Xenoarchaeology is the study of past alien cultures from their physical remains. The prefix xeno- is from the Greek xenos, ‘stranger’.
Alien, in this instance, refers to members of any species other than that of the hypothetical xenoarchaeologist. A human studying martian ruins is a xenoarchaeologist, as is a martian studying human ruins.
The term ‘alien’ always sounds a little pejorative to me (how about non-human person?), but I use it here instead of ‘extraterrestrial’ which could be taken as a spatial designation, and because in the future there could conceivably be terrestrial nonhuman cultures (say, from uplifted animals or artificial intelligences). Despite its connotations, the word ‘alien’ conveys the otherness of the culture to be studied.
If xenoarchaeology is the study of past cultures from species other than one’s own, and if you define ‘human’ in a narrow sense to refer to modern Homo sapiens, then archaeologists who study other hominids are already conducting a sort of xenoarchaeology.
Interpreting human, and perhaps hominid, minds and cultures is one thing, in fact we all do it in our everyday lives. But a special set of skills will be needed to study alien cultures without anthropomorphising them.
See Robert Freitas’ paper Xenopsychology or this article on Astrosociobiology for some reading on studying alien cultures.
I’m put in mind of a concept from the Ender’s Game series by science fiction author Orson Scott Card. In it, he introduces a system of classifying ‘strangers’ called the Hierarchy of Exclusion. Here’s an abridged version from Wikipedia:
- Utlanning (translated: “outlander” or “foreigner””, utlänning in Swedish) are strangers of one’s own species and one’s own culture). An utlanning is a person who shares the observer’s cultural identity.
- Framling (translated: “stranger”, främling in Swedish) are members of one’s own species but from another culture. This is a person who is both substantially similar to and significantly different from ourselves.
- Ramen are strangers from another species who are capable of communication and peaceful coexistence.
- Varelse (pronounced var-ELSS-uh) (translated: “being”) are strangers from another species who are not able to communicate with us. They are true aliens, completely incapable of common ground with humanity. In Swedish, varelse means “creature.”
- Djur (translated as: “slavering beast”): are the monsters. “The dire beast that comes in the night with slavering jaws.” Translated from Swedish, djur means “animal”.
Archaeologists today study utlanning and framling remains. Xenoarchaeologists will study ramen and varelse. I don’t have the books to hand, so I’m not sure whether djur refers literally to animals/monsters or to implacably hostile aliens.
Ramen would include most of the aliens of popular science fiction – the Star Trek and Star Wars universes, for example. For examples of varelse consider the aliens from John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline, Peter Watts’ Blindsight, or the creators of the artefact from Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon.
It seems to me that the distinction between ramen and varelse is potentially a useful one, at the very least offering shorthand terms for use in discussing aliens – fictional or otherwise.
Greg Fewer
May 7, 2010 — 11:53 pm
This is an interesting discussion of what xenoarchaeology is.
I was struck by your comment:
‘If xenoarchaeology is the study of past cultures from species other than one’s own, and if you define ‘human’ in a narrow sense to refer to modern Homo sapiens, then archaeologists who study other hominids are already conducting a sort of xenoarchaeology.’
I would add that humans have also identified cultures among chimpanzees and orangutans (though I’m sure gorillas and gibbons, as well as at least some species of monkey and whale must have a level of culture as well). A. Whiten et al. (1999) reported on a comparative study of chimpanzee populations in Guinea, Ivory Coast, Tanzania and Uganda, which demonstrated 39 observed patterns of behaviour that were absent in some populations but were customary or habitual in others, and which could not be explained by local ecological factors. The authors argue that in ‘the biological sciences, a more inclusive definition [of culture than some cultural anthropologists would allow for (based on linguistic ability)] is accepted, in which the significance of cultural transmission is recognized as one of only two important processes that can generate evolutionary change: inter-generation transmission of behaviour may occur either genetically or through social learning, with processes of variation and selection shaping biological evolution in the first case and cultural evolution in the second. From this perspective, a cultural behaviour is one that is transmitted repeatedly through social or observational learning to become a population-level characteristic.’
In the case of orangutans, 24 patterns of behaviour that are transmitted from one generation to another by imitation, were identified in another study (van Schaik et al., 2003; McDowell, 2003).
These studies are, of course, ethological since they deal with observations of behaviour in living populations of chimpanzees and orangutans. However, by applying archaeoloogical techniques to the recovery of durable artefacts, skeletal remains and associated environmental traces such as coprolites and preserved food waste with respect to ancient chimpanzee and orangutan populations, then one could argue that the scientists concerned are practicing xenoarchaeology.
REFERENCES
McDOWELL, N. (2003) ‘Orangutans[‘] swinging culture revealed’, in New Scientist, 2 January 2003.
VAN SCHAIK, C. P., M. Ancrenaz, G. Borgen, B. Galdikas, C. D. Knott, I. Singlton, A. Suzuki, S. S. Utami & M. Y. Merill (2003) Orangutan cultures and the evolution of material culture’, in Science, vol. 299, pp. 102-5.
WHITEN, A., J. Goodall, W>C. McGrew, T. Nishida, V. reynolds, Y. Sugiyama, C. E. G. Tutin, R. W. Wrangham & C. Boeasch (1999) ‘Cultures in chimpanzees’, in Nature, vol. 399, pp. 682-5.
Steve Wilson
May 17, 2010 — 10:33 am
Great point, Greg! Maybe there’s room in there for another category … archaeology within one’s own clade …
Jayarava
November 4, 2016 — 8:47 pm
Råmän (Probably from Swedish rå ‘crude’ + män ‘person’; sounds like ‘raw-men’) are not Homo sapiens, but are recognised as ‘human’ and can be communicated with.
David Bofinger
December 30, 2017 — 10:45 pm
C. J. Cherryh’s Compact Space is an SF example of a continuum between ramen and varelse. The viewpoint character hani can easily communicate with mahe, though they are clearly different. The other oxygen-breathing species are more alien but still comprehensible. The hydrogen-breathers are far stranger: one can be communicated with reasonably easily, the second is much harder to understand, the third is incomprehensible to hani but contact has been made via the second.