The cultural landscape of interplanetary space

I’ve been sent this article written by Alice Gorman in February’s edition of the Journal of Social Archaeology after finding it mentioned on Raw Harvest. As will become apparent below, I know very little about Australia despite working with some Australian archaeologists. I remember while digging in Luxembourg Matthew, an Australian archaeologist on holiday, was explaining the rolling heritage act which protected anything older than fifty years in Australia. This caused amusement when we worked out that in a few years archaeologists would be attempting to reconstruct early Elvis records, possibly even experimenting with white jump suits as they dug. We couldn’t see the point of excavating a building when you could walk down to the council offices and pick up the plans. Space Archaeology should be an even bigger goldmine of knee-jerk put-downs. Why bother studying the Saturn V rockets when you can just go down to Cape Canaveral and pick up the plans?

Since then my attitudes to the differences between history and archaeology have changed. Archaeology isn’t just about writing history without using texts. Archaeologists often ask different questions of the past to Historians. Dr Gorman’s paper is an excellent example of the value of contemporary archaeology. She looks at three sites to give a differing view of the space race. In fact she moves beyond the whole ‘space race’ story and shows there’s a place for the disenfranchised who are usually glossed over in histories of space flight.

The first site she examines is Peenemünde and the rocket factory of Wernher von Braun. I’m familiar with the arguments that the American rocketry successes were guided by a man who would have been tried for war crimes if the British had caught him. What hadn’t really impacted on my consciousness is exactly who it was that worked to build these rockets. When you consider the fact Gorman raises, that more people died making V2s than were killed by impacts it, becomes obvious exactly who built the site and the rockets. This site is the cradle of the American space programme. How do you deal with it? It’s not something I’d thought about.

Aerial photo of Peenemünde by the RAF from Wikipedia

Like 99% of Britons I didn’t even know where Woomera was until I read the article – apart from ‘Australia’ and narrowing down a location to a continent is not very impressive. My mental image, such as it is, of the place was of a wide, flat, open and somewhat desolate area, which Gorman points out is the typical British view of more or less anywhere where the whites weren’t. There were Aboriginal people who called it home, but this was the 60s so they didn’t count. She shows how the aboriginal peoples have coped with, and fought against, the detritus of the space programme and anything else the Australian government wanted out of sight.

The final site is Tranquillity Base, which I’ve covered before and probably will be a heritage headache next century. There will doubtless be people who will want to visit, but the preservation is so perfect and the site so fragile what access can be safely allowed? I’m told Palaeolithic footprints in Africa are being worn away by tourists putting their feet in to compare sizes. Just one curious visitor on the Moon could leave an indelible mark.

What I like about the article is that it shows that contemporary archaeology isn’t a gimmick. I can see that there’s more reason to do study space material than simply trying to carve a niche in academia. Archaeologists can ask questions which historians either cannot or will not. Dr Gorman has recently been to Kourou to examine the launch site there. Insofar as I’ve thought about French Guiana during the Ariane launches, it’s been “That’s looks hot – I wouldn’t want to go there”. The impact on the people of French Guiana has made so little impression on me that even Bill or Ted would be impressed.

It also poses challenges about the creation of the archaeological record. Usually we think about archaeology as a non-renewable resource. Once you excavate it, it’s gone. Kent Flannery in ‘The Golden Marshalltown’ says that “Archaeology is the only branch of Anthropology where we kill our informants in the process of studying them” American Anthropologist 84:275. Yet at the moment the archaeological record of space exploration is expanding with little hindrance. Ironically one of the more serious threats to the integrity of many sites will be the desire to study them as heritage. The other is the need for renewal of satellites with new technology. It would be nice to think that some of this is being recorded. With the ongoing archive problems for data and our blindness to contemporary heritage, it would seem the Space Age has great potential to be the new Dark Ages. —–