After the astronauts, cometh the archaeologists
The far reaches of space exploration don’t usually gel with the annals of archaeology – but for Alice Gorman, it’s a match made in heaven.
The 52-year-old space archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, is living her childhood dream, assessing the cultural and heritage values of spacecraft, landing sites and crash-landed debris to decide which should be preserved, and which consigned to the junk pile.
“Every now and then I have to pinch myself,” Gorman says. Space conferences are usually filled with engineers and mathematicians who handle the technical intricacies of nuts-and-bolts research, she explains, so the cultural significance of space travel is often overlooked.
Much like excavating ancient sites to understand past human behaviour, space archaeology looks at aeronautical artefacts with fresh eyes and places them in the context of our past, present and future.
Her favourite example of modern archaeology, she says, is cable ties. Cable ties! They are items quickly discarded – and then rescued by Gorman to add to her collection – that show the trajectory of different kinds of technology since World War II.
Gorman grew up on a farm in the Riverina area of southern New South Wales, far from big city lights. The constant presence of a big, wide night sky gave her a passion for astrophysics.
But getting there was not a quick journey, nor an easy one. While Gorman was at school in the 1970s and 1980s, women were typically prodded towards humanitarian rather than technical fields.
The pressure was never overt but enough to smother her astronomical ambitions. “You got the really strong impression that, if you weren’t brilliant as a girl in maths or physics, you were edged towards more literary fields,” she recalls. “If you were just average at those things as a boy, it wasn’t seen to be an impediment to continuing.”
After graduating, therefore, she moved into her other academic love, archaeology, and quickly became recognised as an expert in stone tools. The work – largely at Australian indigenous heritage sites – was fascinating, but didn’t stop her studying astrophysics in her downtime.
In 2002, this brought her to examine the cultural value of a rocket launch site at the Royal Australian Air Force’s Woomera Test Range in the South Australian desert. In 2007, the 122,000 km2 site was bestowed the status of Historic Aerospace Site by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Not long after Gorman became the first woman ever elected to the board of the Space Industry Association of Australia. These days she sits on its advisory council.
So while women still comprise a minority in space research, she says “it’s possible, just by perseverance, to be taken seriously”.
Now she is taking part in the first archaeological study of human habitation in space, based on the International Space Station and spearheaded by her colleague Justin Walsh from Chapman University in California.
Their research came about after NASA put a call out for astronauts from a range of backgrounds – but explicitly excluded archaeologists and anthropologists from the mix.
“Why don’t they want archaeologists?” she asks. “We’re used to working in remote locations and in difficult conditions in the field. Wouldn’t that be quite useful in space?”
Although there have been physiological and psychological studies on long-haul missions, she says, no research has delved into how people interact with objects in a space environment over time, and how these technological artefacts might carry social meanings.
The ISS study, then, is partly aimed at proving to NASA that archaeologists are, indeed, valuable high above the atmosphere.
Gorman says the approach to space travel has so far been similar to that of 19th Century colonisation – excluding or not giving a voice to entire groups of people.these include not only to women and experts in maverick fields but also local communities affected by space programs, such as indigenous Australians. “Space technology doesn’t exist in isolation, but often against a backdrop of colonisation and indigenous alienation from their country,” she says.
Our ability to survive in space would be “radically advanced” if we brought in fresh perspectives from a greater diversity of people, she argues. Imagine the rich ideas indigenous communities could bring to the space age, for instance.
“People have this idea that space travel is part of a long evolutionary process and use the past to support current
WHY DON’T THEY WANT ARCHAEOLOGISTS? WE’RE USED TO WORKING IN REMOTE LOCATIONS AND IN DIFFICULT CONDITIONS IN THE FIELD. WOULDN’T THAT BE QUITE USEFUL IN SPACE?
power imbalances,” she says. “But the archaeologist knows the past is incredibly diverse.”
Shaping how we will explore space down the track also keeps Gorman busy. Now that human footprints will soon imprint the dirt on Mars, contemplating space colonies is no longer restricted to the realm of science fiction.
Gorman says life in space – including potential industrial practices such as asteroid mining –might need different social and political structures to those we’re familiar with in Western civilisations. Nuclear families, for instance, are a fairly recent construct that might not work in an isolated colony.
“Are we going to put those social structures into space without considering them?” she muses. “Without an anthropologist or archaeologist, nobody asks those questions. If we settle the rest of the solar system, we shouldn’t replicate, uncritically, the social structure we have here and now.”
So what would space exploration or settlements look like in an ideal universe?
Gorman believes in the old space treaties from the 1960s – such as the Outer Space Treaty formulated in 1967 and signed by 20 UN member states – that promote the idea space is the common heritage of humanity and access should be open to all, with everyone deriving benefits. “I don’t see why we have to let go of the dream,” she says.
She explains that while these ideas may seem a bit utopian, if we don’t keep talking about those principles, “they’ll drop like a cable tie in the dirt and people will forget that’s how we started out in space”.