The Awe of the Ancients: Archaeology and Science Fiction
By Jeremy Clift, author of Born in Space: Unlocking Destiny
Standing before the remains of a civilization that flourished long before our own can be deeply unsettling. We can measure the stones, catalogue the artifacts, and reconstruct fragments of the lives of the people who built them, but a distance we cannot entirely cross still separates us from them.
We are looking at evidence of lives that once seemed as immediate and important to those who lived them as ours do to us, yet much of what those people knew, believed, and understood has disappeared.
That was one of the ideas that emerged from The Ancients in Sci-fi: Archaeology and Anthropology in Space, a panel I moderated at the August Sci-Fi Worldcon in Los Angeles. We began with Stargate SG-1, appropriately enough, and its wonderfully seductive premise that ancient ruins might conceal knowledge capable of
transforming our understanding of human history. But our discussion soon moved beyond lost technologies and mysterious artifacts to a more fundamental question: if we discovered the remains of an alien civilization, how much could we really hope to understand?
Janet Forbes introduced a phrase that captured part of the attraction particularly well: “aesthetic awe.” It is the feeling of being confronted by something so immense, ancient or extraordinary that it exceeds our normal frame of reference.
We can experience something of that sensation when we stand before the pyramids, Stonehenge or the ruins of an ancient city. The physical remains connect us with people who lived centuries or millennia before us, while simultaneously reminding us of how much separates us from them.
Harnessing The Mystery
Science fiction can magnify that feeling almost without limit. Imagine entering a structure on another world and discovering that it was built a million years before the first humans appeared on Earth. Imagine finding a machine the size of a city without understanding what it was designed to do, or discovering evidence that an interstellar civilization had flourished and disappeared before humanity had even begun its evolutionary journey.
The power of the alien ruin, then, lies in more than the mystery of what happened there. It confronts us with the possibility of civilizations vastly older than our own and with the uncomfortable realization that intelligence, technology and power may offer no guarantee of permanence.
For a science-fiction writer, that combination of mystery and awe can provide a powerful narrative hook because the past can introduce a question whose answer has immediate consequences for the future. I used that idea in Space Shield: The Wrath of the Sun, where the discovery of an ancient Olmec mosaic in Mexico appears to contain evidence of catastrophic solar activity long before modern instruments existed to record it. The archaeological mystery becomes intertwined with a twenty-second-century scientific one: if the people who created the mosaic witnessed something extraordinary in the Sun, what exactly did they see, and could it happen again?
Bringing an ancient artifact into a futuristic story creates a bridge across time, allowing the past to become more than background or atmosphere. It can provide the clue, warning or unresolved mystery that sets the future story in motion.
Yet awe can also mislead us. Faced with an alien city or an immense machine, we would naturally focus on the spectacular. An archaeologist might instead be fascinated by the apparently insignificant objects lying around it.
As Terilee Edwards-Hewitt pointed out during our discussion, the most important archaeological discoveries are not necessarily the largest, most beautiful or most intrinsically valuable. Their importance comes from what they can reveal about the culture that produced them. A humble domestic object may tell us more about how people actually lived than a monumental structure built to impress them.
That distinction leads to the central problem at the heart of both archaeology and archaeological science fiction. Discovering something is only the beginning. The much harder task is deciding what it means.
The evidence survives, but the meaning may not
Archaeologists reconstruct vanished societies from whatever those societies happen to have left behind, whether buildings, burials, pottery, seeds, bones, tools or, when they are particularly fortunate, writing.
The difficulty is that an artifact does not arrive with an instruction manual explaining what it meant to the people who made it.
Kathryn Sullivan, one of my fellow panelists, offered a wonderful illustration from her own fiction. An archaeologist confidently identifies an object as an important ritual device, only for a time traveler who actually knows the civilization being studied to explain that it was an ordinary toothbrush.
The example is amusing because it exposes a genuine problem. Archaeologists have evidence, but they still have to interpret it, and the distinction between what the evidence demonstrates and the story we construct around it is not always obvious.
If that is difficult when we are studying other human beings, the problem becomes enormously greater when we imagine trying to understand an entirely alien civilization.
— Jeremy Clift, author of Born in Space, Space Vault, and Space Shield. Read Clift’s profile on Kirkus.
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