Project Participants

The co-PI’s

Dr. Alice Gorman is recognized as one of the world’s foremost scholars in the cutting-edge field of space archaeology. Her academic track record includes 21 journal articles or book chapters. She is the author of “The Cultural Landscape of Interplanetary Space,” the 25th most cited article in the Journal of Social Archaeology and “The Anthropocene in the Solar System,” cited by Zalasiewicz et al. (2016) in the Anthropocene Review as evidence that this era now extends into interplanetary space. Gorman has been invited to provide authoritative definitions and overviews of space archaeology by the Oxford Companion to Archaeology, the Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology and The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World. Her survey of the Orroral Valley NASA Tracking Station in the Australian Capital Territory is one of the few previous fieldwork-based analyses of space material culture. Other major contributions to the field of space archaeology include demonstrating the application of the Burra Charter heritage guidelines to space objects and space places, conceptualizing the solar system as a cultural landscape, and reframing terrestrial archaeology to take account of variable gravity environments. You can find her scholarly work at Academia.edu.

Alice Gorman is the global leader in public engagement in the history and archaeology of space exploration. Dr. Gorman was profiled for her work in The New Yorker in September 2017. She has more than 120 media appearances including television (ABC News 24, The Project, Channel NewsAsia and the Daily Edition), podcasts, print and online; over 4700 Twitter followers with a January 2017 impression of more than 80,000, in the top 1% of Academia.edu, and over 7000 YouTube views of her TEDxSydney talk in 2013. Her research blog, Space Age Archaeology, is archived by the National Library of Australia as a significant scientific publication and has been included in numerous blog ranking lists, with over 230,000 reads. She has been selected three times for the Best Australian Science Writing Anthology, and in 2017 she was awarded the Bragg Prize for Science Writing. She was named in the National Science Week 2016 Five Scientists Pledge, a challenge put forward by Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, to name five living Australian scientists.

Dr. Justin St. P. Walsh, RPA, is an archaeologist whose research areas include intercultural contact, identity construction, the protection of cultural heritage, and the archaeology of human activity in space. Since 1998, he has excavated sites in the United States, Spain, Jordan, and Italy. He has directed the Chapman Excavations at Cástulo project since 2014, investigating ancient Iberian consumption of imported goods near Linares, Spain. This project received funding from the National Geographic Society and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation at Harvard University. Since 2009, he has published one book, ten peer-reviewed articles, encyclopedia articles for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome and the Springer Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, and blog-posts/opinion pieces for Scientific American, the Los Angeles Times, and Hyperallergic. Dr. Walsh has won major awards including a Rome Prize and a Fulbright to Greece to support his research. In 2016, he was Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol. You can find Dr. Walsh’s scholarly work at Humanities Commons.

Dr. Walsh is the only archaeologist ever to have presented a paper at the biennial Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) meetings, to have given talks to chapters of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or to organize panels at the International Astronautical Congress and Global Space Exploration conferences. His space archaeology publications concern the need for an international protocol to protect heritage in space (published in the journal Space Policy); and the increasing ephemerality of satellites in low-Earth orbit (and the consequences of that ephemerality for future archaeological study of human activity in space).

Collaborators

We’re taking a global approach to this global project, and developing specific proposals to tackle elements of the larger investigation. You can find a list of our current collaborators below.

  • Rao Hamza Ali, Machine Learning and Assistive Technology Lab, Fowler School of Engineering, Chapman University (specialty: machine learning).
  • Dr. Paola Castaño, Newton Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University (specialties: sociology of science and knowledge, epistemology of the social sciences, sociological theory, science on the International Space Station, and public communication of astronomy).
  • Dr. Wendy Gunn, Emerging Technologies Lab, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University (speciality: design anthropology).
  • Prof. Erick Jones, Radio Frequency and Auto Identification Labs, University of Texas at Arlington (specialty: RFID technology, inventory management systems).
  • Amir Kanan Kashefi, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Flinders University (speciality: database engineering).
  • Dr. Erik Linstead, Machine Learning and Assistive Technology Lab, Fowler School of Engineering, Chapman University (specialties: machine learning, information retrieval).
  • Dr. Daniel Richter, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University (speciality: anthropogenic soil formation).
  • Prof. Frederick Scharmen, LEED AP, School of Architecture, Morgan State University (specialities: space architectures, speculative futures, urban design).
  • Prof. John Schofield, Department of Archaeology, University of York (specialties: contemporary archaeology, landscapes of science and technology, cultural heritage management).
  • Prof. Wendy Salmond, Department of Art, Chapman University (specialties: late imperial Russian art, Soviet and post-Soviet art, icon reception).
  • Dr. Stephanie Takaragawa, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Chapman University (specialities: visual anthropology, representation in film, mass media, art, performance, and cultural display, construction and dissemination of identities).