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 photo of the workstation when there wasn’t someone using it,” he added. “That was an important lesson about the relationship of the historic photos to long-term usage patterns.” The project began in 2015 as a retrospective review of the way spaces on the ISS are used.
But archival imagery only showed so much, so the team decided to conduct an archaeological survey on the station. Once the team got the nod from the ISS National Laboratory, it took less than a year to set the project up aboard the station. “I think we may have been one of the fastest payloads, from proposal to execution, in the history of the ISS,” Walsh said.
The fieldwork took place between January and March 2022. The second research space—a hitherto-unimportant blank wall near the station’s latrine and exercise area—was used by one crew member as a place for their toiletries. Walsh pointed out that where astronauts can put their personal items “seems to have been a bit of an afterthought for the ISS, and it’s an issue that every person who visits there has to deal with.
” So far, only two of the sample squares are published on, but the team plans to report findings from more of the survey areas next year. “There are a few key takeaways. First, we showed that it’s possible to do good, productive archaeology in space, even if the investigators are on the ground,” Walsh said.
“Second, we definitely showed that places in the space station are used in unexpected ways, which is a very human thing to do,” he added. It’s like how the countertop in my entryway is now called, “Where We Keep the Mail.” Communication works in myriad and sometimes enigmatic ways, but in my humble opinion, things should be named for their specific purpose.
However, sometimes spaces are assigned meaning (and a label) before the way they’re actually used becomes clear. “Finally, we’ve contributed useful insights that can be used by future space station designers to improve their habitats—we’ve highlighted phenomena that are important but not obvious,” Walsh added. “Given that the ISS is probably the most expensive building project ever constructed by humans, it’s important to learn from it and think about how to do better going forward.
” Indeed, now is the time to plan how future human habitation in space can be improved. The ISS is scheduled for retirement in 2030 , at which point the station will be deorbited for a controlled crash landing in the Pacific Ocean. There are concerns that commercial alternatives to the ISS may not be ready in time for the veteran collaboration’s retirement.
And besides an orbiting, ongoing international collaboration in space, there’s the not-so-small matter of Lunar Gateway , the planned lunar space station that will establish a semi-permanent human presence on the Moon. On a bittersweet note, the archaeological work on the ISS will soon be more akin to traditional archaeology, as the space station will soon pass into history. If we are to take any lessons from how humans have made use of the research station, now is the time.
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