What’s New in Archaeology?

Space Archaeology Redefines What An Excavation Could Be 

By Ariel Gilmore

The stereotypical view of archaeology includes ancient ruins, excavation units, and trenches laid out in a grid as diggers systematically examine context after context as archaeologists seek to create a cohesive narrative of a site’s history and importance. However, as time progresses and humanity extends its reach beyond terra forms to the oceans, earth’s orbit, and other planets, archaeology has changed too.  Archaeologists are starting to look beyond the earth that’s beneath our feet towards other habitats, including those in space. USC Dornsife Archaeology and USC Viterbi have been supporting the pioneering work of Justin St.P. Walsh, professor of art at Chapman University as an Ad Astra Fellow at the USC Space Engineering Research Center (SERC) and a research mentor to a USC archaeology undergrad. 

Walsh and his team are pioneering a new approach that redefines what an “excavation” can be, especially when it occurs in a not-so-terrestrial place.

Walsh and his team– that included a USC student who recently graduated–have been conducting a new kind of science dubbed “Space Archaeology”. Since 2015, the International Space Station Archaeological Project has been pioneering and applying material culture approaches to study a human habitat in Earth’s orbit. 

This past school year, Justin Walsh visited USC and gave a preview of his research findings from the first-ever in-orbit archaeological experiment titled the “Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment or SQuARE”. He showed work done by USC alumna Salma Al-Abdullah (Dornsife Archaeology Major ‘23) in a machine learning project designed to track material culture use and change in the ISS.  “SQuARE” uses the metadata that Al-Abdullah and other team members create from digital photographs captured by astronauts and archived by NASA since the year 2000. Their goal is to “identify the distribution of different population groups–by gender, nationality, and space agency affiliation—across modules of the ISS, for the first time” (Walsh, 2023). 

The ISS has been continuously occupied for the past two decades, with over 200 individuals residing at the station, making it a site with the most prolonged presence of humans in space, and an optimal site for studying the habits, behaviors, and culture that has emerged as a result of this presence….including patterns that nobody has yet noticed before. 

“Humans are human no matter where they are, and astronauts spend 90-95% of their lives on Earth. So they are going to want to make their home and workplace in space as much as their home and workplace on Earth, and they want to live Earth-like lives. We can spot that desire throughout the ISS

Walsh thinks that’s an extremely valuable lesson because “many people feel we need to leave Earth behind”. One of the more notable areas where Walsh’s team saw patterns forming was in hygiene products and practices while aboard the spacecraft. He “digs” into photographs taken of one meter squares inside the ISS, where people live and work. He compares the intended and actual uses of this compressed real estate.

“The most common usage of that space was for storing items – not only tools, but writing implements, wet wipes, and other things unrelated to the “primary” function. In the other area we have completed documentation of so far, there was no designated function. It was a blank wall between exercise machines and opposite the latrine. But one crew member chose to store their toiletry kit there. Hygiene is a related function to exercise and waste, so that makes sense. But it was the crew member’s decision to put the toiletry kit there – the space has no affordances or accommodations for that function” (Walsh). So, we see decisions about convenience and accessibility emerging through daily use, yielding important details that can inform future designs for more convenient long term human living in space.

 Walsh and his team are charting new territory as they redefine the limits of archaeology with new and unorthodox solutions that increase data analysis capacities, ensure accurate material culture identification, and minimize human error. To document change over time during each mission of the ISS, Walsh is applying the careful recording that is vital to systematic archaeological methods…including recording locations, finds, and the uses of all the finds except that he is not an astronaut and so is not able to physically access the site personally.

This is where Walsh’s team had to get creative.  According to Walsh, “From the beginning of the project in 2015, we wanted to develop experimental work that the crew of ISS could perform on our behalf”. But how to do this? 

Working with NASA, Walsh organized a method of remote data capture on the ISS. Astronauts use tape to lay out one-meter square sampling locations around the space station and part of the daily mission is for various astronauts to photograph the same places day after day over a given period (Walsh, 2023). In developing this concept, Walsh’s Co-PI Alice Gorman, explains that it “was derived from the standard archaeological technique for systematically sampling a site through the excavation of one-metre-squared test pits. Each photo of a sample location would be equivalent to a stratigraphic layer, representing a moment and a specific activity” (Walsh, 2023). The contents of the squares change visibly throughout the mission and from hour to hour or day to day…or not. The photographs are later sent to Walsh’s team for analysis. 

Additionally, the team faced yet another challenge to combat the zero-gravity issue and the general lack of geography in space.

 “We couldn’t adopt a standard coordinate system such as latitude-longitude or the Universal Transverse Mercator system since the ISS is not only off-Earth but also in constant motion. So we developed a relative system for each module, dividing them into 27 three-dimensional  volumes  derived  from  positions  on  the  three-dimensional  axes: forward-center-aft, starboard-center-port,  and zenith-center-nadir (we  adopted  nautical  terminology, following the system crew uses to navigate around the station).” (Walsh, 2023).

This became increasingly more important as metadata from the digital photographs was accumulated because, with over eight thousand digital artifacts across various archives and platforms, it is essential to have locational information when trying to deduce how specific area adaptations and changes over time. Like with any other artifacts, the photos from the ISS are noted with contextual information such as location descriptors, actions taking place within the picture, names and dates of the photo’s subjects, etc. To manage this vast amount of data, Walsh’s team has also created a computer program to help recognize specific patterns in the photos to aid in data entry.

The analysis of the photos includes various phases, and the work done on the sites around the space station is pretty involved.  According to undergraduate research student researcher Salma Al-Abdullah (Dornsife Archaeology major ‘23),

 “ Once each image of that square has been completed, I begin a second phase where I analyze the information. This includes identifying patterns and themes for the individual images and the square as a whole across the two months. The latter is generally done using graphs and charts that are created with algorithms that process the data based on item count, type, etc. All of which I learned with the guidance of Dr. Walsh.” 

The preliminary results from the study yielded an array of accomplishments for this new field of space archaeology. 

“First, we validated an archaeological method for studying a habitat in space. We got good data and were able to use it to reveal unknown aspects of living in a new environment. As a result, we also demonstrated that the social sciences are far from irrelevant when it comes to living better in space. They are necessary to build better space habitats and to make the crew happier and healthier. I hope we can communicate that message to the space agencies and the industry” (Walsh). The study conducted by Walsh and his team will continue to test the limits of archaeological thinking and redefine how this line of work could be conceptualized. 

Overall, Walsh’s team combines advancements in traditional archaeology, digital archaeology, and ethnography to craft a new discipline out of this world. As the field progresses, it has become increasingly pertinent to push the boundaries of what archaeology can be—taking some aspects of the old and transforming them into new approaches and technologies to help create more holistic ideas of culture and the human relationship to space (both abstract and literal).

To learn more about the advancements in space archaeology, visit the International Space Station Archaeological Project: https://issarchaeology.org/. Also be sure to check out an article recounting updated research findings in Walsh’s article coming out on August 7th, 2024. 

Walsh, Justin St. P. “Adapting to Space: The International Space Station Archaeological Project.” The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space, 1st ed., Routledge, 2023, pp. 400–12, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003280507-37.