The word “archaeology” conjures up countless images in the cultural imagination: ancient civilizations, lost artifacts, and—as much as we try to break away from cliché—Indiana Jones. But a recent archaeological survey was done differently than any other. It was done in space.
The archaeological survey is the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment, or SQuARE, and it’s comprised of six square survey areas aboard the International Space Station, about 254 miles (408 km) above our planet. In a study published today in PLOS One, a research team revealed their findings from two of the sampling locations. One of the locations (pictured above) is a maintenance area on the ISS; the other is a catch-all area near the latrine and the astronauts’ exercise equipment.
The team found that the way spaces were assigned meaning didn’t always conform with the way they were actually used. In their 60-day survey, the maintenance area was hardly used for maintenance, and only lightly used for science purposes. “It was actually a storage area, like the pegboard in your garage or garden shed, in this case made possible by the tremendous amount of Velcro in this location,” said study lead author Justin Walsh, an archaeologist at Chapman University and founder and co-director of the International Space Station Archaeological Project , in an email to Gizmodo.
“We realized that the historic photos showed something different because nobody had ever bothered to take a ph.