Digging Holes in Popular Culture: Archaeology and Science Fiction edited by Miles Russell

Black Slab, Taunton. Photo by pmecologic.

I suspect that Bournemouth is rather a fun place to be an archaeologist. One of the earlier Occasional Papers, Communication Archaeology is one of my favourite books. I’ve recently been reading another Digging Holes in Popular Culture Archaeology and Science Fiction. It’s a collection of papers from a themed TAG session. It sounds like someone desperately trying to be relevant, but in fact parts of it are rather good.

The book opens with a preface by Douglas Adams, which deserves a post in its own right. After that it falls into three sections: Archaeologists in Fiction, Past Present and Parallels and The Shape of Things to Come? The first Archaeologists in Fiction, as the name suggests looks mainly at the portrayal of archaeologists, usually in science fiction. This section is done rather well. I thought Lynette Russell’s Archaeology and Star Trek: Exploring the Past in the Future was the best example of what can be done with the subject. The title does sound odd. The analysis of the archaeologists in the series was eccentric. Vash makes a couple of appearances, but the other major case study was Ship’s Archaeologist Lt. Aster. If this had been the original series rather than TNG, she would have been one of those people who beam down to the hostile planet in a bright red jumper with a target painted on the back. Her role was to die before the opening credits thus creating a situation for Picard to deal with. Professor Galen in contrast who almost gets to the first commercial break of his episode, gets comparatively short shrift. However her discussion of how the Prime Directive applies or does not apply to archaeology highlights modern expectations of archaeology and the behaviour of archaeologists.

Miles Russell, the editor, contributes the strongest paper of the section by looking at the archaeologist in pop-culture. He examines the roles archaeologists take in popular culture and the equipment they take with them. He has a strong knowledge of the historical development of the TV archaeologist. He also asks the question “So what?” which is always worth asking. The answer he gives is that while other professions come into contact with the public on a regular basis, archaeologists are often only seen on television. If this is the public we are seeking to fund our work then that arguably makes image a problem.

I expected to dislike this section. My initial feeling was that this was media studies and thus should have been presented at a media conference if the authors were serious about their work. However the references used showed that all of the authors were indeed serious thinking beyond archaeology about communication issues, and in this case drawing the problems to the attention archaeologists was a good idea and I was wrong. In fact I was so impressed by this section I was going to split the review over three days so I could be utterly ebullient about how wonderful this book was.

Then I read section two.

Section Two is poor. It looks at the use of archaeology in literature. This could reflect thoughts on how the archaeological process works. There’s clearly a lot of thought gone into the papers, but they rather miss the point. One of the papers examines the work of Terry Pratchett, who has made it clear on numerous occasions that things work in his books because that’s the way the story goes. This could be applied to all the papers in this section. Archaeologists generally work with all the data they can get. I don’t know of a historical archaeologist who refuses to read history. When reading fiction we have access to the actions of people and even their thoughts. In the midst of this concentrating narrowly on archaeology seems a bit parochial. I think that in contrast to section one, this really could have benefited from being given at a literature conference. It’s not that the papers were bad as such, but they did suggest a little tunnel-vision.

Section Three is the Curate’s Egg, as each paper is at least good in parts. It is, I think, the boldest part of the book and the part that most strongly deserves a sequel. It’s the section that attempts to apply Archaeology to the sites of the future in the manner most like hard SF, though Star Trek still gets a mention.

The best paper is Towards an LSMR and MSMR (Lunar and Martian Sites and Monuments Records): recording planetary spacecraft landing sites as archaeological monuments of the future by Greg Fewer. Fewer draws parallels between the inaccessible sites of 19th century exploration, many of which are now vacation spots for tourists and the current inaccessibility of the Moon and Mars. It’s speculation, but it’s well-founded speculation and Fewer illustrates the heritage we stand to lose if we don’t act to record and protect these sites. It may seem wacky or zany, but there’s a beautiful quote near the end of the paper.

Early in 1996, Charles Thomas remarked in an essay in British Archaeology that “It’s a great pity that the poor old Moon seems to boast nothing in the way of artefacts beyond the rubbish we left there ourselves”

As Fewer rightly points out what is it that we think makes up majority of the archaeological record on Earth? What is it that makes Tranquillity Base, the place where humans first stepped on another body beyond the Earth, rubbish? The only criticism that I could make of the paper is that, in keeping his feet firmly on the ground, he missed out on the need for an Orbital SMR. That would be great if that was one of my insights, but’s it’s not. Alice Gorman has already argued satellites like Vanguard are heritage that should be protected.

The other paper I like, despite disagreeing with large parts of it is Vicky Walsh’s The Case for Exoarchaeology. She argues that archaeologists could have a role in SETI, and should be considering how we would survey for extra-terrestrial civilisations. I’d agree with her to this point, but on more or less every detail after that I’d disagree. For example she argues for a four stage plan for investigating a planet,

1. Global Reconnaissance

2. Landed Mission

3. Robots

4. Human Presence (or possibly telepresence)

I’d argue stage one is an all sky survey, like the on being carried out by the SETI institute. Stage two would, for me be observation from Earth. I think putting sending an orbiter would be a huge timescale to work across. By the time it did arrived terrestrial optics would probably have made such advances that the orbiter was obsolete. One could also question what effect putting a new star in the sky of the observed civilisation would be. Even now there is much we could tell about a planet from Earth. By examining the spectrum of the reflected light is should be possible to examine the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Find traces of plutonium and you know you have an advanced civilisation. Or possibly the smoking remains of what thought it was an advanced civilisation.

I could pick more holes like this in her paper, but I think her central argument is sound. I would suggest that we should be looking more to the assumptions we make in SETI as archaeologists. People like Sundar Sarukkai already are, noting that maths is a platonic language, rather than an acultural universal language (PDF). Thinking about alien cosmologies could be a useful ‘what if?’ scenario for think about terrestrial cosmologies. As with so much anthropology by looking at the other we learn about ourselves.

All in all the book is thought provoking. I think there’s a little too much dependency on Star Trek as a stand-in for all Science Fiction to convince sceptics on the subject. This is a shame because where the people did get to grips with the theme, particularly in the final section, it was extremely thought-provoking. I think exploring Archaeology as Science Fiction, of the Arthur C Clarke, rather than George Lucas variety, could be a surprisingly fruitful line of thought. —–