaring nations and colonised/'developing' nations (Gorman 2005a, Gorman 2009b, Redfield 2005). These divisions have been very evident in the politics around the formation of the Outer Space Treaty (OST), the Moon Agreement even more so, and contribute to the impasse that resource utilisation on the Moon is currently facing (Hoffstadt 1994).

The reaction of, say, an Australian to a US-based profit-making mine in which they have no say or share could easily be negative. A First Nations Australian may have another layer of reaction, based on their experience of alienation from country and destruction of cultural heritage arising from terrestrial resource exploitation. Moreover, an assault on the integrity of a celestial body which belongs to what is commonly called the ‘Dreaming’ – a suite of cultural knowledge in which the past is simultaneously entwined with the creation of law, identity and land in the present – may be a matter of some concern. Aboriginal people are by no means the only First Nation to have such a relationship with the Moon.

Moon Dreaming, by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, 2007
Ronnie Tjampitjinapa is a Pintupi man from the Western Desert  He was a founding member of the Papunya Tula Artists group. .
Image courtesy of Aboriginal Art Directory
http://gallery.aboriginalartdirectory.com/aboriginal-art/ronnie-tjampitjinpa/moon-dreaming.php

What is considered to be for ‘the benefit and in the interests of all countries’ (OST Article 1, see also Moon Agreement Article 4) depends very much on how regulation unfolds in this next critical period. Again a parallel with terrestrial mining industry may be instructive. Management strategies in SLO frameworks include the concept of ‘offsets’: compensating for impacts at one location through activities at another, either directly or indirectly. A direct offset might be setting aside a protected area of land to compensate for the loss of that impacted by mining. Increasing the value of a heritage place could be considered a direct offset – for example, committing resources to conserving Tranquility Base to compensate for ‘sacrificing’ a Lunar Orbiter impact site. Indirect offsets may include funding research or education around the environmental/heritage resource that will lead to benefits for it. Note though, that offsets are determined during the planning phase, not in retrospect ie they do not compensate for damage already caused.

Lunar mining will take place in an environment where social media are a major part of public engagement with space. Space agencies, private companies, astronauts, missions, and rovers have their own Twitter accounts and there is an expectation of public involvement. Crowd-funded space missions such as Lunar Mission One, a probe designed to drill a deep core in polar regions, is possibly the vanguard of more such projects. The investors in off-world mining companies are likely to be the same people who buy shares in terrestrial mining. The moon’s seeming remoteness will not protect industrial operations from the scrutiny of the public.

References

Bice, Sarah 2014 What Gives You a Social Licence? An Exploration of the Social Licence to Operate in the Australian Mining Industry. Resources 3:62-80

Gorman, A.C. 2009b Beyond the Space Race: the significance of space sites in a new global context. In Angela Piccini and Cornelius Holtorf (eds) Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now, pp 161-180 Bern: Peter Lang

Gorman, A.C. 2005a The cultural landscape of interplanetary space. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85-10

Hoffstadt, Brian 1994 Moving the heavens: lunar mining and the ‘common heritage of mankind’ in the Moon Treaty. UCLA Law Review 42:575-621

Redfield, P. 2005. Space in the Tropics. From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Walsh, Justin 2012 Protection of humanity’s cultural and historic heritage in space. Space Policy 28:234-243

From Stone Age to Space Age: the impact of Woomera on Aboriginal people

In 1946–7, as a joint project between the UK and Australia, the Long Range Weapons Establishment was set up [at Woomera] approximately 450 km north of Adelaide. The area was considered remote and unproductive, a treeless gibber plain with few water sources. Everything had to be constructed from scratch: roads, airstrips, workshops, housing, leisure facilities. Water was piped at great expense to supply the new range (Morton 1989:123–126).

However, not everyone in Australia supported the establishment of a rocket range aimed at developing nuclear missiles. There was widespread consternation at the decision, in the wake of World War II, to enter into a nuclear arms race, and concern about the impact of the rocket range on Aboriginal people (Watt 1947; Duguid 1947). Under the leadership of Dr Charles Duguid, the Presbyterian Church spearheaded a nation-wide protest movement that involved over 50 community groups, trade unions and Aboriginal rights organisations.

Image courtesy of
National Museum of Australia

The protest gathered high profile supporters: Duguid himself, the anthropologist Donald Thomson, Member of Parliament Doris Blackburn, the Aboriginal activist Pastor Doug Nicholls, and many others. Debate raged about the place that Aboriginal people held in white Australian society, with views ranging from the familiar expectation that Aboriginal people were on the verge of extinction (e.g. Bates 1938), to calls for greater assimilation - or protection. In response, the Australian government branded the protest leaders as communist dupes and placed them under surveillance.

Advised by Sydney University anthropologist A.P. Elkin, the government took the line that Woomera would, at most, accelerate processes both unavoidable and already evident among the Aboriginal groups of central and southern Australia: 'coming in' from the desert to missions, increasing reliance on European food and medicines, and exposure to alcohol, disease and other vices of civilisation. A supposedly independent committee set up to examine the impact of the range on Aboriginal people dismissed the representations of Duguid and Thomson. Disillusioned, Duguid withdrew from spotlight and the first phase of protests at Woomera was effectively over.

The survey and construction of the rocket range infrastructure progressed throughout the late 1940s, and the first missile test took place in 1949. Now movement was restricted within the prohibited area of the range, and Aboriginal people could no longer access many ceremonial sites and resources: they were competing for precious water with the needs of the rocket range. Roads were pushed through, bringing people, equipment, and encounters for which neither group had much preparation. A policy of non-intervention led to fraught interactions where Woomera and other government employees were forbidden to assist Aboriginal groups even when they were in obvious need of food, water, transport or medicine (Morton 1989:83, 87). This situation held until 1967, when Aboriginal people finally became recognised as citizens of Australia. Meanwhile, in Woomera Village, people collected stone artefacts from the desert, and pondered on the contrast between the Stone Age and the Space Age (Gorman 2005a).

These events are not, I have argued, peripheral to the understanding of the Woomera rocket range as a space site. They are an integral aspect of its significance that relates to the colonial processes at work in the growth of space industry (Gorman 2005b, Gorman 2007). Nor was the conjunction of space/protest an isolated one in the history of space exploration.

This is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2007 La Terre et l'espace: rockets, prison, protests and heritage in Australia and French Guiana. Archaeologies: the Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 3(2):153-167

Further reading and resources can be found at Collaborating for Indigenous Rights.

References

Bates, D. 1938. The Passing of the Aborigines. A lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray.

Duguid, C. 1947 The Rocket Range, Aborigines and War. Melbourne: Rocket Range Protest Committee

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. From the Stone Age to the Space Age: Interpreting the Significance of Space Exploration at Woomera. Unpublished Paper Presented at the Symposium Home on the Range: The Cold War, Space Exploration and Heritage at Woomera, South Australia, Flinders University, November 2005

Gorman, A.C. 2005b. The Cultural Landscape of Interplanetary Space. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85–107.

Morton, P. 1989. Fire Across the Desert. Woomera and the Anglo-Australian Joint Programme, 1946–80. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service

Watt, A. 1947 Rocket Range Threatens Australia. Adelaide: South Australian State Committee, Communist Party of Australia

Cold War, colonialism, and the meaning of space hardware.

Spacecraft are more than utilitarian objects that further industrial, environmental or military objectives. They can also be regarded as artefacts, the material record of a particular phase in human social and technological development. On Earth, the preservation of material culture is considered important at a number of different levels: because it tells a story that is different to that presented in written documents, because it supplements written history, because material culture is the repository of people’s memories, ideas, and attachments. Material culture both shapes the world and is shaped by it:

....the things which constitute our world, which direct its functions, in turn influence our most basic cultural assumptions. A society which has access to jet engines, fast cars, and an international mass media based on television, fax machines and the information super-highway views the world entirely differently from a society dependent on the bullock dray and sea mail. (Anderson 1997).

That people see the material culture of space exploration as important is demonstrated by the popularity of museums such as the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. More people visit NASM than any other Smithsonian Institution. They don't go to see photographs of space, or to read interpretations of space history on storyboards. Words are not unique, and they are cheap. So why are visitors drawn in such staggering numbers to this museum?

Because the NASM has on display a Gemini capsule, a section of Skylab, and an astronaut's complete moon-walking suit....it's the artifacts, stupid. (Smith 2004)

Skylab module in NASM.
Image courtesy of http://whizzospace.com/

At the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communication Complex near Canberra, around 70 000 people each year come to the Visitor Centre to see a piece of the Moon and items of flown space hardware. The material culture of space exploration captures something that no written word can convey, and an object that has flown in space is perceived as more charged with meaning than a model, prototype or unflown spacecraft.

The material culture of space exploration is clearly seen as significant. However, its significance is often assumed to be self-evident. A well-used aphorism in the space community maintains that space exploration is the outcome of an innate human urge to explore. Thus, space objects are perceived to have a globally understood meaning that appeals to our common human nature (Gorman 2005). Just as the great navigators and explorers ventured out into unknown seas to discover the New World, so we have now left the cradle of Earth to satisfy a fundamental curiosity about our universe. This curiosity is one of the most commonly cited rationales for pursuing space exploration, far more palatable than the realpolitik of military and commercial dominance.

Another implicit and popular model for understanding the significance of space material culture is what I have called the Space Race model (Gorman 2005). In this formulation, objects and places have significance for their contribution to the Cold War confrontation between the USA and the USSR. This model focuses on these two states, ignoring the achievements of other countries like France, Britain, China, Japan and Australia in the development of space technology. It emphasises competitiveness rather than cooperation in space, and overlooks the contributions of and impacts on non-spacefaring countries, such as the colonial territories where potentially dangerous space installations were located. The relationship of space exploration to inequalities between the developed and developing world is unexplored, and indeed unproblematic, in the Space Race scenario, where US hegemony in space is assumed to benefit all.

The significance space artefacts might hold, therefore, is far from obvious.

Note: This is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2005 The Archaeology of Orbital Space.

In Australian Space Science Conference 2005; pages: [338-357]. Melbourne: RMIT University

References

Anderson, M. 1997 Material culture and the cultural environment: Objects and places. Australia: State of the Environment Technical Paper Series (Natural and Cultural Heritage), Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories, Canberra

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

Smith, Bill 2004 It’s the artifacts, stupid! Guest Editorial. The Mineralogical Record 35(2):106-107

 

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

  

Space heritage and the Dublin Principles for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage Sites, Structures, Areas and Landscapes

Last year, the 17th ICOMOS General Assembly approved the 'Dublin Principles' for the the Conservation of Industrial Heritage, Sites, Structures, Areas and Landscapes. The Principles are the joint work of the International Council on Monuments and Sites and the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH). This is naturally of interest since it covers the material culture of space exploration, which, despite the romance of rockets and astronauts, is about as industrial as you can get. You can find the final text here.

So what are the principles?  They start with a definition:

The industrial heritage consists of sites, structures, complexes, areas and landscapes as well as the related machinery, objects or documents that provide evidence of past or ongoing industrial processes of production, the extraction of raw materials, their transformation into goods, and the related energy and transport infrastructures.

This definition is both broad enough and precise enough to apply to space complexes consisting of terrestrial and orbital/planetary/interplanetary components. The interdependence of 'multiple site operations or systems' is emphasised in a few places in the Principles, and I think this is important, both as a feature of industry in a globalised capitalist world, and as a management principle - you can't just consider a site in isolation: the connections are part of its significance.

The definition does not mention time frame, but the introduction makes clear that the focus of the Principles is the heritage of the Industrial Revolution and the modern world.

Note also that documents are both sources of information, and part of the evidence: both artefact and research tool at the same time.

The significance and value of industrial heritage is intrinsic to the structures or sites themselves, their material fabric, components, machinery and setting, expressed in the industrial landscape, in written documentation, and also in the intangible records contained in memories, arts and customs.

A frequent question I get when I talk about space stuff to non-archaeologists is why we need to keep the actual material when we have (often) the maps, plans, photographs, documents, etc. The answer is simple. Words and drawings can lie. Well, they can be inaccurate, or represent something only from a particular perspective (both in the drawing sense or the point of view sense), or omit critical information. (These inaccuracies, perspectives and omissions are themselves interesting to study). And anyone who still thinks that a photograph in some way represents an objective reality needs to get with the programme. That's not to say that photographs are not incredibly important as historical documents; only that to see them as standing in for the actual object or place is very naive in a 19th century spiritualist kind of way. Yes, scientists, I'm talking to you, with my humanities hat on.

So the fabric, the physical stuff, is important. Where a document of any kind does not tell us what we need to know, or we want another perspective, we need to go back to the original thing. This statement also picks up on the importance of the setting (following the Burra Charter) and the intangibles. 

Here is the first action statement: I. Document and understand industrial heritage structures, sites, areas and landscapes and their values. This research and documentation should include human skills and knowledge, should be interdisciplinary, and should include consultation with stakeholders. All this is standard fare for heritage managers, but the following is perhaps a departure, and as a recommendation for practice, has all kinds of implications:

Research and preservation of documentary records, company archives, building plans, and specimens of industrial products should be encouraged. The evaluation and assessment of documents should be undertaken by an appropriate specialist in the industry to which they relate to determine their heritage significance.

This is about encouraging corporations and industries to value their own history and heritage, and preserve the company archives. I've certainly had the experience of contacting a manufacturer to enquire about particular documents or archives, only to find that someone has chucked them out just the week before because they were taking up space, or they've got lost in some building move, or a recent employee isn't even aware of the company's history or significance. The second part of the statement above acknowledges that modern industries are so complex and specialist that a heritage manager can't, by themselves, hope to gain a good understanding of what documents mean and why they might be significant: an industry specialist should not only be consulted, but should evaluate and assess these documents.

II. Ensure effective protection and conservation of the industrial heritage structures, sites, areas and landscapes.

This protection should occur through legal, policy and administrative measures, while remaining aware of the rules for corporations and investments, trades or intellectual property such as patents, and standards applicable to active industrial operations. In other words, the relationship of the heritage to the contemporary industry. Not something you really have to worry about with other kinds of heritage.

Are there legal measures for the protection of space heritage? It depends where you are. Some countries have heritage legislation that only covers things of a certain age, for example, over 100 years old. So contemporary industrial heritage may only be protected by legislation when enough time has passed, by which time sites may have been demolished and built over, vandalised, recycled, etc, and the knowledge, customs and memories associated with them have passed away with the people who worked there. (See below for more on time frames).

Heritage legislation may also not cover the extra-planetary components of a place or site, if we consider them to be connected, which we do. This is where heritage, which is usually legally protected at the national level, comes up against the Outer Space Treaty 1967, which makes it impossible for national jurisdiction to be extended into space. There is a legal, administrative and policy gap here.

This is a very practical bit: Integrated inventories and lists of structures, sites, areas, landscapes, their setting and associated objects, documents, drawings and archives or intangible heritage should be developed. So we need to know what's there, and we need to integrate the documents with the physical stuff and with the intangible stuff. This recognises the complexity and interconnectedness of industrial processes, as well as the distinct nature of the contemporary past: as Harrison and Schofield (2010) have pointed out, something that characterises the contemporary archaeological record is the superfluity and abundance of information and artefacts of all kinds. Because the passage of time has not yet removed massive chunks of the record through decay and destruction, we have so much stuff that needs to be understood; almost too much stuff. 

For ongoing industries, heritage management should be integrated with their operation and recognise that this operation may in fact carry heritage value.

The machinery, fittings and related objects are just as important as the actual buildings. This is crucial, as frequently such places are approached from an architectural perspective only, and the movable stuff gets sold, scrapped or recycled elsewhere. Not to say that these options might not sometimes be appropriate - there is something nice about the re-use of industrial materials - but losing them may diminish the significance of the buildings too.

Time frames are very important:

Legal and administrative frameworks should be developed to enable authorities to respond quickly to the closure of operating industrial heritage sites and complexes to prevent removal or destruction of significant elements such as machinery, industrial objects or related records.

I'm not sure quite how we would do this, but it is a kind of rescue archaeology or salvage at its most immediate. What is not explicit here is the assumption (for which we have plenty of evidence, however) of how little value people place on industrial heritage. If intervention is not performed, then the stuff will be lost to us, because industries will not of their own volition take care of their own heritage. So we need to be proactive: to have some idea beforehand of the likely value of a company's resources, and be at the ready when they go under and liquidate their assets. Heritage management through the financial news pages .......

The classic example of this is the Woomera launch site in South Australia. At the end of the Europa and Apollo programmes in the early 1970s, infrastructure was demolished, sold for scrap, reused by the Centre Nationale des Etudes Spatiales at the Kourou launch site in French Guiana, and sometimes destroyed in frustration and despair by those whose dreams of space had been sold down the river by the perfidious Brits.

III. Conserve and maintain the industrial heritage structures, sites, areas and landscapes.

Adaptive reuse is highlighted as a way to sustain an industrial place while respecting the fabric. Following the Burra Charter, physical interventions should be reversible and documented. If places or machinery have to be dismantled, they should be thoroughly documented and oral histories done.

IV. Present and communicate the heritage dimensions and values of industrial structures, sites, areas and landscapes to raise public and corporate awareness, and support training and research.

This also is standard fare - interpretation is an important part of heritage management, for many reasons: to justify the resources used in undertaking heritage work; to give a product back to the community; to engage the community in their own heritage. Here again we see the view that companies (corporations) do not value their own heritage and need to be supported in this.

Public awareness is, in the context of industrial heritage, of a different order to other kinds of heritage. The industrial is often constructed as opposed to some kind of generalised bucolic idyll that is unconsciously held to be more related to the 'natural' human spirit than the gritty, filthy, coal and disease-ridden industries that existed only to screw profit out of people and the earth. I think there are social memories of the industrial revolution that evoke negative responses to industry, even now. I guess I am articulating this for the first time in my head, so I haven't fully thought through what this means, but I think there is some kind of truth in it. Industry is the opposite of what many people consider heritage to be. And yet, in terms of working lives, industry engages and mobilises huge numbers of people who have knowledge, memories, practices, rituals, and frequently great pride in their work. They just don't necessarily think of it as having heritage value.

Finally, the principles conclude with this statement:

Programmes and facilities such as visits of active industrial heritage sites and the presentation of their operations as well as the stories and intangible heritage associated with their history, machinery and industrial processes, industrial or city museums and interpretation centres, exhibitions, publications, websites, regional or trans-boundary itineraries should be developed and sustained as means to raise awareness and appreciation for the industrial heritage in the full richness of its meaning for contemporary societies. These should ideally be located at the heritage sites itself where the process of industrialisation has taken place and can be best communicated. Wherever possible, national and international institutions in the field of research and conservation of heritage should be empowered to use them as educational facilities for the general public and the professional communities.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Communicating the archaeology of the contemporary past: an experiment in methodology

Recently, I took some graduate students out to one of my favourite places, the former Orroral Valley Tracking Station in Namadgi National Park, Australian Capital Territory. We did some normal archaeological things (pedestrian transect survey, mapping with DGPS, RTK-DPGS and baseline-offset), but I also wanted to do something different, to see if methodologies touted as being distinctive to the contemporary past had anything to offer us as archaeologists.

This is what I asked the students to do:

All that remains of a once vibrant facility, where over 100 people worked in shifts around the clock, is now concrete footings: the spikes and sky-gazing arcs of numerous antennas are represented by flat surfaces over which a person can walk without really registering what they are - as we observed with numerous Outward Bound hikers, who filed over the main antenna footing as if it were only a changing texture underfoot.  They seem to barely notice the interpretive signs. There are two generations of interpretive signs at Orroral; most people agree that the older ones are not very effective, but the more recent ones, which are far more informative, are only present at a few places near the most accessible parts of the site.  There's a lot of scope to do more, and this was also something I wanted the students to think about too.

So what happened?  Was this experiment worth it?  Most definitely, but not necessarily in the ways I was expecting.  And I wasn't really sure what I was expecting!

A few students took a little while to feel comfortable with the fact that it was THEIR instincts that were important here, and what appeared to be stupid to them was really exactly what I was looking for. Some were initially cautious, but no-one refused to do it or made too much of a fuss about it, despite the fact that it wasn't being assessed.

The first result was that approaching the site in this way caused the students to be very observant, paying attention to the meaning of ephemeral traces and relationships between structures.  They saw things that I had never paid any particular attention to, even though I was far more familiar with the site than they. Helen wrote an evocative piece about the fading white paint outlining parking places outside buildings such as the Minitrack Operations Building, a presence implying the absence of cars and workers. She noted that while these lines were "Ephemera appearing on no plan or map or survey, they have yet outlasted the buildings and hardware and people". Tom used photographs, from the interpretation panels, of the tracking station in operation and located the same perspectives now, juxtaposing the vibrancy of the peopled landscape with the silence of the concrete footings, and the decades of tree growth since the original photographs were taken. Steve put the people back in: on the flat floors without walls, he posed his fellow students carrying out activities that would once have happened in that building:  serving food in the canteen, sitting on a toilet, processing data in the operations building while looking at the view out to the 26 m antenna, sweeping the concrete curtain around the dish's base.

Cultural significance is not just about historic events and people; it's also about the senses, or what the Burra Charter (1999) defines as aesthetic significance (NOT to be confused with aesthetics).  Some students chose to engage senses other than sight, using both the real and imagined sounds of the site to evoke Orroral as it was in the past and in the present. Joan put a schematic engineering drawing of the 26 m antenna together with a broadcast from space: the voices of the astronauts communicating with ground control as the dish provided comms for a space shuttle mission, thus giving life and rapid movement to this monolithic structure. Jon showed a picture of the almost desolate, windswept northern end of the site, the valley enclosed by a bowl of alpine ranges that isolate it from radio interference, and played a recording of the wind and solitary bird calls: the loneliness of the abandoned tracking station that once spoke to the stars.

Poetry featured too. Lance asked us to close our eyes while he recited his words, removing us from the large common room and into his private vision; Susan used a whiteboard to draw the features of the site as she wove the outline of a yet-to-be-written poem together from fragments of the past and the present, a work in progress.

Susan, Liam and the poem taking shape on the whiteboard

John, our intrepid technical officer, emerged in his fluoro vest, set up the dumpy level tripod, tipped a bag of rubbish on to the floor, and lay down with his hat over his face: the postprandial nap amidst the wreckage of lunch. The rubbish had been collected from the site: he had very carefully picked up drink and food containers on which the use-by date was after 2011, reasoning that they were actually rubbish and not artefacts as they half-existed in the future. In this careful act he has captured all the paradoxes of the archaeology of the contemporary past, and I think he was a little taken aback when I insisted that we keep his collection for analysis .......

John naps amidst the artefacts of the future

Another principle of contemporary archaeology is 'making the familiar unfamiliar'. When you're looking at recent material culture, we are so used to it that we don't necessarily perceive its role in our lives. But, as Colleen Beck has pointed out, much of the technology of the recent past is anything but familiar. We all know of nuclear testing and the terrible deployments of these weapons, but could any of us identify the components of a test site and figure out what went on there? We all use satellite technology, but could we identify Orroral Valley as a tracking station by the layout and antenna footings alone? These kinds of places, which define the global technologies of the recent past, are frequently inaccessible and mysterious. They need interpreting; they're places that help us make sense of the world we live in.

Jonathan showed a photo of the 9 m antenna footing: much more intimate in scale than the big dish. He talked about popular quizzes where people have to guess what an object is. Asking us to place ourselves in the role of a 'lay' listener/viewer, he asked 'What is it?'.  Indeed. What, actually, is this circle of concrete with a sloped half-amphitheatrical wall behind it? How do we describe this structure?

The students connected a place, trace or structure with imagined human actions - and hence stories - creating new avenues for approaching the interpretation of the site and making it real. But the most stunning outcome was when the students presented their pieces before the small audience of ourselves and four visitors, Johnn, Geoff, Adam and Liam, who had joined us for dinner that night. I wasn't sure if our guests would want to stay for this part of the evening, but they were riveted. Afterwards, Johnn said 'You should do this for the ABC'. He made an interesting argument: because there were nine small snapshots of the site, all highlighting completely different things in different ways, there was something to appeal to the most diverse of audiences. If one approach didn't do it for you, then one of the others was bound to. So in terms of communicating with non-archaeologists, he saw this as a way of engaging the public effectively. The very personal choices the students made about what appealed to them, what caught their attention and how they expressed it, mirrored the diversity of the broader community, creating points of entree into what otherwise might be opaque technology. I was very struck by this insight, that reaffirmed a position outlined in Harrison and Schofield's recent textbook on the archaeology of the contemporary past: that we are the best authorities on the archaeology of us; that the process of autoanthropology or autoethnography is revealing of our own approaches to the material world.

And of course the question you're all asking - was there an interpretive dance?  Yes there was, but Chantal was too shy to perform it!

Theory, atheory or anti-theory? The state of play in Australian archaeology

I wasn't planning to go to the annual Australian Archaeological Association conference this year (it's in Toowoomba from 1-3 December), but pressure from my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis (president of the Association) who wants company in the presidential penthouse, plus an enticing suggestion from my new partner-in-crime Tom Sapienza to run a session on theory, has put an end to that.

Here is our session abstract. It's actually nearly too late to submit a paper if you were feeling so inclined, but we will consider anything, however briefly. 

Theory, atheory or anti-theory?  Issues in Australian archaeology

From students to professionals, many archaeologists in Australia today deny that they are operating in a theoretical framework, or question the usefulness of theoretical approaches to their practice. With ever greater numbers of archaeologists in academia and cultural heritage management, what are the implications of this retreat from archaeological theory for the discipline? Since all data are theory-laden, what does Australian archaeology's particular interaction with theoretical matters say about our data?

Because of Australia’s history, location and unique archaeological record, archaeologists here have the potential to offer new theoretical insights into such questions as the origins of behavioural modernity, the relationship between lithics and social behaviour, cultural responses to climate change and the role of communities in creating heritage, to name a few.  Despite the existence of outstanding scholarship in many of these areas, we suggest that an a- or anti-theoretical culture, perhaps related to a broader Australian anti-intellectual tradition and the “cultural cringe”, has limited the realisation of this potential. Moreover, disciplines such as history and geography are currently engaging with a “material turn” (eg Bennett and Joyce 2010), acknowledging that material culture is a legitimate and indeed necessary component of their enquiries. As they look to archaeology to understand how this works, we find ourselves in an awkward position. The question of whether archaeology has developed its own theories, as opposed to borrowing in bower-bird fashion from other disciplines, remains contentious. In this session, we want to examine the nature of theory in Australian archaeology today, both in the academic and private sectors.  We invite contributions which address, but are not limited to, the following themes: 

• Teaching archaeological theory• Theory and communities; theory and students• Contemporary theoretical developments in Australia• Case studies in the application of theory• Historical analyses• The use of theory in cultural heritage management

References
Bennett, Tony and Patrick Joyce (eds) 2010  Material Powers:  Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn.  London and New York: Routledge

Alice Gorman Alice.Gorman@flinders.edu.au

Tom Sapienza sapienza@berkeley.edu

Space junk and its affinity for water: Columbia's fuel tank

Drought reveals Columbia shuttle debris
Analysis by Irene Klotz
Thu Aug 4, 2011

One of 18 fuel tanks that flew aboard the U.S. space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart as it re-entered the atmosphere for landing on Feb. 1, 2003, has been found in a lake in drought-stricken Texas. "This is one of the bigger pieces," says NASA's Lisa Malone, head of public affairs at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the Columbia debris is stored.

The space center got a call late last week from police officers in Texas who were asking for help identifying a large spherical tank newly exposed in the receding water of Lake Nacogdoches. It was a match to gas tanks on a pallet in Columbia, enabling its seven member crew, which included Israel's Ilan Ramon, to stay in space conducting research for 16 days. As Columbia flew through the atmosphere for landing, its left wing, which had been damaged by a debris strike during launch, broke off, triggering the ship's destruction over East Texas and Louisiana and killing the crew.

Malone said NASA will retrieve the tank and add it to the rest of the recovered wreckage, which is stored inside the shuttle's Vehicle Assembly Building.  Unlike the Challenger debris, which was buried in an abandoned missile silo at the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, NASA wanted to make pieces recovered from Columbia available to researchers, in the hopes that more can be learned to benefit future space travelers.

Dr Space Junk's Heritage Tour of the Solar System

A  lovely poster for my recent seminar, created by the talented Lisa Bennett (Flinders University).