![]() ![]() ![]() The archeologists documented a surprising amount of other candy on board, Walsh says, puncturing the myth of astronauts as superhuman. But the bottle of Sriracha sauce remained pristine, and a Lindt chocolate bar languished, unfinished, for a while. Some food pouches were filthy, indicating frequent use. In the galley module, astronauts left clues about what they eat-and don’t. “If we could just capture the information into a database-get the people, places and objects that are in the photos-then we could actually start to trace out the patterns of behavior there and the associations between people and things,” says Walsh, who presented the team’s preliminary findings yesterday afternoon at the Society for American Archaeology conference in Portland, Oregon. Justin Walsh, an archaeologist at Chapman University and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, thinks that images like these are tremendously useful for social science researchers who want to know how people use the limited tools and material comforts available to them in space. The SQuARE photos, shot over 60 days last year, show everything from anti-gravity hacks to food treats enjoyed by astronauts. That meant that astronauts were no longer limited by film canisters when documenting life in space, and that space archaeologists-yes, that’s a thing-no longer had to merely speculate about it from afar.īut this is the first time archeologists have coordinated that photography so they could analyze it. People have continuously occupied the space station for decades, and the launch of its initial modules in the late 1990s coincided with the rise of digital photography. The new project, called the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment, or SQuARE, involves hundreds of photos taken by astronauts throughout the living and work spaces of the ISS. Archaeologists have probed the cultures of people all over the Earth-so why not study a unique community that’s out of this world? One team is creating a first-of-its-kind archaeological record of life aboard the International Space Station. ![]()
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