This volume addresses the creation, documentation, preservation, and study of the archaeology of lunar, planetary, and interstellar exploration. It defines the attributes of common human technological expressions within national and, increasingly, private exploration efforts, and explore the archaeology of both fixed and mobile artifacts in the solar system and the wider galaxy. This book presents the research of the foremost scholars in the field of space archaeology and heritage, a recent discipline of the field of Space Archaeology and Heritage. It provides the emerging archaeological perspective on the history of the human exploration of space. Since humans have been creating a vast archaeological preserve in space and on other celestial bodies. This assemblage of heritage objects and sites attest to the human presence off the Earth and the study of these material remains are best investigated by archaeologists and historic preservationists. As space exploration has reached the half century mark, it is the appropriate time to reflect on the major events and technological development of this particular unique 20th century arena of human history. The authors encapsulate various ways of looking at the archaeology of both fixed and mobile human artifacts in the solar system. As missions continue into space, and as private ventures gear up for public and tourist visits to space and to the Moon and even Mars, it is the appropriate time to address questions about the meaning and significance of this material culture.

This volume addresses the creation, documentation, preservation, and study of the archaeology of lunar, planetary, and interstellar exploration.It defines the attributes of common human technological expressions within national and, increasingly, private exploration efforts, and explore the archaeology of both fixed and mobile artifacts in the solar system and the wider galaxy.
This book presents the research of the foremost scholars in the field of space archaeology and heritage, a recent discipline of the field of Space Archaeology and Heritage. It provides the emerging archaeological perspective on the history of the human exploration of space.Since humans have been creating a vast archaeological preserve in space and on other celestial bodies.This assemblage of heritage objects and sites attest to the human presence off the Earth and the study of these material remains are best investigated by archaeologists and historic preservationists.As space exploration has reached the half century mark, it is the appropriate time to reflect on the major events and technological development of this particular unique 20th century arena of human history.
The authors encapsulate various ways of looking at the archaeology of both fixed and mobile human artifacts in the solar system.As missions continue into space, and as private ventures gear up for public and tourist visits to space and to the Moon and even Mars, it is the appropriate time to address questions about the meaning and significance of this material culture."

Reprint of book originally published by the Historian's Office of the United States Coast Guard in 2003. Includes maps and photographs in full color.

One of the untold stories of World War II is the guarding of Greenland and its coastal waters, where the first U.S. capture of an enemy ship took place. For six months in 1942 and against standing orders of the time, Thaddeus Nowakowski (now Novak) kept a personal diary of his service on patrol in the North Atlantic. Supplemented by photos from his last surviving shipmates, Novak's diary fills a void in the story of American sailors at war in the North Atlantic. It is the only known diary of an enlisted Coast Guard sailor to emerge from WWII.Though the Greenland coast was of vital importance to Allied forces, U.S. Coast Guard crews serving there were relegated to converted fishing vessels known as wooden shoes. Hastily commissioned in Boston to serve as escorts for supply routes to new air bases in Greenland, ten Arctic trawlers were transformed into the basis of the Greenland Patrol, transporting young men who had never been away from home into a realm of mountainous icebergs, lurking U-boats, and the alien culture of native Greenland Eskimos. This story of the Nanok's 1942 patrol is a remarkable account of a sailor thrown into a global war in a remote area full of environmental hardships that few endured in World War II. Between the sudden excitements and mind-numbing boredom of military life, Novak records the routine details of day-to-day patrol, contacts with the native Greenlanders and their impenetrable way of life, and actions such as the loss of the cutter Natsek and its entire crew on the night of December 17,1942. Not an account of grand strategy or hand-to-hand combat, this story of a twenty-year-old petty officer on duty in the Arctic is rather the life of an ordinary individual at war, coping with rigorous hardships during a time of great crisis.Novak's account will be of significant value to students of the U.S. Coast Guard and of naval service in wartime. His illumination of the small details of a sailor's life and perceptive observation of the arctic region and its little-known people will appeal to anyone interested in maritime history.

Benjamin Leigh Smith discovered and named dozens of islands in the Arctic but published no account of his pioneering explorations. He refused public accolades and sent stand-ins to deliver the results of his work to scientific societies. Yet, the Royal Geographic Society's Sir Clements R. Markham referred to him as a polar explorer of the first rank. Travelling to the Arctic islands that Leigh Smith explored and crisscrossing England to uncover unpublished journals, diaries, and photographs, archaeologist and writer P.J. Capelotti details Leigh Smith's five major Arctic expeditions and places them within the context of the great polar explorations in the nineteenth century.

In the summer of 2021, Norwegian explorer Bjorn Larsen and Italian archaeologist Paolo Serengetti are completing a wide-ranging archaeological survey along the north coast of the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard on board the research vessel Polar Quest. The objective of their expedition is to locate any surviving evidence of the disastrous 1928 Italia dirigible expedition to the North Pole. But instead of finding the lost airship in a remote fjord of the archipelago, they stumble instead upon a previously unknown shipwreck. As the identity of their discovery becomes apparent, so too does its magnitude: a submarine that appears to be the same Nautilus described by Jules Verne in the novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It soon becomes evident to Serengetti and Larsen that Verne's famous novel was not a dramatic imaginative science fiction story, but a fictionalized account of an undersea voyage that actually took place in 1867.

This book describes the 1873 voyage of the British explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith, based on the diaries and photographs of Lieutenant Herbert C. Chermside, who joined the expedition of the seas around Svalbard. Chermside's photographs, long believed lost, have recently been uncovered in Sweden and are being curated there by the Grenna Museum. The three unpublished diaries of Herbert Chermside were lent to the Scott Polar Research Institute in 1939 by Mrs. Benjamin Leigh Smith. For the first time, Chermside's diaries are published in their entirety, with the original photographs shown alongside modern images of the same locations. This includes the first photographic record of the north coast of Svalbard, images that are today being used as comparative data for the study of climate change in the archipelago. The diaries have been fully transcribed and edited. Introductory chapters are included, written by specialists in the history of exploration, history of science, and the history of photography from Penn State University, the University of Gothenburg, and UiT, the Arctic University of Norway, as well as contributors from the UK and Germany. This volume is published in association with Grenna Museum, which will present Chermside's photographs in a 2022 exhibit on Leigh Smith and A.E. Nordenskiold.

Franz Josef Land is a forbidding place, isolated by geography and history. Lying above the Arctic Circle in the northernmost province of Russia, this remote series of islands was only discovered by Westerners in 1873, and remains little known today. A few intrepid explorers ventured there in the late 19th century as a stepping-stone in attempts to reach the North Pole. Chicago journalist Walter Wellman led the first American expedition to the archipelago as part of a polar expedition in 1898-1899. His second-in-command, Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, kept a journal documenting their trip. This previously unpublished journal reveals much about one of the last great periods of exploration - including the violence, chicanery, and racism that characterized much of American exploration and expansion. Baldwin's journal, reproduced here, paints a more realistic picture of the expedition than did Wellman's communiques sent home for mass consumption. Correspondence between Baldwin and Wellman is included, and expedition notes list the supplies carried, descriptions of geographic features observed in the course of the trip, and the doctor's notes on treatments, remedies and supplies. Editor P.J. Capelotti provides an extended introduction, and the text is illustrated with maps, depictions of dramatic events occurring on the trip, and several photographs.

Discover a little-known world of archaeology Wrecked aircraft and abandoned airfields, old highway billboards and derelict boats, movie props, deserted mining operations. In this book, archaeologist P.J. Capelotti explores places and things that people don't typically think of as archaeological sites and artifacts, introducing readers to the most extreme fieldwork taking place today.Capelotti shows that even seemingly ordinary objects from the recent past hold secrets about the cultural history of humans. He investigates the site where a stunt copy of the Orca, the fishing boat used in the movie Jaws, was stripped to pieces by fans-a revelation of the ways humans relate to popular culture. He takes readers to abandoned base camps near the North Pole that are now used as destinations for Arctic tourism. Retelling the story of Thor Heyerdahl's research expedition across the Pacific Ocean on a balsa log raft, Capelotti shows how this episode of experimental archaeology revealed cultural connections between continents. And he doesn't stop at the limits of the planet. He discusses debris floating through outer space and equipment left behind on the surface of the moon, highlighting current efforts to preserve artifacts that exist beyond the Earth's atmosphere. These discarded materials, says Capelotti, help archaeologists piece together the sweeping story of human cultural expansion and exploitation. He explains how the unusual sites of shorelines, sea, air, and space represent the farthest reaches of human civilization. His enthusiasm will inspire readers to set out on their own to investigate the secret meanings of treasures hiding in plain sight.

In Gilded Age America, Arctic explorers were fabulous celebrities - assured of riches and near-immortality so long as they reached the North Pole first. Of the many attempts to meet that goal, three American expeditions, launched from the Russian archipelago of Franz Josef Land, ended in abject failure, their exploits consigned to near-oblivion. Even so, these ventures - the Wellman expedition (1898-99), the Baldwin-Ziegler (1901-2), and the Fiala-Ziegler (1903-5) - have much to tell us about the personalities, politics, and economics of exploration in their day. In The Greatest Show in the Arctic, the first book to chronicle all three expeditions, P. J. Capelotti explores what went right and what, in the end, went tragically wrong. The cast of colorful characters from the Franz Josef Land forays included Walter Wellman, a Chicago journalist and bon vivant running from debts, his mistress, and an illegitimate daughter; Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, a deranged meteorologist with a fetish for balloons and a passion for Swedish conserves; and Anthony Fiala, a pious photographer in search of God in the Arctic. Featuring an international cast of supporting characters worthy of a three-ring circus, The Greatest Show in the Arctic follows each of the three expeditions in turn, from spectacular feats of financing to their bitter ends. Along the way, the explorers accumulated considerable geographic knowledge and left a legacy of place-names. Through close study of the expeditions' journals, Capelotti reveals that the Franz Josef Land endeavors foundered chiefly because of poor leadership and internal friction, not for lack of funding, as historians have previously suspected. Presenting tales of noble intentions, novel inventions, and epic miscalculations, The Greatest Show in the Arctic brings fresh life to a unique and underappreciated story of American exploration.

Norways Spitsbergen Archipelago, known as Svalbard to the Norwegians, is of increasing interest to Arctic scholars and geographers, as well as to military historians and analysts of strategy. It was the farthest northern battleground between German and Allied forces in World War II; it became a political arena for Soviet and U.S. competition during the Cold War; it is now a field of conflict for fishing rights and cultural resource protection; and it serves as a laboratory for the study of global warming. This unique island group occupies a fascinating place in European, Russian, and American affairs. Here, for the first time, is the complete report compiled by U.S. Intelligence at the beginning of World War II evaluating the islands both geographically and militarily, as well as a report on the archipelago produced by the CIA in 1950. This comprehensive report--never superseded in the years since--has been edited and introduced by P.J. Capelotti. It provides in great detail the American perspective on these islands and their strategic, economic, and geologic value. Maps and illustrations are included, some from the original report, some new. A glossary covers Arctic terms.

Providing a unified catalog of archaeological artifacts that have been left behind in space as a result of human exploration, this book describes the remnants of lost satellites, discarded lunar rovers, depleted rockets, and various abandoned spacecrafts. The book is divided into three parts covering distinct but interconnected issues of lunar, planetary, and interstellar archaeology. In Parts One and Two, individual chapters cover the history of each space mission, along with technical notes and, in some cases, images of the artifacts in question. Part Three explores the archaeology of mobile artifacts in the Solar System and the wider galaxy, looking particularly at the problems encountered in attempting a traditional archaeological field survey of artifacts that may remain in motion indefinitely.