Carleton University is among the institutions studying archaeology on the International Space Station (International Space Station) to see how astronauts adapt their living space to their needs.
A new peer-reviewed study in Plus One examines the “microsociety” of ISS astronauts and their use of cluttered spaces, such as repurposing a pegboard near the exercise area and bathroom to store rarely used equipment.
In the study, astronauts placed tape in six small squares around the ISS and tracked objects entering and leaving those squares using daily photographs, simulating “test pits” in archaeology. To learn more, SpaceQ spoke to Carleton’s Shawn Graham, a professor of digital humanities with a background in Roman archaeology. (The study was led by Chapman University’s Justin Walsh.)
SpaceQ: How did your experience contribute to the project?
Graham: It was through digital archaeology. For me, digital archaeology is not just about using digital tools to solve archaeological questions, but also about considering how archaeology can influence our current world mediated by digital technology.
When I started working with the International Space Station Archaeology Project, I had already been working for several years on a project of my own trying to understand the online trade in human remains. People buy and sell skulls, tibias, finger bones, etc., through Instagram, Facebook, Etsy. On any social media platform, there is always someone selling human remains. We had developed ways to use machine learning and computer vision to look at large-scale patterns in the composition of the photographs that accompany these sales posts—things that only become apparent when you have thousands of images to work with.
My graduate student, Chantal Brousseau, was using some of those methods – and developing her own methods – to use computer vision to detect handwritten annotations in the margins of early modern printed books for her major research paper. So when Justin Walsh called me and asked if I had any ideas for “How do you make sense of the photographs or ‘contexts’ that capture archaeology on the space station?” we had some ideas ready to go.
Chantal built the tool that the project used to annotate and identify objects in contexts, and I then developed the code to quantify and calculate various archaeological statistics on the data.
SpaceQ: How do you think archaeology on the ISS is different from other archaeological projects you have worked on? How are they similar?
Graham: In terrestrial archaeology, every “event” leaves a “context.” As time passes, those contexts pile up on top of each other. Then, when we excavate, we carefully extract the materials that make up those contexts. We look at contexts that coexist at similar depths, and so on. Through all those information-rich relationships, we can tell something of the story of how people lived there.
We worked backward from today through echoes – through material culture, contexts – to some point in the past. On the space station, we could start from the beginning with the first photograph/context captured by the astronaut and see the development forward in time. That was really cool.
SpaceQ: What have been some of the most important findings from ISSAP so far, and their implications for space archaeology?
Graham: The daily life of astronauts is highly regulated. Every second is controlled. The manuals and procedures of the International Space Station dictate what each space should be used for. And yet, a kind of society emerges there. People work without respecting the restrictions!
Evidence from material culture shows that life on board is far more complex, rather than complicated: complex things can be adapted, complicated things break. Things don't happen the way ground control says they should.
In the official photographs, for example, of the maintenance area we saw, there was always someone working there. But in the “context” photographs that the astronauts took of us every day, the space was practically empty.
Justin calls it a “pegboard wall in the garage,” a space shed. The designers didn’t think of such a thing, but it was needed and emerged through the daily lives of astronauts. NASA – and other nations or corporations that want to go into space – need to think more about what it means to be social creatures out there. This could help them better identify these unmet needs.
SpaceQ: What can we learn from archaeology on the ISS that could be useful in designing future space habitats?
Graham: Designing future space habitats requires more engineers and “hard scientists” to come forward. Humans are complex. There is nothing “soft” about studying how we live and how society emerges. Tools, objects, and spaces constrain and enable different ways of living. Archaeology is one way to understand this question through the evidence of the things we make.
SpaceQ: Anything else you would like to add?
Graham: When I was a child, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. My answer was, “An astronaut, or maybe an archaeologist.” At ten years old, I would have loved that.
