Battlestar Galactica

In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), the scriptural phrase “life here began out there” prompts the survivors of the Cylon attack to seek refuge in the mythic home-world, Earth. While the planet’s location lies buried in the obscure corners of cultural memory, the Colonial fleet manages to take its bearings from artefacts, ruins, and substrata along the way. But as a critical medium for investing and investigating historical and cultural identity in objects, archaeology also challenges the Colonials to evaluate the hierarchical distinctions between things and people that underlie their antagonism with the Cylon “machines.” Cylons and humans alike search for their origins, identity, and even survival among the shards of their shared material history in the race to Earth. BSG’s archaeological mise-en-scène affords meta-textual reflection on the central ethical and philosophical question fuelling the exodus narrative: how to understand and define humanity’s purpose out of the ruins of the contemporary world? The answer is that the Cylon Wars will rage until Colonial humanity accepts the Cylons’ desire to transcend the status of historical objects and become historical agents. Finding a (co)habitable destination requires both sides to open the archaeological record to inclusive narratives of origin.

Envoi

Excavating the Future concludes with a discussion of two real-world archaeological events: ISIS’s destruction of artefacts at Palmyra and Nimrud and the reaction by heritage preservation organizations to simulate destroyed artefacts through 3D printing, stereoscopic modelling, and crowdsourcing projects. The envoi contends that these reproductive countermeasures to the world-wide media dissemination of terrorist attacks on material history serve to perpetuate a desired future born from the very logic of globalization and progress that has made World Heritage sites such irresistible targets for Islamic extremists. The envoi argues that SF’s response to the material conditions of history in the post 9/11 world invites attentive audiences to remain suspicious of such iconodulist claims upon the past and future.

Prometheus

Prometheus (2012) provides ample material for cyborg criticism in the figure of its android protagonist, David. Modelling himself after the archaeologist, promoter of Arab nationalism and British spy T.E. Lawrence, David functions as both a cultural artefact in, and an agent of, Prometheus's expedition to the origins of human life, an enterprise that, like Lawrence’s, is an anthropological recovery of an early phase of civilization that promotes the interests of the industrial-military complex that David serves (in Lawrence's case, Britain's Foreign and Colonial Office). David is the pivot upon which the film's historical fabula turns, is the "cyborg site" from which the diegetic environment of material science flows: as a non-human marginalized figure, the cyborg David simultaneously embodies and resists the originary trajectory and the racist/speciesist discourse that lay at the heart of early archaeological thinking. Ultimately, theories of common origins that infuse Scott's film are dismantled along with the conservative political agendas such myths serve. As a signifier of the archaeological business of gathering artefacts into partial typologies of origins and progress, the cyborg archaeologist is a fitting coda to my investigation of the uneasy and ongoing alliance between archaeology and global politics circulating in the popular imaginary of SF.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

This chapter transposes the analogical investigation of ancient astronauts as a source of geopolitical meditation in Ancient Aliens to a SF film that make this connection explicit: Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull (2006), which adapts the cinematic antecedent of 1950s B SF movies—in which aliens function as a trope for governmental conspiracy, atomic anxiety, and Soviet hysteria—into ancient astronaut discourse. An interesting subtext of Spielberg’s nostalgic throwback to SF film history is the nature of the aliens themselves. As archaeologists and collectors, they replicate the kinds of colonial archaeology that Jones and even the audience may take for granted. These beings function within the SF métier as an external threat, but they simultaneously sanction the civilizing activities undertaken by democratic institutions like the British Museum, Louvre and Metropolitan Museum. The film thus neatly closes the hermeneutic circle on the Indiana Jones franchise by mining its latent SF tropes: the intrepid figure of colonial archaeology is reinvigorated through the exotic adventures of technologically-advanced beings from outer space. Archaeology is a device for manifesting threats that can be foiled by the very scientific structures and geopolitical forces that inform the entertaining world of action and adventure.

Smallville

For 10 seasons Smallville (2001-2011) remodelled Superman for audiences growing up with Clark Kent in an age perhaps uniquely defined by insecurity. Clark's struggles to understand what the audience infers is his pre-determined destiny are shaped within social realities very different from those of his comic book progenitor's. The show very smartly establishes tensions between good and evil not in terms of moral benchmarks but through complex exercises of power. Archaeology is an important vehicle for Smallville's revitalization of the Superman mythos. As a decade-long excavation and reinterpretation the Kryptonian's coming of age as the guardian par excellence of national and global security, a mysterious blend of artefacts, expeditions and ancient aliens are crucial sources of contestation and education for the young superhero. Through archaeological reference, education and exploration, the show sets up a flexible framework for responding to current crises in terms that resist the binaries under which such antagonisms are rendered in so much of the popular rhetoric circulating in the American geopolitical imaginary.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

This chapter examines the representation of archaeology in the action/adventure cinematics of Michael Bay's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (2007), a film predicated on hidden relics transforming explosively into action. The film's diegetic environment—which features a hunt for a lost relic that happens to be the key to an ancient doomsday device secreted away inside the Great Pyramid at Giza—is analogous to the its specific geographical and historical setting. The film is "Babylonian" in that it invokes Orientalist imagery as an almost inevitable generic necessity within SF action/adventure cinema. The chapter argues specifically that the military, archaeological and geopolitical motifs of the film are most clearly and coherently aligned in the framing and shot-making techniques of the action sequences themselves. By figuratively compressing time into literally compressed spaces (here principal photography at Petra, Giza and Luxor is collapsed into a single location), the set/setting is a chronotopic threshold that transforms antiquity into a battle ground for military technocratic modernity.

Ancient Aliens

Focusing on the History Channel's popular series Ancient Aliens (2009-), this chapter examines how the (pseudo)documentary mode of representing the incredible idea that extra-terrestrial intelligences intervened in human history directs amateur experiences of archaeology towards SF conventions. Integral to these viewing experiences of Ancient Aliens are the kinds of future-pasts exposed in the series. Of particular interest is the threatening sense of the past, which capitalizes and obliquely comments on the current state of insecurity generated in all sorts of news, documentary and fictional media. This chapter contends that recurrent themes such as doomsday weapons, extra-terrestrial invasion threats, government conspiracies, genetic tampering, the rise and fall of civilizations, the Mayan calendar, and the insistent focus on the Middle East as the origin of civilization and setting for the (imminent) apocalypse cast palpable contemporary geopolitical anxieties into challenging narratives of cultural origins. As such, the ancient alien topos, though pseudo-archaeological, is a significant cultural expression of the dialogic relationship between archaeology and SF film and television as popular and imaginative expressions of historical identity and geopolitical mediation.

Stargate SG-1

This chapter develops the central thesis of Chapter 1, namely that paramilitary archaeology is a means of invoking then containing dangerous pasts as an imaginative extension of U.S. foreign policy. Aired in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, Stargate (1994) translates the colonial milieu of 1930s Egyptology to the science fictional terrain of Abydos and the battle against Ra. But the shift to the small screen's televisual identity is symptomatic of the deepening complexities of representing geopolitical activity in the region. Just as archaeology passes from a source of wonder into a vehicle for military adventure, the show's ideological commitments to global (read intra-galactic) security become increasingly destabilized, particularly in the Mesopotamian-themed episodes aired after 9/11. The mercurial figure of Babylon offers a counterpoint to the film's overlay of archaeology and militarism, and indeed to the rhetoric of military stewardship at the heart of the "military-archaeology complex." The shifting representation of Mesopotamian antiquity in SG-1's ten-year run (1997-2007) offers powerful cultural criticism of the show's own premise.

Manticore

Predicated on the infamous looting of the Baghdad Museum during the first week of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Tripp Reed’s telefilm Manticore (2005) is a "Babylonian" text that reverses the events and politics upon which its scenario is based—the destruction of antiquities in wartime—into a liberation story. In the film, U.S. Marines save Iraq from a legendary beast unleashed from its own archaeological past by a megalomaniacal terrorist claiming Babylonian ancestry. Wedding the (neo)imperialist rhetoric of archaeological stewardship in the "cradle of civilization" with military adventure, Manticore exemplifies how SF as a symbolic medium frequently capitalizes on (and thereby exposes) archaeology's latent complicity with geopolitical activity. The notion of the "archaeology-military complex" in Iraq—the absorption of archaeologists into military structures—provides an important critical context for the investigation of the ways values like heritage and stewardship promote Western interventions in the Middle East, activities that in turn provide diegetic materials for SF narratives

Introduction

The introductory chapter establishes relationships between archaeology as a trope within SF film and television and as a cultural site from which to investigate the medium’s critical engagement with post 9/11 geopolitics. Arguing that the imagination of the future is indelibly overrun by the past, scholars like Fredric Jameson, Gary Wolfe and Carl Freeman contend that SF is a historicist genre that exposes its master fantasy of progress to the kinds of real and symbolic assaults on Western global power represented by 9/11. The introduction contends that SF film and television offer resistant readings of the ways mediatized weapons of retaliation on the West circulate within popular culture as potent images of threat and fear that have leant Western governments extraordinary powers of surveillance and control over its citizens and the world in the name of freedom and security. The introduction historicises the cinematic and televisual response to 9/11 and its aftermath by looking back to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film that speaks obliquely to the terrible events of the year it imagines, in which the cinematics of terror have been naturalized within the SF cinematic imagination.