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.

A funny thing happened on the way to the spaceport

Back in 2005, I was lucky enough to visit the Centre Spatial Guyanais in French Guyana. This is where the Ariane rockets are launched. It was amazing. I spent a couple of days in the archives, and drank a lot of ti-punch. Later, I incorporated some of my research into an article.

There were a few other people on the official part of the visit, and we took a group shot at the end. An acquaintance thought it might be amusing to re-imagine the Kourou spaceport as a landing rather than a launching site.....

What do they eat in space?

labeley.com

'Tonight she was glittering and wild': an eclipse of the moon.

A couple of years ago I made an excursion into lunar poetry to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. At the moment I'm investigating the cultural significance of the entire moon in the context of proposed lunar mining. A random train of connections led to this evocative poem by Elizabeth Ridell. I like the conjunction of small domestic events and sensations with the astronomical event happening in the skies above, and the moon wild and glittering.....

Eclipse of the Moon

Elizabeth Ridell

This is a profitable night, the moon’s eclipse
at last a reason for not sleeping.
There is a reason to wake every hour
to observe the shape and size of door and window
and wall and picture frame,
turn on the lamp, open the book
and let it fall away, reason to rise, make tea,
pad to the door,
stand on cool tiles
to watch the invaded moon.
I see a jagged one third of her beauty left
and somewhere, black layers back,
a rim of light.

Sometimes the moon strays into daytime skies
Ophelia-wan.
Tonight she was glittering and wild
until the mask slid down,
erasing all her gold.

Source: The ABC Book of Australian Poetry: a treasury for young people compiled by Libby Hathorn (ABC Books 2010)

Found on https://ozpoemaday.wordpress.com/tag/elizabeth-riddell/

Artefacts are the skeletons of people's minds

The words above popped into my mind recently as I was thinking about the archaeological stuff I wanted to teach the first years. I wrote them on a piece of paper and drew a box around them, to distinguish it from other fragments of thoughts, scribbled in passing on the same piece of paper, which go something like this:

Naga

Huxley - Heaven and Hell

Inhumation

World of Chickens

I will figure out what I was thinking about them another time. For now, I'll just try to excavate my thoughts around the bony artefacts. I was thinking about them as physical skeletons, fleshed out by wishes, dreams, meanings, social interactions, the accumulation of touches, the passing of time, the clothing of use.

The brain, of course, already has a bone in the form of the skull. When I'm thinking about the skeletons of mind, I mean the artefacts are the hard bits of the soft brain tissue. They just happen to be outside the cranium and sometimes vastly larger than it.

While living, in its systemic context, the artefact can be visible or invisible depending on where or when it is interacted with. It can be in the foreground or the background. It might appear in dreams as something half-registered, barely impinging on the dream-consciousness. It might be perceived only from its shadow. 

(And indeed this begs the question of virtual worlds and how humans interact with objects which cross different registers of existence).

The artefact moves in and out of our perception in a pattern much like a dynamical system. Then people for whom the artefact was meaningful pass on, or discard it. Eventually, it ends up at the point of lowest energy - it's archaeological context.

Dynamical system. Image courtesy of Henry Harrison
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/40812-dynamical-system-viewer

The layers of organs, muscles, skin, slowly decay as it falls out of memory. The forces of taphonomy start to strip it down and pare it back from corpse to skeleton.

Let's take the metaphor further and think about the mineralisation of the once dynamic and malleable artefact. It takes on the character of stone and sinks like one to the bottom of the pool where only the rare worm tunnels through the silt to touch its surface in a polychaete kiss.

And then we dig it up.......and hope to apprehend its place within the brain as a calcreted thought.

Culture on the Moon: bodies in time and space

This is an excerpt from my just-published paper Culture on the Moon: Bodies in Time and Space (Archaeologies 12(1):110-128

This was very much an arena where masculinity was defined for the future of space. Automation and lack of control were equated with femininity. US experts cited Valentina Tereshkova’s successful orbit in 1963 to mean that the heavily automated Vostok vehicle did not require a skilled operator. MargaretWeitekamp argues that 'Demonstrating that a woman could perform those tasks would diminish their prestige' (2004:3). So strong was this ideology that the USA did not send a female astronaut into space until Sally Ride became a crew member of the space shuttle Challenger for STS-7 in 1983. 

By contrast, cosmonauts were the epitome of the ‘'new Soviet man’' (Gerovitch 2007), the ‘cog in the machine’ celebrated in Bolshevik political and poetic imagination. Sergei Korolev, the leader of the Soviet space program, was opposed to any active role for the cosmonauts, but as they, like the astronauts, were drawn from a test pilot background, the battle to preserve the aviation role of pilot was similarly played out. The unknowns and technological constraints of creating a successful lunar mission led to the development of similar human–machine interfaces and similar levels of autonomy in both programs (Gerovitch 2007). At this level, at least, evidence suggests that a hypothetical USSR lunar landing site might reflect many similarities to the US series. 

The Apollo 11 surface mission was highly choreographed and scripted (NASA 1969), but at that point no person of Earth knew exactly what the experience of being on the lunar surface would be like. In the gaps between the script and the actual actions of the astronauts, there is a window where minds and bodies express their individual and cultural differences. Where there was choice, what did the astronauts choose to do? What determined those choices?

(Gorman 2016:122)

References

Gerovitch, S. 2007. ‘New Soviet Man’ Inside the Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft, Design, and the Construction of Communism. Osiris 22:135–157.

NASA Lunar Surface Operations Office Mission Operations Branch Flight Crew Support Division 1969. Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Operations Plan. Houston: Manned Spaceflight Centre June 27, FINAL version of document.

Weitekamp, M. 2004. Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Dr Space Junk wears the Orbiting Solar Observatory

In this picture I'm wearing one of my favourite pieces of jewellery, a pendant made from a NASA Goddard commemorative plate with spacecraft around the circumference. One of them is an Orbiting Solar Observatory, a satellite series I am quite interested in as it was tracked by Orroral Valley.

I'm actually standing on the balcony at the Camperdown cinema (Vic), a beautiful old heritage-listed building, where I was about to give a talk to introduce a screening of In the Shadow of the Moon. This was in 2008, I think. I had a fabulous time with the Corangamite Film Society and RiAus.

He said, she said, and what the dictionary said

Friend! When a woman answers your question, don't believe her; but if she keeps silence, believe her even less.

(Polish proverb from Women in Proverbs Worldwide http://www.womeninproverbsworldwide.com/ )

He said, she said

There's an aphorism frequently applied to rape cases. In the absence of witnesses, detectable physical injury or, these days, DNA evidence, people say it comes down to a matter of 'he said, she said'. At which point they throw up their hands and exclaim it's too hard: what are we to do?

But think about it. Although the words are symmetrical, this is not a balanced equation. The problem is not what he said. It's what she said. Because she is likely to lie or exaggerate. And if you believe her, a man's life will be ruined. 

Only, in reality, she is more likely to be disbelieved, and his life is rarely ruined. Her life, clearly, is of lesser consequence. This is because women's speech, how it sounds, what they say, and its relation to 'truth', is suspect and problematic. There is no similar expectation that men will lie about committing rape or sexual harassment. Everyone, on the contrary, is in a hurry to believe them. They're a 'good man',  they wouldn't hurt a fly, and so it goes on.

Nothing demonstrates the hidden foundations of this discourse better than the so-called provocation defence, still accepted in a few Australian states and in other countries. It allows men to literally get away with murdering their female partners. The principle is that if provoked, it is understandable that a normal person may 'snap' and lose control of their actions, so that they don't realise what they are doing. It is most frequently used as a defence by men who kill women (but also for what has been called 'gay panic').

In one case, which happened in the last decade, a man murdered his wife because she had told him she was leaving him for someone else. As he reported it in court, she had taunted him and said her new boyfriend was a better lover. At this point, he killed her.

There were no witnesses. No-one can corroborate that she said those words to him. She was not there to tell her side of the story. But what 'he said she said' was enough for the judge to rule that he had been provoked. He was convicted of manslaughter, and given a light sentence. She stayed dead.

There's been too many of these over the years, including the high profile case of Vicky Cleary, that turned her heartbroken brother Phil Cleary into a campaigner against male violence and the complicity of the law.

When he speaks, it's credible. When she speaks, it's not.

The twittering of birds

The very sound of women's voices is questionable. Many people (including some women) can't stand hearing women's voices on the radio. They're too high. They sound like children. They don't have enough gravitas to read the news. The number of comments online which run along the lines of 'I'm not sexist, but I can't listen to a female sports commentator' are legion. 

Women's speech has been compared to the twittering of birds. (Perhaps this is partially why Twitter has been such a huge factor in invigorating new feminist activism). There's even evidence to suggest that as women progress into higher positions, they lower their voice in order to fend off these sorts of reactions.

Over the last couple of weeks the language used to describe women's speech has been in the spotlight. In July 2014, Nordette Adams pointed out that the online Oxford Dictionaries used 'a rabid feminist' as an example of usage in the definition for 'rabid'. You can read her post about it here. In January 2016 Michael Oman-Reagan also noticed this and began tweeting about a number of other examples of usage that were .....dodgy, to say the least.  His account is here.

It turned out that there were many negative words that were associated with women's speech. The included rabid, shrill, grating, nagging, bossy, shrew, gossip. As a theme, they all add up to support this very, very old idea that there's something wrong with what 'she said'. 

What's in a name? Or an adjective?

What a feminist says is like a slavering, diseased dog: full of violence, unable to discriminate between friend and foe, taken by madness, unintelligible, not obeying orders to sit, stay. She is a bitch, after all.

Women's voices are shrill, high-pitched, grating, piercing, unpleasant to listen to. It's even worse when there's a group of them. You can't distinguish between one woman and the next, they all sound alike.

When women speak, they are nagging men, harassing them 'to do something'. Isn't this rich territory for comedians and those dreadful cartoons that appear in the sort of magazines you used to read in the doctor's waiting room? Like Readers Digest and, oh yes, the New Yorker? They are being unreasonable, asking the man to do something that's not important, or he'll do when he's ready. And they've asked him more than once! Wives, if you nag, you'll annoy your husband, he'll leave you for a younger woman.

This trope is accepted without considering the power dynamics behind it - the man annoyed that he is expected to pull his weight in the house instead of having everything done for him, the woman trying to manage house, children and frequently a job in which she is not supported or treated as an equal. Women think they are sharing family responsibilities equally but as their labour is not recognised as such, their partners think they are being unfairly asked to do additional work. The use of the term 'nagging' to describe requests to share work makes it the woman's problem. I could go on.

She's not the boss, she's just bossy. Her authority is not accepted. You don't have to do what she says. 

She gossips. With other women. It's idle, frivolous, malicious. She might be talking about men, about YOU! with the other women. You can't believe anything she says, it's just gossip. It's not true. Those women, when they get together.....

I grew up learning that men talk, women gossip. One day, I think I was at high school, as I waited for my father to stop talking to someone so we could leave, I realised that it wasn't true. He was not talking about serious matters. HE WAS GOSSIPING. It was one of those baby steps on my way to becoming a RABID FEMINIST.

Grrrr.

Or perhaps I became a shrew. Girls start out nice and docile, but they become shrews and harridans, with opinions, nagging, always wanting their own way. The other women got to them, you see. Don't listen to what the other women say.

Don't listen when they say it happened to them too. It's rumour, speculation, hearsay. It's not evidence. It's just what 'she said'.

Women. Don't talk. Your words are dangerous. Your words can get you in trouble. Your words are the reason you die.

Image courtesy of http://www.halfthedeck.com/

Acknowledgements: many thanks to Michael Oman-Reagan for his fearlessness and strong support of women's voices.
Note: screenshots are taken from Oxford Dictionaries (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/) on 30 January 2016. As a result of the discussion, they are undertaking a review of the examples used.

The Anthropocene, the nonhuman and the solar system are grand challenges for archaeology

What are the grand challenges for archaeology? Last year, a group of mostly US researchers (Kintigh et al 2014) published the results of a survey conducted in order to find out. The result was a series of general research areas and specific questions, most of which are core issues in what we do, but with some inevitable blind spots and holes.

Here's a few that resonate with me in terms of my own research in space archaeology (thanks to Publishing Archaeology for extracting them from the paper in a nice list):

•  Why and how do social inequalities emerge, grow, persist, and diminish, and with what consequences?
• How do humans occupy extreme environments, and what cultural and biological adaptations emerged as a result?
• How have human activities shaped Earth’s biological and physical systems, and when did humans become dominant drivers of these systems?
• How do spatial and material reconfigurations of landscapes and experiential fields affect societal development?

Archaeology blogger Doug Rocks-Macqueen thinks there's quite a bit more to be said on these grand challenges. He's asked his fellow bloggers to respond in what ever way they choose, and that's a challenge I can't refuse (bursts into song a la Gilbert and Sullivan).

Challenges are often something that we let others define for us. Something I've gradually learnt over the last decade of being an academic (I was a heritage consultant before, and actually during, this time as well), is to trust my voice.  Part of this is allowing deeply buried or incoherent thoughts to rise to the surface and be given shape. Another part of it is turning things you think you're stupid for not understanding properly upside down and making them into questions or problems to be investigated. So I've delved into my brain to work out what I really think, and this is what emerged.

Put actual people back into the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a challenge, because despite the brilliant Matt Edgeworth being on the Anthropocene Working Group, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of awareness among that community that there is already a discipline devoted to human-environment interactions in the past. Kintigh et al (2014:15-16) say:

Despite producing key data, archaeologists have largely been left out of this discussion. This is a major limitation, since archaeology, drawing on cross-disciplinary tools capable of tracking the increasingly dominant role of humans in Earth systems, brings a deep-time perspective that stands to make significant contributions to understanding how humans have shaped the Earth.

I even read one paper in which the author coined the term 'technofossil' for objects made of contemporary materials. Dude, they're just artefacts, and not always the most durable ones in human history at that. And in my observation there's little understanding of taphonomy in terms of how archaeological data is derived ....

We can't leave this one to the geologists and earth systems scientists. We need to make ourselves visible and relevant to this debate. What I think this means is synthesising archaeological data at a planetary scale in a way we've rarely done before. Imagine if we calculated the total weight of stone removed from original contexts and moved into others after being knapped, quarried, sculpted, built, used, discarded, from the Pleistocene to the present! In effect, we need to act as planetary archaeologists visiting from elsewhere.

And in this, the fine-grained detail you only get from intensive analysis of a site or an artefact type is still absolutely critical. It is the cumulative effect of living people carrying out individual actions in accordance with their worldview which creates the Anthropocene. As archaeologists, this is at the core of what we do everyday: meshing individual agency with broad scale patterns through time and space.

In some ways I kind of resent being drawn in to the debate on the Anthropocene. Part of me wants to resist trends and buzzwords, as hard as that is to do sometimes. But there is no doubt that this is shaping up to be the big theme of the next decade across all the sciences and humanities, and we need to be leading it, not following.

Last year Matt Edgeworth edited a forum section in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology on The Archaeology of the Anthropocene. I recommend it to you.

Make humans the environment for other objects and things

Another big challenge is almost the polar opposite of the Anthropocene, which makes human actions central. As archaeologists, we're pretty focused on humans, because that is what differentiates us from geologists and palaeontologists, after all. But everyone else, it seems, is leaving humans behind. Animals, plants, microbes, and the inanimate are all being drawn out of the background into the foreground. The very definition of what it is to be human is being reshaped by looking at the human body as a microbial biome and considering its continuity with what we previously considered external to it. Then there are cyborgs, robots, AIs, artilects, hyperobjects, superobjects, posthumanism and transhumanism. It's just not fashionable to look at the human body as a coherent entity or unit of analysis any more.

So where does that leave archaeology? We've done more than our fair share of theorising about the interaction between humans and material stuff, with perspectives ranging from environmental determinism to phenomenology and taking in actor-network theory, social theory and a myriad more along the way. (Some argue that archaeologists have always been bower birds and have never formulated truly original theories about the world of objects. In some ways, I tend to agree). We've questioned the meanings of the human body and the boundaries between the 'cultural' and the 'natural'. But will we be stranded in an intellectual backwater as the human is completely bypassed?

Maybe not. I think our contribution to these frameworks lies in inverting our lens and looking at the experience of a mountain, a microbe, a mammoth, a melaleuca as human bodies, actions and technologies interact with it. Let's swap subject and object, or situate both in a flat or object-oriented ontology. How did the life of a flea change when hominins lost most of their body hair? How does the daily or annual life of a flowering plant change when Neanderthal people move into Shanidar Cave?  I'm not talking about use, or impact, or adaptation.  Perhaps the human body is still the unit of analysis, just from the perspective of something else.

Matrioshka Brain, by Steve Bowers
Orion's Arm Universe Project

My own engagement with this challenge at present is looking at materials and structures like degenerate matter and Matrioshka Brains, both far beyond the human scale of existence. I'm interested in what the future holds if we start from the premise that we have always been adapted to large scale networks mediated by material culture - in the words of Andy Clark, 'natural born cyborgs'. Despite dire warnings about AIs who are going to destroy humanity, I don't see why we have to be gloomy all the time. This is just a deficit in imagination. Sometimes it's nice to focus on creativity and transformation. Perhaps that's one reason why we're archaeologists.

Take the solar system perspective

There's no mention of space in Kintigh et al's survey, which is a little disappointing. I'd like to think we'd made a bigger impact than that. But how can space not be a grand challenge?

This is not about going to the Moon or Mars in order to do space archaeology. But archaeologists know all about colonisation, contact, impacts on the environment, adaptation, social life and things. We've seen how population growth and technology change have played out on Earth. Whether your vision of space is dystopian or utopian, we can't go blindly onto other planets without considering the deep history of sentient life on our own. This is archaeology's greatest strength in my view: different futures can't be imagined without understanding the diversity of the past.

I think archaeologists have an important role to play in shaping the discourses around space exploration. The usual rationales trotted out are riddled with 19th century ideas about progress and curiosity and exploration and growth, some drawing very explicitly on assumed human imperatives to colonise and explore. In other words, there's a particular (masculine) version of behavioural modernity that is co-opted to justify the current models of space occupation. Needless to say, I hate that stuff almost as much as I hate evolutionary psychology, which is quite a bit actually.

At this point, however, the two challenges outlined above come to be part of the same question. Really, we should be taking the perspective that Earth is just one of the planets colonised by life at this point in time, and contextualise ourselves within a whole solar system. If there is anything living on other planets, then perhaps they will have their own 'cene'. We can't judge the scale of the Anthropocene in isolation after all. So we need to develop concepts to frame humans a part of a much bigger system than just one planet. Continuities and discontinuities are important here, and we need to be wary of drawing the lines in all the wrong places.

Elsewhere I've argued that a constant gravity is assumed for terrestrial archaeology, and for space archaeology we have to stop considering it as "normal" and recognise that it's just one gravitational regime to which culture is adapted. This is not an entirely new idea: the seeds of it were present in the 19th century (think Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Otis Mason Tufton). I think one of the challenges of space archaeology is how it makes us look back on Earth, and I don't mean as a pale blue dot, a blue marble, a spaceship, Gaia or the so-called 'overview effect'. Call me unromantic but I want a more robust and nuanced philosophy of existence in the cosmos.

Finally

When I started writing, I didn't know this would be where I'd end up. To be honest, parts of it come as a surprise to me, but in a good way. So it seems I've set some challenges for myself here; I hope this discussion may provide some inspiration for others too.

See you in orbit.

Space Age Archaeology: A Retro-blog-spective

Just because it's the New Year, I've decided to make a list of my most-read posts from each year since 2004, when I started this blog.

2004: Flying Saucers at Woomera 

 In September, I was researching Australian space history at the National Archives office in Adelaide. This was in the days when you sat there for hours furiously scribbling notes in pencil until your fingers bled. One of the files I looked at was the (formerly) secret UFO file from Woomera. What I discovered in this file gave me pause for thought....

2005:  The Little Lemon

Racehorses and space. You wouldn't think there was a connection, would you? However....this is what happened when my father tried to name a racehorse after Laika the dog during the Cold War.

2006:  Space biscuits and recognition for space archaeology

Once upon a time in the dim past of internet history there was a lovely man called Nicey who ran a website devoted to tea, biscuits, and sit downs. It was called, appropriately, Nice Cup of Tea and A Sit Down. It was charming and funny and full of biscuits (proper Commonwealth biscuits, not the American version of the scone), and they loved space archaeology! I wonder what happened to him?

2007: Nostalgia for Infinity: exploring the archaeology of the final frontier

This was the abstract for a session on space archaeology at the World Archaeological Congress in Dublin, which I was convening with Beth Laura O'Leary.  The title incorporated the name of a spaceship that will be familiar to anyone who has read the works of Alistair Reynolds.

2008: A rocket cake to be proud of!

No-one doesn't love a rocket cake, and for some reason anything I post about space-related food and drink goes down a treat. Kudos to my friend Kaylene Manderson, who made this masterpiece!

2009: Quirky, yet methodologically sound: a review of Space Travel and Culture: from Apollo to Space Tourism.

Michael Allen wrote a review of this book, in which I had a chapter, and more-or-less called my contribution "quirky, yet methodologically sound".  I was enchanted.

2010: Space food: recreating an authentic space experience on Earth. A review of The Astronaut's Cookbook. 

I wasn't joking about the food-and-drink bit. Another book review, but this time by me, and I have a little digression into the history of Australia's monopoly on the manufacture of Space Food Sticks. Snap them up if you find them gathering dust on a supermarket shelf, because they went out of production last year. But whatever you do, do not attempt to actually eat one. They're not very nice.

2011: Consuming the Space Age: The Cuisine of Sputnik

Nicola Twilley of Good Magazine ran a week-long distributed online conversation about food-writing. I decided to write something about space food, and this was the result.  A little bit of history, a little bit of politics, a cocktail recipe, and the Sputnik Burger!

2012: Space-craft: rockets, jetpacks, and other DIY space paraphernalia

They don't love me for my unique insights into space history or brain-splintering forays into theory. What the readers of my blog really want is recipes and spacey things for kids. I'm cool with that, though. Here's some excellent things you can make, collected together from all over the internet, and yes, there is another cake.

2013: The Anthropocene in the Solar System

I didn't post much in 2013. I had left the university for a break to return to my first profession, heritage consulting. In April, I went to the Society for American Archaeology conference in Hawai'i, and managed to injure myself rather badly, necessitating a long 18 month rehabilitation. In May, I gave a TEDxSydney talk, and shortly afterwards, life took an even more unexpected turn which I'll tell you about one day over a beer. BUT there were other good things. The lovely brain-the-size-of-planet Matt Edgeworth invited me to give a paper at the Chicago Theoretical Archaeology Group conference on the Anthropocene (so sometimes someone does actually want me for my theories), and this was later published in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. You can read the abstract in this blog post, and the article here.

2014: How to avoid sexist language in space - Dr Space Junk wields the red pen

They asked for it, and I delivered. Not cakes this time, but what I hope is a practical guide to eliminating locutions like "manned mission" that reinforce the idea that women like/are like fluffy kittens and aren't really suited to the man's business of space. Which, incidentally, was exactly what a Russian cosmonaut trainer said in a public talk in Adelaide last year, so don't even try to tell me it's not an issue.

2015: How would lunar mining affect the cultural significance of the Moon?

Terrestrial mining is something I know a fair bit about. In my former career as a heritage consultant, I spent a LOT of time on mining sites, and in remote areas where mining exploration was taking place. My job was the make mining companies comply with legislation that was supposed to protect Aboriginal heritage places. In this excerpt from a forthcoming paper, I consider how these principles might play out in space.



I raise a glass of dry Australian sherry to you, dear readers! I feel that 2016 is going to be an exciting year in space.....

Bus stop taphonomy: an experiment in contemporary archaeology

Most mornings I wait at a certain bus stop to catch the 300 up to Flinders University. There's a large tree, and a strip of scraggly grass on clayey soil. When it's really wet, I have to watch my steps as it gets quite slippery. Along the streets are houses and one business, a mower shop cheerfully painted in bright yellow and green - very useful as in the dark as a landmark.

Often when I'm standing there waiting, I notice small items of rubbish. Sometimes I even collect them, thinking of my Modern Material Culture class. One time it was a small pink plastic flower with a flat back, that looked like it had fallen off a toy. Once it was a battered piece of orange plastic bunting, still attached to a section of rope, and a crushed texta lid. A couple of mornings ago, there was a broken glass bottle in the street, and I collected a fragment which, in a different context, might be mistaken for deliberately flaked glass. This one was for my Archaeology of Australian Stone Artefacts class.

It's best to collect objects quickly, as they often don't last long. Since Monday, the broken glass pile has diminished. There's none of it still to be seen on the grass verge where I'm standing, only on the asphalt where it was smashed. I don't know where the stuff goes. Blown or washed away, or does a council employee come along at night and pick the grass clean? Perhaps the movement of humans, dogs, birds and bicycles shuffles the artefacts along until they're just out of my sight.

With a pocketful of snap-lock bags and a will, I could make this into an interesting experiment. I could, each day, collect whatever I could see in my 5 m radius. Some days it might be nothing at all. I'd have to take note of weather, visibility, any local events that might be relevant. For example, I'm pretty sure the orange bunting derives from the installation of the controversial NBN cables in the street. 

How long have these objects been in the street before they pass my bus stop? I assume they're recent, but perhaps they have been circulating for a while. I could tag one and see how far it travels. Perhaps the crushed texta lid originated out Salisbury way, and has traveled through the streets and gutters of Adelaide town to my bus stop, only to be captured and objectified.

What is their life span? How long does it take before UV exposure, and chemical and mechanical weathering cause these objects to disintegrate? What is their size range? Do they fly under the radar because they are generally small, less then 10 cm or so? What makes them so invisible?

What would I find out if I collected them for a year?

Women in the kitchen of science: on being excluded from the life of the mind.

When I was in my late teens at university, one of my favourite books was Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (1943). In the 25th century, in the European province of Castalia, there was an isolated, university-like community devoted to the life of the mind. The pinnacle of intellectual activity was the Glass Bead Game, an esoteric exploration of the deep connections between ideas. The scholars took little part in secular life, but politicians and wealthy people would attend the Glass Bead tournaments. This was the only point at which the chaotic, everyday politics of the rest of the population intersected with the great minds of Castalia.

The book follows the life of Joseph Knecht, the greatest Magister Ludi, or master of the Glass Bead Game. Over the course of the book, he begins to question the value of the isolated 'ivory tower' life and eventually abandons Castalia.

There were so many things about The Glass Bead Game that appealed to me at that stage of my life. I had, perhaps, grandiose ambitions of making great intellectual discoveries. Arcane knowledge about the nature of the universe seemed like the most exciting thing to me, and a community of like minds, all devoted to higher thought, was a dream to be achieved. The book held out a vision of the pursuit of knowledge as the highest human calling, and in my naivety I yearned for this world.

There was one teeny, tiny problem though. The world of Castalia was a purely male one. All of the Magisters and scholars were men. Only in the outside world did men marry and have families. Women are mentioned only in this capacity in the book: as wives and mothers who have nothing to do with study or knowledge.

As a young woman, this didn't bother me too much. I was adept at reading myself into male roles in fiction, imagining myself as Biggles, as Mowgli and Bilbo. I read the book many, many times, pondering the never-quite-revealed mysteries of the Glass Bead Game, as elusive as the Rites of Eleusis.

But after a while, I felt more and more the effort of including myself where I was excluded, and it started to annoy me more and more. A period of many years followed where I didn't re-read it. By this time I was a professional archaeologist and thinking about the research that later became my PhD.

I think it was while packing books for a house move that I found my copy again and decided it was what I felt like reading at that moment. I was by now in my late 20s. But this time it was different. I could no longer kid myself that women could be any part of this world. In Hesse's vision, mind belonged to men and the corporeal world belonged to women. The further I progressed through the chapters, the less I could stomach it. I abandoned the book unfinished and have never read it since. It made me sad to be so disillusioned by what had been a beloved novel.

Now let's leap forward to another part of my life. In the mid-1990s, I was living in the UK and collecting data for my PhD. A conference about stone tools was being held in Ireland. I wanted desperately to go, not just because of the lithics, but because it would be my first visit to the land of my ancestors, who fled the ravages of the Great Famine in the 1850s for a new life in Australia.

When the plane touched down in Cork airport, I was very emotional. I can still remember the moment vividly. The Irish soil was already something familiar, a landscape thrumming through my blood. Even though I had never seen it, never breathed the air, I was aware of a knowledge deep below the surface of my mind, passed on from my Irish great-great-great grandmothers in some fashion, that made this home.

Over the next week, from Cork to Dublin, I had an experience that was completely novel to me. Almost all the street names, the town names, the shop names, were Irish. I didn't have to spell my surname. Hell, I even looked Irish: eyes passed over me in the street, while the Englishness of my conference companions was noted. For the first time, my ethnic identity was indistinguishable from everyone else's. I was deeply part of this culture despite the generational time gap. I belonged: it was only when I spoke and my Australian accent marked me as a foreigner that I stood out in any way. From multicultural Australia, where even the fairly homogenous, white rural community of my childhood contained people of Irish, Welsh, Scottish, English descent, from Catholic, Anglican, Uniting, Methodist, Presbyterian beliefs, I was experiencing the monoculture of Irish Catholicism. Suddenly, a whole raft of negotiations about who I was were removed from the table. There were some things that were so accepted that they needed no explanation. I have to say it was very liberating.  I've often reflected on it over the years, and I'm sure you can see how this experience is relevant to understanding a raft of similar inclusions/exclusions.

Now, I have a very particular reason for telling you about these two seemingly disparate experiences, and it is this.

No male person reading The Glass Bead Game has to confront their exclusion from the highest intellectual life constructed as normal or natural. Every male person experiences the world of science and the intellect without their identity being up for constant negotiation. They are the default setting, just as I was in Ireland.

Let's think about that.

'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

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)

Red, dead and dangerous to know: Ridley Scott's The Martian brings a planet to life

Apollo 13 / Ares 3

I once read a review of Ron Howard’s superb 1995 film, Apollo 13, which made an interesting point: everyone already knew how it ended – and yet you were absolutely on the edge of your seat throughout the recreation of the famous 'Houston, we have a problem' mission. This, as the reviewer highlighted, was a remarkable achievement.

When I attended the South Australian premiere of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s novel, I also knew the ending. Nevertheless, I was as tense as a coiled spring waiting for abandoned astronaut Mark Watney to extricate himself from each fresh disaster, and filled with relief and jubilation as the credits began to roll. 

There is more in common between the two films than you might think. Both feature astronauts who are at risk of being lost in space, who survive by going back to basic science, with a lot of help from dedicated NASA staff and with the world watching.

The Martian represents a space program perhaps at the same stage as Apollo 13, but on a different planet. It’s still an experimental, rather than a mature, technology. Apollo 13 and Ares 3 are both the third landing missions in their series when they experience these potentially fatal setbacks: a warning not to be complacent about space travel.

In fact this is an extraordinary thing: that there have, as yet, been so few human deaths while actually in space. (There have been some fatalities while in spacecraft; the closest to a death in space is the three Soyuz 11 cosmonauts who died during descent). President Nixon’s unused speech, prepared in the event of the death of the Apollo 11 astronauts, is now famous; but it’s surely only a matter of time before some head of state has to use a similar one for a death where the body cannot be brought home.

It’s interesting to contemplate what effect this might have on public perceptions of space travel, and indeed  of space itself, once a human body has lost its soul in the outer darkness. The first death in space will change everything.

Planetary archaeology

For my archaeological eye, there was much that appealed. Watney travels to the Pathfinder lander (launched 1997) so that he can use its comms equipment to contact Earth. There is an obvious echo of Apollo 12’s visit to the earlier Surveyor III robotic lander in 1969. Astronauts Alan Bean and Peter Conrad landed their lunar descent module about 155 metres away from Surveyor III and removed the camera and a couple of bits to take back to Earth, a vital study in how human materials are affected by lunar conditions.

In emergencies, future space travellers may well have to cannibalise previous missions for spare parts and other resources.

What happens back on Earth is also illustrative: Ares Mission Director Vincent Kapoor has to locate people who worked on the Pathfinder program and boot up old software and hardware so that they can talk to Mark Watney. Knowing about space heritage has its uses after all.

The rendezvous with Pathfinder is a vivid cross-cultural encounter with an earlier phase of Martian technology. An analogy might be someone’s chainsaw breaking, forcing them to resort to a ground stone axe to cut wood.

Apollo 11 toss zone (hashed area), where unnecessary fittings 

and objects were thrown out of the ascent module in order to 

make it light  enough to take off.      Image courtesy of 

Beth Laura O'Leary http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/oleary/

In order to leave, Watney has to jettison almost everything from his escape vehicle, the MAV 4. It’s a scene reminiscent of the Apollo ascents, where they similarly had to chuck any excess weight overboard. In both cases, astronauts just threw things outside from the hatches, the haste and chaos of it very at odds with the meticulous planning of other mission activities. Where the stuff landed is a sort of toss zone (as theorised by Lewis Binford and applied to the Moon by Beth Laura O'Leary), and may well be an archaeological signature of such human ascent sites – on the Moon, and now, mythically, on Mars.

Adapting The Martian

The film is very true to the book; what it leaves out you can live with, as it makes for more seamless viewing. It's expertly paced and never dull for a moment.

One thing that is very deftly done is some of the explanations of orbital mechanics. Experts explain to dunderheads in the film (and us in the audience) how something will work, using props. Such visual didactics could easily have missed the mark, coming across as forced and clunky, but they work both to explain things to a lay audience and add a little humour.

Thankfully, Ridley Scott eschews some of the book’s more laddish, hypermasculine moments, and does not interpose unnecessary romance into story. He also beefs up the role of Commander Lewis in a way that works well for her as a character and adds a bit more substance to a lead female role.

However, Kristen Wiig, as the plain-speaking Public Relations Manager Annie Montrose, is not given much to get her teeth into; the role is reduced and wooden compared to the book, and the same goes for satellite engineer Mindy Park. Replacing the Ares Mission director Venkat Kapoor, a practicing Hindu, with the more African-American half-Hindu half-Baptist Vincent Kapoor (played by English actor Chiwetel Ejiofor) is frankly odd. Andy Weir’s efforts at being inclusive were slightly thwarted here. Most of the diversity has to be crammed into one character doing the work of two through bifurcating his name, his religion and his background. Unsatisfying, although those who have not read the book will notice nothing amiss.

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox

And of course the Martian vistas are all that you could want. The romance of red planet is writ large across the screen (all the better in 3D). I’ll commit heresy here by admitting that Mars is not my favourite planet. Nevertheless, the beauty and the terror of this alien landscape made me yearn for something greater than life on earth.



(And just quietly what a relief after the monumental cock-up that was Prometheus)


Updated 5 October 2015 to include Soyuz 11; thanks to @dsfportree for an interesting discussion.

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