\u201cArcheology really is a perspective on material culture we use as evidence to understand how humans adapt to their environment, to the situations they are in, and to each other. There is no place, no time that is out of bounds,\u201d says Justin Walsh, an archeologist at Chapman University who led the first off-world archeological study on board the ISS.<\/p>\n
Walsh\u2019s and his team wanted to understand, document, and preserve the heritage of the astronaut culture at one of the first permanent space habitats. \u201cThere is this notion about astronauts that they are high achievers, highly intelligent, and highly trained, that they are not like you and me. What we learned is that they are just people, and they want the comforts of home,\u201d Walsh says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 2008, my student in an archeology class raised her hand and said, \u2018What about stuff in space, is that heritage?\u2019 I said, \u2018Oh my God, I\u2019ve never thought of this before, but yes,\u2019\u201d Walsh says. \u201cThink of Tranquility base\u2014it\u2019s an archeological site. You could go back there, and you could reconstruct not only the specific activities of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but you could understand the engineering culture, the political culture, etc. of the society that created that equipment, sent it to the Moon, and left it there.\u201d<\/p>\n
So he conceived the idea of an archeological study on the ISS, wrote a proposal, sent it to NASA, and got rejected. NASA said human sciences were not their priority and not part of their mission. But in 2021, NASA changed its mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey said they had an experiment that could not be done at the scheduled time, so they had to delay it. Also, they changed the crew size from six to seven people,\u201d says Walsh. These opened up some idle time in the astronauts\u2019 schedules, allowing NASA to find space in the schedule for less urgent projects on the station. The agency gave Walsh\u2019s team the go-ahead under the condition that their study could be done with the equipment already present on the ISS.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
The outline of Walsh\u2019s research was inspired by and loosely based on the Tucson Garbage Project and the Undocumented Migration Project, two contemporary archeology studies. The first drew conclusions about people\u2019s lives by studying the garbage they threw away. The second documented the experiences of migrants on their way to the US from Mexico.<\/p>\n
\u201cJason De Le\u00f3n, who is the principal investigator of this project, gave people in Mexico disposable cameras, and he retrieved those cameras from them when they got to the US. He could observe things they experienced without being there himself. For me, that was a lightbulb moment,\u201d says Walsh.<\/p>\n
There were cameras on board the ISS and there was a crew to take pictures with them. To pull off an equivalent of digging a test pit in space, Walsh\u2019s team chose six locations on the station, asked the crew to mark them with squares one meter across, and asked the astronauts to take a picture of each of those squares once a day for 60 days, from January to March 2022.<\/p>\n
In the first paper discussing the study\u2019s results, Walsh\u2019s team covered two out of six chosen locations, dubbed squares 03 and 05. The 03 square was in a maintenance area near the four crew berths where the US crew sleeps. It\u2019s near docking ports for spacecraft coming to the ISS. The square was drawn around a blue board with Velcro patches meant to hold tools and equipment in place.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll historic photographs of this location published by NASA show somebody working in there\u2014fixing a piece of equipment, doing a science experiment,\u201d says Walsh. But when his team analyzed day-by-day photos of the same spot, the items velcroed to the wall hardly changed in those 60 days. \u201cIt was the same set of items over and over again. If there was an activity, it was a scientific experiment. It was supposed to be the maintenance area. So where was the maintenance? And even if it was a science area, where\u2019s the science? It was only happening on 10 percent of days,\u201d Walsh says.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
It turned out the crew adapted this space for storage. \u201cIt was like a peg board in your garage you\u2019re hanging your tools on. And we all know your garage, your basement, or your garden shed is where you put things and then you forget about them. That\u2019s what they built up there,\u201d Walsh says.<\/p>\n
He said the reason the crew turned the supposed science and maintenance area into a space shed is because the ISS designers didn\u2019t think a space shed was needed, so the crew had to establish its own. But that wasn\u2019t the only thing the designers didn\u2019t think of.<\/p>\n
The 05 square was a location between two exercise machines the crew uses very regularly. Opposite the square, right behind the photographer, was a latrine. It was a busy area with people going on and off the exercise machines and using the latrine all day long. Some of the old photos of this place show it with a small toolkit attached to the wall. \u201cLike a mini-version of the maintenance work area in our square 03,\u201d says Walsh.<\/p>\n
In this square, there was a rail used by astronauts to hold on to or propel themselves to other locations. In Welsh\u2019s photographs, various things stored in resealable bags were strapped to this rail. There was also the German Space Agency\u2019s Touch Array Assembly Experiment with little panels for the astronauts to touch to see if the bacteria gathered on their fingers would grow. \u201cAnd then about six days into our work, the toiletry kit appears,\u201d says Walsh.<\/p>\n
The toiletry kit, a bag stuffed with toothpaste, a toothbrush, an electric razor, nail clippers, a deodorant, and a towel attached to it, stayed there for 52 days.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt moved around because someone was using it,\u201d Walsh says. \u201cThat toiletry kit being there was really interesting. There is exercise equipment nearby, so droplets of sweat are flying all around, and there is a latrine, which we know is an imperfect system, so there are droplets flying from there as well. I wouldn\u2019t want my toothbrush out there, or a towel I wipe my face with. It really speaks to the inadequacy of the affordances, the accommodations for the crew. You really get the sense that hygiene and body maintenance was an afterthought for the engineers designing the station.\u201d<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
But space archeology is way more than just tracking toiletries left in weird places.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the ISS, the crew is there for six months or a year at a time. If I were to ask one of them, \u2018What did you do during this time?\u2019 they might be able to tell me about a few different moments that really made an impact on them and that they remembered very clearly. But they wouldn\u2019t be able to talk about the long duration of their time on board,\u201d Walsh says.<\/p>\n
Because the ISS is scheduled for deorbiting in 2031, his goal is to preserve its realities down to the tiniest details, including its smell\u2014a mixture of ozone and welding fumes, or, as Tim Peake, one of the US astronauts, once said, \u201ca barbecue that\u2019s gone wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very distinctive smell\u2014something I would like to see if it\u2019s possible to preserve so that future generations can know what the first permanent space habitat smelled like,\u201d Walsh says.<\/p>\n
But Walsh is confident it won\u2019t be the last space facility that will need preserving. \u201cThe future of space archeology? Well, first of all, I am going to the Moon and I am going to Tycho and I am going to discover a monolith there. It\u2019s 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>, right? It\u2019s funny how people talk about archeologists finding aliens. Archeology is focused on humans,\u201d he says. \u201cWe could go to the Tranquility base, although actually we don\u2019t really know how to operate properly on the Moon to avoid damaging a site like that. But there are lots of other sites on the Moon or Mars we could go and study.\u201d<\/p>\n PLOS ONE, 2024. DOI: 10.1371\/journal.pone.0304229<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cArcheology really is a perspective on material culture we use as evidence to understand how humans adapt to their environment, to the situations they are in, and to each other. There is no place, no time that is out of bounds,\u201d says Justin Walsh, an archeologist at Chapman University who led the first off-world archeological […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9656,4849,265,9657],"class_list":["post-44954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-archeology","tag-space-exploration","tag-space-station","tag-space-archeology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44954"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}