“Archaeology is the perspective of material culture that we use as evidence to understand how humans have adapted to their environments, their situations, and each other. There are no boundaries in space or time,” says Justin Walsh, an archaeologist at Chapman University who led the first extraterrestrial archaeological research mission aboard the International Space Station.
Walsh and his team wanted to understand, document and preserve the heritage of astronaut culture in one of the first permanent space habitats. “There’s this perception of astronauts as high-achieving, highly intelligent, highly trained and different from us. But what we’ve learned is that astronauts are just people and they want the comforts of home,” Walsh says.
Disposable cameras and trash
“In 2008, a student raised his hand in an archaeology class and said, ‘Is anything in space heritage?’ and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I’d never thought of that, but yes, it is,'” Walsh says. “Think of Tranquility Station – it’s an archaeological site. You can go there and not only recreate the specific activities of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but you can also understand the engineering culture, the political culture, etc. of the society that built that equipment, sent it to the moon and left it there.”
So he came up with the idea of doing archaeological research on the ISS, wrote a proposal and sent it to NASA, but it was rejected: NASA said that humanities wasn’t a priority and wouldn’t be part of the mission. But in 2021, NASA changed its mind.
“They said they had to postpone it because some experiments couldn’t be done when they were supposed to, and they also changed the crew size from six to seven,” Walsh says. That freed up the astronauts’ schedules and gave NASA more time for less urgent projects on the station. NASA gave Walsh’s team the green light, on the condition that they could conduct their research with instruments already installed on the ISS.
Walsh’s research outline was inspired by and loosely based on two contemporary archaeological studies: the Tucson Garbage Project, which drew conclusions about people’s lives by studying the trash they discarded, and the Illegal Immigrant Project, which documented the experiences of immigrants on their way from Mexico to the United States.
“Jason de Leon, the principal investigator on this project, gave people in Mexico disposable cameras and collected the cameras when they arrived in the U.S. He was able to observe their experiences without being there. For me, that was a eureka moment,” Walsh says.
The ISS has cameras on board, and some crew members took photos with them. To accomplish the equivalent of digging test pits in space, Walsh’s team chose six locations on the ISS and asked the crew to mark them with one-meter-diameter squares, then asked the astronauts to take a photo of each square once a day for 60 days from January to March 2022.
Build a space hut
In the first paper discussing their findings, Walsh’s team looked at two of the six selected sites, dubbed square 03 and square 05. Square 03 was in a maintenance area near the four crew bunks where the American crew sleep, near the docking port for incoming spacecraft. The square was drawn around a blue board with Velcro fasteners for securing tools and equipment.
“Historic photos of the site released by NASA show someone working there, repairing equipment or doing science experiments,” Walsh says. But when his team analyzed daily photos of the same location, they found that items velcro-taped to the wall remained largely unchanged over a 60-day period. “The same items were being used over and over again. If there was any activity, it was science experiments. It was supposed to be a maintenance area. So where was the maintenance? If it was a science area, where was the science? Science was only happening 10 percent of the days,” Walsh says.
