It is true that the moon landing did not do much for archaeology. Yet, the space program and the space race, the military-industrial complex of the late 1950s and 1960s, along with other lines of research, created the fundamentals of what we use in spatial technology in archaeology today.
moon landing
16 posts
The stiff, gray cardboard box sat calmly on the table in the quiet NASA archive at the University of Houston Clear Lake: History Archive, Box#52, Astronomy Papers and Research. Folder 8, “Parker personal correspondence,” contained the transcript of an astronaut’s personal diary about landing on the moon.
The year is 1902. Our setting is a Jules Verne-inspired film studio on the outskirts of Paris. Illusionist and director Georges Méliès is about to produce one of the most influential films ever made—Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon).
The Scottish National Party (SNP) presents itself as a non-radical civic nationalist party—a traditional party of government, a party to be taken seriously, and one that has capably led the Scottish Parliament for the past eight years.
With Apollo 11’s successful moon landing in 1969, humans captured the first picture of the earth as a globe. Taken from a distance in space, this picture marks a pictorial imagination of the “global” characterized by imageries of the earth as a whole.
Last January in Texas, I sat listening as Solomon, a self-described atheist who had long worked with the NASA Human Research Program, talked about destiny. I asked him to tell me about the future of humans in space and he answered, eyes lit with emotion, “It’s whatever anybody wants it to be, and it’s unlimited. It’s inevitable.”
The term “moonshot” is used to suggest an exploratory enterprise with a high probability of failure, but also one that promises tremendous impact in the unlikely outcome of success.
On March 26, 2019, NASA cancelled the first all-female astronaut spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The size medium suits needed by astronauts Christina Koch and Anne McClain were on board, but only one was prepped for a spacewalk. So instead, it was Koch and fellow astronaut Nick Hague who floated outside the space station to install new batteries.
The topic of the Apollo 11 moonwalk on July 16, 1969, stirred a range of memories for senior anthropologists. Myrdene Anderson, then a graduate student at Yale, even remembers what she had to eat that evening: poached salmon, cooked by fellow grad student Michiko Takaki. Fifty years on however, she feels cause to question her recollections.
The Biosphere Reserve of El Pinacate in northwestern Mexico, sacred to the Tohono O’odham, is considered a paradise by biologists for its diversity of plant and animal life, and by geologists for its immense dunes and lava fields.
I figure I was seven years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I remember being at my neighbors’ house, sitting on their oval braided rug, watching the small-screen TV. I can still picture those fuzzy black and white images of the spacecraft and astronauts. Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” I get chills when I replay that moon landing on the internet.
The night of the moon landing fell in the middle of a hectic week for my American mother in Iran. She was arranging her wedding, which included the arrival of her best friend from Michigan just in time to sit down in front of the television with my mother’s soon-to-be in-laws to watch Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the moon.
African Cosmos/Stellar Arts opened at the National Museum of African Art in 2012 and traveled to three additional venues through 2015. The exhibition took on the rich, complex, and little-studied topic of African cultural astronomy as a way to challenge commonly held notions of Africans as cultural, but not as scientific, beings.
In 2016, LTG Associates, Inc. brought together a team of anthropologists to respond to a NASA contract opportunity to conduct an ethnography of a rapid, ambiguous, countercultural team assignment.
On Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8 became the first manned spacecraft to venture around the dark side of the moon. To audiences across the world, the visions of Earth rising above the lunar deserts triggered an understanding that humanity might be alone in the universe, its habitat precariously unique.