Category: Philosophy of Archaeology

The body has a moving edge

Second in a series. The first essay set out the ancient programme this work descends from — the ontology from Parmenides and Heraclitus, the method from Epicurus, and the argument that dualism is what froze the human sciences. This essay takes those foundations as given and follows the single most important consequence: that a living body is not the bounded thing we take it for, that its real edge moves, and that technology is the name for what happens when it moves outward into the world.

The first essay did the hard foundational work: one continuous being, in motion, with the dualisms dissolved because there is nowhere left for a real separation to stand. I want now to take the most familiar object there is — your own body — and show what those two axioms do to it. Because the place the whole programme turns from metaphysics into a science of human beings is here, at the boundary of the body, and it turns on noticing that the boundary is not where you think it is and does not stay still.

A body is a motion, not a thing

You think of yourself as a thing: a body, bounded by skin, that moves around inside an environment. The environment is outside, you are inside, and the skin is the line between. This is so obvious it is hard to see as a claim at all. But it is a claim, and on the view set out in the first essay it is the wrong one.

A living body is not a thing that happens to be moving. It is a motion that happens to hold a shape. Heartbeat, breath, the transport of molecules across membranes, the firing of neurons, the constant muscular work of holding posture against gravity — a body is a continuously regulated system of motion, sustained against a background of ambient motion that would otherwise dissipate it. This is not poetic licence. Stop the regulation and the shape goes: the structure that was a body becomes, within minutes, just matter subject to the ambient motion like any other, and then it disperses. What we call a body is precisely the regulation — the holding of a pattern of motion against the tendency of everything to even out. The “thing” is the verb, not the noun.

If that is what a body is, then its boundary is not the skin. The boundary is the edge of the motion the system can govern. Where the organism’s regulated motion ends and ungoverned ambient motion begins — that is the real edge of the organism, and most of the time it sits at roughly the skin, which is why we never notice that skin was never the point.

Watch the edge move

Now pick something up.

Grip a stone. For as long as you hold it, the stone’s possible motions are constrained by yours. It cannot fall, cannot roll, cannot move except as your regulated motion permits; it has entered your force-transmission system and become, for the duration, part of the governed pattern. The edge of the organism is now at the surface of the stone, not at the skin of the hand. Raise the stone and strike with it, and the governed motion now reaches through the stone into whatever you strike. Throw it, and for the duration of the flight your governed motion extends across the whole arc — you have flung the edge of yourself thirty feet downrange.

This is not a metaphor about feeling attached to your tools. It is a literal claim about where the regulated-motion system ends, and the answer is: not at the skin, and not at any fixed place. The boundary is wherever the governance currently reaches, and it moves in and out as the organism takes material under control and releases it again. The skin was just where the edge usually sits when the hands are empty.

And this is the whole definition of technology, arrived at from inside the organism rather than imposed from outside. Technology is structured motion that extends the organism’s governed boundary into external material — that brings the stone, the spear, the anvil under the same regulation that governs the heartbeat and the stride, and so reaches the edge of the self outward into the world. A stone tool, on this account, is not itself the technology. The technology is the motion; the stone is the trace it leaves and the medium through which the boundary momentarily extends. This is the reorientation the whole research programme rests on: away from the object and its type, toward the motion and its boundary.

The coupling, and why biology already has the language for it

There is an established way of talking about this in systems biology, and it is not borrowed loosely — it is the right frame, and the ontology delivers you straight to it.

An organism that brings external material under its own regulation, incorporating it into its governed dynamics, is engaged in what the systems-biology literature calls self-extending symbiosis: a system that maintains itself by recruiting parts of its environment into its own self-maintaining process. The recruited element is not metabolised, not made of the organism’s own tissue; it is coupled — brought into the regulatory loop while remaining external. The hand and the stone, while the knapping lasts, are one self-maintaining motion system with two materials in it, one of them flesh and one of them rock.

This matters because it tells you what kind of thing the organism–environment boundary is. It is not a wall and not a fixed membrane; it is the active surface where governed motion meets ambient motion and can reach across to pull some of the ambient into the governed. The boundary is where the organism does its homeostatic work — where it buffers itself against the environment’s departures from what it can tolerate. An organism with empty hands buffers itself only with its anatomy. An organism that can extend its boundary into material buffers itself with the material too, and the range of environmental departures it can survive grows accordingly. That is the seed of the entire evolutionary story the technical work tells — but the point for now is conceptual: the boundary is a place where work is done, the work is homeostatic, and extending the boundary outward is a way of doing more of it. The body’s moving edge is the organism’s primary tool for staying alive in a world that keeps changing.

The relations are the reality

Here is the part that I think is the conceptual core of the whole way of seeing, and the part I have been least willing, until now, to state without hedging. I have tended to write of technology producing “effective” changes in the organism’s world — as though the real situation were fixed and the technology only altered some experienced or measured overlay on top of it. That hedging is a mistake, and dropping it is what makes the idea land.

Start with something everyone knows in their body. Stand on a station platform as a train slides out. For a moment you cannot tell whether your train is moving or the one beside it is; the only fact available to you is the relative motion between them. This is not a quirk of perception. It is how motion is. Motion is only ever the motion of one body relative to another; there is no measurement you can make of your own motion except against something else. Classical mechanics has known this since Galileo: in an inertial frame, you measure motion only in relation to other bodies, and absent any such relation a body “may as well be at rest.” And here the programme’s first axiom finishes the thought that even Galileo left half-stated — there is no “at rest,” because all is motion. The absolute, motionless background against which things would “really” be moving or still is a fiction. It is, in the exact sense of the first essay, a what-is-not that we have wrongly granted being.

Hold onto that, because it is what licenses the strong claim. We habitually narrate a hunt from an imagined god’s-eye view: “really” the hominin stands here, the prey stands there, the spear flies between. From that imagined absolute frame, the relative-motion description looks like mere bookkeeping — a way of talking. But the absolute frame does not exist. The only frames that exist are the frames of the bodies actually in the interaction. And in those frames, the changes technology makes are not effective, not apparent, not as-if. They are the changes, full stop.

Take the cast spear. The instant it leaves the hand, the organism’s governed edge is travelling downrange at spear-velocity. Consider the moment in the frame of the prey — which is the only frame in which the prey’s life is decided. The prey had established a safe distance: thirty feet, say, judged against how fast a hominin can close on foot. The spear collapses that distance almost instantly. In the prey’s own frame, a lethal surface that should have taken seconds to arrive has crossed thirty feet in a fraction of one. The margin it had relied on is simply gone — not metaphorically, not in some analyst’s measure, but in the only frame that governs whether the prey lives. To be as safe as it was, it must now keep sixty feet, and then the next cast collapses that, and so the pressure ratchets. This is exactly the selective force that shapes prey into swervers and sprinters, and it is invisible if you insist on the god’s-eye frame and visible — calculable, real — the moment you stand where the prey stands. The distance really did collapse. There is no higher court in which it merely seemed to.

Now the cutting edge. A blade is primarily a transformation of force, and what it changes is the resistance of the material worked. With the right edge and the right motion, a hide that was too tough to part, a tendon that would not sever, parts and severs. In the user’s frame the material has become soft — and there is no other frame in which to ask whether it “really” did, because hardness is not a property a material has by itself. Hardness lives in the interaction between a material and the force brought to bear on it through a particular geometry. Change the geometry — bring an edge into the force-transmission chain — and you change the interaction, and hardness, which exists nowhere but in the interaction, changes with it. The result is not an effective softening laid over a real hardness. It is a real deformation of the environment: the flesh opens, the bone breaks, matter that would have held its shape yields and is reshaped. The organism’s structured motion has physically altered the world at its boundary.

So the three axes of the definition — force, distance, speed — are not effective modifications of the organism’s world. They are real changes in the relations between the organism and its environment, and relations are what is physically real; the absolute background in which they would be “merely apparent” is the thing that is not real. The prey really is nearer. The material really is softer. The reach really is longer. Each is true in the frame of the party it acts on, and there is no frame above those frames in which it is false. We think these changes are not “really” happening only because we are in the habit of believing in an absolute, independent reference frame — and that belief is precisely the dualist error the first essay diagnosed, smuggled back in as a picture of space.

I want to mark one boundary so the claim cannot be misread. This is classical, low-speed, Galilean relativity of motion — bodies on the surface of a planet, nothing approaching the speed of light, none of the spacetime contraction of Einstein’s relativity, with which the word “relative” is now unfortunately most associated. The effects here are not small relativistic corrections; they are large, everyday, and classical. The point is not exotic physics. The point is that ordinary motion is relative motion, that relative motion is the only motion there is, and that taking this seriously turns technology from a thing an organism has into a real reshaping of the relations that constitute the organism’s world.

The proof is in our language

There is a quiet piece of evidence that this is how human beings actually meet the world, and it is sitting in the structure of language.

We do not speak of distance, force, and speed as abstractions laid over experience. We speak of them as the substance of experience, and we use them to structure nearly everything else. A deadline approaches. A threat closes in. A solution comes within reach. A danger looms. Hardship is heavy; relief is light; we push through difficulty and move past grief; an argument gains momentum or runs out of steam. The work of Lakoff and Johnson on conceptual metaphor showed that this is not ornament — that the human mind natively builds its abstractions out of exactly these bodily experiences of relative distance, force, speed, and weight.

On the view set out here, that is not a curiosity. It is what you would predict. A creature whose entire evolutionary history was the manipulation of relative motion at its boundary — that spent three million years contracting the distances between itself and what it needed, softening the materials that resisted it, extending the reach of its governed edge — would be expected to encode that history in the deep structure of its thought and speech. The metaphors are fossil traces of the process this work describes. The reason the idea feels intuitive the moment it is stated plainly is that you are not learning something foreign; you are being shown the scaffolding you already think with, named for the first time. There is no rest. There is only motion, and how near, how fast, and how yielding the world is depends entirely on where you stand within it — which is exactly what every human language already knew.

Forward, to the stone

All of this has been the body’s moving edge described from inside, in the present, as experience and as physics. But the edge moved in the deep past too, and it left traces, and those traces are readable.

Around 2.6 million years ago there is a moment in the stone record where you can watch the boundary move. Earlier toolmakers stabilised the stone they were working on an external anvil — a separate object, on the ground, engaged only at the instant of the strike: the stabilising function sat outside the body. Later, the anvil is gone, replaced by the other hand: the stone is held continuously in the grip, oriented by the wrist, struck by a percussor in the opposite hand, and the stabilising function has moved into the body. The same mechanical job — hold the core still, deliver the blow — but reorganised from two loosely associated objects into one tightly coupled system with the material held inside the organism’s governed motion. The boundary moved inward to take up a function the world had been doing, and in doing so it committed the lineage to a path that selection would push on for the next two and a half million years.

That moment — the first time you can see the governed edge reorganise itself in the archaeological record — is where the empirical work finally touches the stone, and it is the subject of a later essay in this series. Before we get there, the next essay steps back to ask a question that the whole programme depends on: how we read any vanished motion from the trace it leaves, whether that trace is a stone, a star, or a burned scroll. The body’s edge moves; it has always moved; and once, long ago, it moved in a way that we can still read in the rock, because the motion left its mark and the mark is the only thing we ever have.

Dylan Foley is an independent researcher based in Ireland working at the intersection of physics, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, through his company Industrial Automata. The technical work these essays draw on is currently under peer review; details will follow on publication.

On conceptual metaphor and the bodily grounding of thought, see Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980). Companion conference paper: Foley & Furey, “From Geospatial Patterns to Ancient Signals” (IEEE Irish Signals and Systems Conference 2025, DOI: 10.1109/ISSC67739.2025.11291309).

May 24, 2026
An Ancient Method for a New Science
But those also who have made considerable progress in the survey of the main principles ought to bear in mind the scheme of the whole system set forth in its essentials. For we have frequent need of the general view, but not so often of the detailed exposition.

Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus

I want to start with a claim that may sound eccentric but is meant quite literally: the method behind this work is roughly 2,500 years old. For the specific task it serves — grounding a scientific framework in a domain that has not yet fully become a science — I do not think it has ever been entirely superseded.

The domain is human beings and their technology. The argument of this series is that it can support a genuinely scientific treatment — quantitative, mechanistic, and predictive in the limited sense that mature historical sciences are predictive. The obstacle, I think, has not primarily been the complexity of the subject matter, but the persistence of certain ontological assumptions inherited very early and retained for a very long time. The conceptual tools for approaching the problem differently were already present in Parmenides, Zeno, Heraclitus, and Epicurus, and in important respects they remain surprisingly usable. Versions of these foundations helped shape the development of physics, chemistry, and biology, but they were only unevenly extended into the study of humans and technology, often for reasons that were philosophical or theological rather than methodological.

Let me lay the foundation out in the order it actually goes, because it is a derivation, not a list. Each step forces the next.

First: there is what is, and you may not speak of what is not

Parmenides begins everything. In the fragments that survive — I am quoting throughout from John Burnet’s translation, the fragments numbered in the standard Diels–Kranz collection as DK 28 — he sets out the two roads with a clarity that is genuinely startling for the early fifth century BC:

Come now, I will tell thee… the only two ways of search that can be thought of. The first, namely, that It is, and that it is impossible for anything not to be, is the way of conviction, for truth is its companion. The other, namely, that It is not… that, I tell thee, is a wholly untrustworthy path. For you cannot know what is not — that is impossible — nor utter it. (DK 28 B2)

A note on what I am doing with these texts, since it will otherwise be misread. I am not offering a new scholarly interpretation of Parmenides, and I am not in competition with the people who study his Greek for its own sake. That work is valuable and largely beside my point. What I am doing instead is taking him operationally: treating the text not primarily as an object of commentary but as an attempt to establish how inquiry into what-is should proceed. Parmenides was not only making claims about reality; he was also attempting to define the conditions under which inquiry itself could proceed coherently. To run that procedure and see what it produces is to use the text as the physiologos meant it to be used. Scholarly interpretation and operational use are different activities. My concern here is with the latter: whether the procedure implied by the text still produces workable results when applied to an unsolved domain.

This can sound abstract, but operationally it has a very strong consequence: it restricts what kinds of entities and separations inquiry is permitted to posit. You may reason about what is. You may not grant reality to what is not.One recurring way this occurs is through the treatment of separations — boundaries, gaps, or divisions — as though they possessed an independent ontological status of their own.

Parmenides saw this coming and named it. A little further on he diagnoses the error directly, and it is worth seeing that he identifies it at the exact moment of its birth:

Mortals have settled in their minds to speak of two forms, one of which they should have left out, and that is where they go astray from the truth. They have assigned an opposite substance to each, and marks distinct from one another. (DK 28 B8)

Read this way, the passage becomes an early critique of dualistic ontology: the treatment of opposed domains as fundamentally separate substances with distinct properties. Two forms, one of which they should have left out. The tradition that came immediately after him did precisely what he warned against: it built ontologies of two forms — being and non-being, form and matter, soul and body, the heavens and the earth, eventually the human and the natural. It assigned opposite substances and distinct marks. And it went astray from the truth, in the specific way Parmenides predicted, at the specific point he predicted it.

I take this to identify a recurrent structural error that reappears throughout later thought. Not Platonism specifically, not Aristotelianism specifically — dualism, the granting of being to a separation. On this reading, many later difficulties in developing unified sciences of motion and nature follow from repeated reintroduction of exactly these kinds of separations.

Why a separation freezes a science

Here is the part that took me a long time to see, and that I now think is the whole game.

Dualistic separation does not merely complicate explanation. In its stronger forms, it can make lawful motion difficult to formulate, because motion is always relational: a thing moves only with respect to other things within a shared system. Natural science, at root, depends on the ability to model such relations.

Motion is relational rather than absolute: a thing moves only with respect to other things and other frames within a continuous system. This is not a modern discovery; it is implicit in the unity Parmenides describes. Now watch what a real separation does. If a domain is treated as fundamentally separate in substance or principle, its relations to the surrounding system become conceptually weakened or obscured. Once that happens, lawful interaction becomes harder to formulate. A truly separate thing has nothing to move relative to. It is, necessarily, frozen.

Something like this ontological structure may also help explain why certain cosmological systems treated the Earth as fundamentally fixed and separate from the surrounding order. Once the cosmos is split dualistically — the heavens one substance, the Earth another, special and apart — the Earth cannot move, because there is nothing in the same frame for it to move against. In this reading, the problem was not purely astronomical but ontological: the separation itself constrained what kinds of motion could be conceived coherently. Get rid of the separation, put the Earth back into one continuous system with everything else, and it moves again. That is, in effect, what the Renaissance did for matter.

The broader argument of this programme is that a comparable separation continued to shape the study of humans long after matter and life had been reintegrated into continuous physical systems. Humans were frequently treated as occupying a categorically distinct domain — partially continuous with nature in some respects, but exempt from full physical continuity in others — often for theological or metaphysical reasons rather than methodological ones. And a separate humanity, exactly like a separate Earth, cannot be in motion, cannot be coupled to an environment, cannot be subjected to a mechanics. It is frozen out of physical science by the same error, four centuries after the Earth was freed from it. The human sciences did not fail to become sciences because humans are too complex or too special. They failed because dualism had defined humans out of the relational field where motion — and therefore law, and therefore science — can exist at all.

Once that separation is relaxed, humans and technology can be reintroduced into the same continuous field of motion, constraint, and interaction studied elsewhere in the natural sciences. That reintegration is the starting condition for the work that follows.

Second: all is motion

Parmenides establishes the continuity of what-is. What remains is a single continuous reality rather than a set of fundamentally separate domains.

One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is… now it is, all at once, a continuous one. (DK 28 B8)

But continuity alone does not yet yield a dynamic world. The second principle comes from Heraclitus: reality is not merely continuous but dynamic. Stable things are sustained patterns within ongoing motion rather than fixed substances beneath it. The one continuous being is not frozen; it is flux. What appears stable — a river, a body, a species, a tool tradition — can be understood as a relatively persistent organization of motion maintaining coherence across time. The important point is that continuity and motion are not opposites here. The continuity of the world is expressed through structured change rather than through immobility.

“All is motion,” the title of this site, is not intended as a slogan so much as a compressed statement of these two linked premises: continuity and structured change.

Heraclitus matters here in a precise way, not as a vague gesture at change. Heraclitean flux is not chaos. Motion possesses structure, recurrence, and constraint — what Heraclitus names logos. This is what lets motion be a subject of science rather than a synonym for chaos. Structured motion becomes the central object of analysis. Following that idea consistently leads, eventually, to the definition of technology developed in the later technical work.

Third: the lines we draw are ours

If reality is continuous and dynamic, then many of the boundaries we draw — between object and environment, organism and world, system and surroundings — are methodological cuts rather than absolute seams in nature. The continuity of the world does not eliminate boundaries, but it changes their status. Boundaries become analytical decisions made for the purpose of studying particular phenomena.

At first this may seem to undermine scientific analysis: if boundaries are constructed, what stabilizes the object of study? In practice, however, it is precisely what makes complex systems scientifically tractable. Science proceeds by selecting stable regions of interaction within the larger continuum. Here the relevant region is the interaction between humans, technology, and environment. The analytical cut is therefore placed at a specific interface: the boundary between an organism’s internally regulated activity and the wider field of environmental motion in which it operates.

Once the problem is framed this way, a familiar scientific vocabulary begins to emerge almost automatically. A boundary across which organisms extend regulation into external material immediately connects the problem to systems biology, ecological dynamics, niche construction, and theories of extended or distributed regulation. The ancient ontology delivers you directly to the modern boundary-systems frame. It is not bolted on afterward; it is where you land when you cut the continuum at the place your phenomenon actually occupies.

On this account, technology is not an external category added onto human life afterward. It is a mode of structured motion through which organisms extend regulation and constraint into the material environment around them.

Fourth: the present is all there is, and this is what saves inference

The next step closes the system and, for archaeology specifically, turns out to be decisive.

Parmenides then introduces a principle which, taken literally and operationally rather than allegorically, produces a remarkably rigorous foundation for archaeological inference:

Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one. (DK 28 B8)

And:

there is not, and never shall be, any time other than that which is present, since fate has chained it so as to be whole and immovable. Wherefore all these things are but the names which mortals have given, believing them to be true. (DK 28 B8)

Operationally, there is no past available to investigation. There are only present material configurations carrying traces of prior motion and interaction. Archaeology never encounters “the past” itself as an observable domain. It encounters stones, deposits, wear patterns, fractures, residues, and distributions as they exist now. “The past,” in this framework, is not a stored realm awaiting retrieval but a reconstructed account inferred from present evidence.

This is not a limitation of archaeology but the condition that makes archaeological reasoning rigorous. Once the distinction is enforced clearly, the structure of the discipline changes.
- What is sensed: the present signal — the trace as it exists materially now.
- What must be inferred: the structured motions and interactions capable of producing that signal.
The archaeologist does not retrieve the past as though it remained physically available somewhere behind the evidence. They reconstruct prior processes inferentially from present signals under conditions of uncertainty. Archaeology therefore becomes an inverse problem in the strict sense: reasoning backward from present traces toward the motions and processes capable of generating them. The Eleatic restriction is what keeps the inference disciplined, because it prevents reconstructed histories from being mistaken for observations. The only observation is the present trace; everything else remains inferential and must carry its uncertainty openly.

That comparable inverse-problem structures appear in astrophysical reconstruction and the search for non-human intelligence is not accidental. In each case, present signals are used to reconstruct processes that are no longer directly observable. The point is that the cleanest available foundation for it was stated by Parmenides, and that it follows from taking “only the present is” literally.

And it is thinkable precisely because of his other principle, the bridge between mind and world:

For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be. (DK 28 B3)

The reconstructed process is not unconstrained imagination. It is bounded both by the observed signal and by the lawful structure of the world capable of producing such a signal in the first place. Inference is possible because the thinkable and the real are not disconnected domains. The world is intelligible enough that present traces can constrain reconstructions of the motions that produced them. That is the epistemic foundation of the method.

Fifth: Zeno tells the formalism what it may not do

Zeno is usually treated as a producer of paradoxes to be resolved. I think it is more useful to read him as defending the continuity implied by Parmenides against attempts to reconstruct motion from discrete states. The paradoxes repeatedly target the same problem: if motion is decomposed into fully discrete positions or instants treated as fundamentally real, motion itself becomes impossible to reconstruct. The arrow that occupies a single position at a single instant is not moving; if time is merely a sum of such instants, nothing ever moves. Since motion plainly occurs, the discreteness must be the illusion and the continuity the reality. Zeno proves the master’s premise by reductio: being is continuous, not discrete.

This is not antiquarian, and it is not abstract. It is a hard constraint on how you are permitted to build the formalism, and it cuts directly at how archaeology represents its own evidence. Archaeological recording systems routinely treat layers, contexts, events, and time-slices as discrete stored units — as though the past were a stack of separate states filed away in sequence, each one a thing that happened and was set down and can now be retrieved. This is exactly the atomised ontology Zeno’s arguments were designed to destroy, and it is exactly the separate, retrievable past that Parmenides showed to be only a name.

The objection is not that we may not discretise. All science discretises; every measurement samples a continuous field, and a digital record has no choice but to partition what it stores. The error is to mistake the partition for the world — to let the sampled, layered, timestamped representation become the ontology rather than remaining a constrained operational model of a continuous present field. The moment the database schema is taken to describe how reality is structured, rather than how our sampling of it is structured, the Eleatic error has been reintroduced under a new name, and motion has been quietly frozen back out of the picture.

Taken together, the two Eleatic principles converge on a single methodological demand. Parmenides says there is no separate, stored past; Zeno says there are no fundamental discrete states for such a past to be made of. So the formalism must represent a continuous present field of traces, signals, and inferential relations — not a sequence of discretely stored, recoverable pasts. The stored record is a sampling of a continuous field, never a shelf of retrievable moments. Ontology, in other words, dictates schema — and an archaeology that builds its databases as shelves of frozen instants has, without noticing, chosen the ontology Parmenides and Zeno spent their lives refuting.

Sixth: Epicurus, and how you actually build it

The Eleatics and Heraclitus give the ontology. Epicurus gives the method — the procedure for turning that ontology into a working science from the phenomena up. His Letter to Herodotus is, read correctly, a construction manual: begin from what is evident to the senses; fix the meaning of your terms to those evident things so the words do not float free; admit nothing that contradicts the phenomena; and where the phenomena underdetermine the cause, permit several explanations rather than forcing one prematurely. This is the recipe. It is exactly the procedure I followed, consciously, to think through how a science of technology could be constructed where there was none.

And Epicurean atomism supplies the one structural idea without which none of it becomes quantitative. Atomism replaces the transformation of essences with the recombination of elements. This is the difference between a study that can only classify and a science that can count, combine, and predict. An essentialist asks what a thing fundamentally is and sorts it into a type. An atomist asks what the irreducible constituents are and how they are arranged, and can then recombine them, measure them, and predict new arrangements. Every quantitative science made this trade, and it is, in my view, the trade that is the birth of modern science — whatever one thinks of the historical route by which Epicurus’ atomism returned to circulation through Lucretius. The structural fact is what matters: recombination of elements is generative; transformation of essences is not.

This is the precise correction the work applies to archaeology. Typology is essentialism: it asks what type a tool is and sorts it. The procedural unit — the irreducible coded unit of structured motion — is the atom: it recombines, it can be counted across assemblages, it supports quantitative inference and prediction. Recoding the lithic record from types into procedural units is nothing other than the Epicurean move from essences to elements, applied to stone. The whole empirical apparatus of the work is atomism, two and a half thousand years late to a field that was kept out of its reach.

Why this is somehow new

Taken together, these steps amount to a coherent programme: Parmenides for ontology and the critique of separation; Heraclitus for structured motion; the systems boundary for organism-environment coupling; the present-only constraint for inference; Zeno for continuity; and Epicurus for operational method and atomistic reconstruction.

None of these components are modern in origin. Which raises an obvious question: if these conceptual tools were already available in antiquity, and if it built physics and chemistry and biology once it was applied to matter and life, why is applying it to humans and their technology a new research programme in 2026 rather than an obvious and long-completed one?

There are two parts to the answer, and the first is not about religion at all. It is about what a mature science is for.

Modern science succeeded largely through specialisation. Once disciplines become productive, they typically stop revisiting foundational ontological questions and instead operate within inherited conceptual frameworks.Once a field is established it stops doing ontology — it inherits its basic categories and gets on with the productive normal-science work conducted inside them. This is exactly why it is so powerful and exactly why it is helpless at the particular task of founding a new science from an ungrounded domain.But constructing a new science requires temporarily returning to earlier questions: what constitutes the object of study, what counts as a fundamental unit, where boundaries should be drawn, and what kind of motion or interaction is being modeled. That is the founder’s work, and it is a different act from the practitioner’s. Even philosophy of science, which might be expected to retain the capacity, has largely become a science about mature sciences — it studies how established fields work, not how to make one out of nothing. So the one tool required to ground a new domain is the tool the entire modern apparatus has, very reasonably, set down. In that narrow sense, some ancient foundational procedures remain unexpectedly useful for problems involving scientific grounding rather than normal disciplinary practice.

This also tells us how to read the moderns who did see it. Popper went “back to the Presocratics” and argued they founded the critical-rational tradition that science is. Rovelli wrote a whole book contending that physics descends directly from Anaximander and the Milesians and that their way of thinking simply is the scientific one. These are not merely historical observations. They reflect recognition that certain Presocratic questions remain structurally close to the foundations of scientific reasoning itself. What this programme adds is the step past recognition. If one takes the Presocratic programme operationally and applies it to a domain lacking a mature scientific structure — and if a coherent predictive and falsifiable framework emerges — then the significance of that programme is demonstrated practically rather than merely historically. We applied the method and got the kind of result the method is supposed to get. That is a stronger vindication than any reading of the texts could provide, and it is available only because we used them rather than glossed them. In that case, the Presocratics cease to appear merely as precursors to science and instead become participants in an unfinished scientific project whose implications were only partially developed.

The second part of the answer is the one I have been building toward, and I will now state it at the level of mechanism and leave the reader to draw the rest. The extension of these methods into the study of humans and technology remained unusually incomplete. The dualism Parmenides warned against was installed early, formulated with great precision — its sharpest early formulations were aimed, before Christianity, at countering the power of Epicureanism — and then welded to institutional authority and used to set humanity apart from nature. Once humans are treated as partially exempt from the same continuous relational field governing matter and life elsewhere, constructing a unified mechanics of human technological behavior becomes correspondingly difficult. Matter and life were progressively reintegrated into continuous physical and biological explanation during the development of modern science. Human technological behavior, however, remained comparatively resistant to full integration. I will not speculate about intentions; intentions are unknowable and beside the point. I only observe that of all the domains, the one kept exempt from science for non-scientific reasons was the one in which a powerful institution had the most to gain from the exemption, and that the exemption, uniquely, was never lifted. The reader may make of that what they will.

So, finally, to the matter of modern philosophy, now that the derivation has earned the remark: it is, ironically, poorly equipped to undo any of this, and the evidence is that it has been trying for decades to bring archaeology and the human sciences into science and has not managed it. It has not managed it because it inherited the very dualism it would need to discard, and because it treats the Presocratics as a charming prelude rather than as the people who actually laid down the first principles that science requires. I find that relegation genuinely strange. Parmenides established what a first principle must be, and forbade the error that froze the world, before the error had even been fully made. To file him under “early, superseded” is to mistake the foundation for a draft.

The argument of this programme is not that archaeology requires more scientific vocabulary layered onto existing theory. It is that the underlying ontology itself must change. A discipline built around classificatory essentialism, interpretive fragmentation, and unstable theoretical language cannot easily become cumulative, mechanistic, or predictive, because its foundations were not constructed for those purposes in the first place.

Much twentieth-century archaeological theory treated scientific grounding as naïve, reductionist, or even undesirable. The result was not liberation from outdated models but the gradual loss of any shared framework capable of connecting explanation, inference, evidence, and mechanism coherently across scales. In place of integration came proliferation: competing vocabularies, interpretive schools, and increasingly elaborate theoretical languages often detached from operational reconstruction.

The programme outlined here proceeds in the opposite direction. It treats archaeology not as an interpretive exception to science but as an unfinished scientific domain whose foundational reconstruction was historically interrupted before completion. The claim is therefore not modest. If the framework succeeds, even partially, then large parts of archaeological “theory” will come to appear less like the foundations of a mature science than like compensatory structures developed in the prolonged absence of one.

Let the debt be stated without hedging: this essay, and the work behind it, owes almost everything to Parmenides, Zeno, Heraclitus, and Epicurus, and almost nothing to the archaeological theory of the last century. And what astonishes me most is not how much they achieved but how little we needed to inherit. Their books are gone. What we have are fragments — quoted by enemies, buried under volcanic mud, recovered by the handful. Yet even these offcuts are sufficient to build a new way of seeing the world, and more than that, a new scientific way of seeing it — which is the most powerful form of understanding human beings have ever found. If fragments can do this, imagine what was lost. And imagine what is still to be found.

The Presocratics were not important because they anticipated modern conclusions. They were important because they asked, with unusual clarity, the questions required to begin a science at all. Physics and biology eventually followed those questions into matter and life. This programme is an attempt to follow them into technology and the human past with the same seriousness — and to discover whether archaeology, too, can finally become cumulative in the strong scientific sense rather than only in the archival one.

First in a series. This essay sets out the foundation underneath everything else on this site. The work — a physical theory of technology, is an attempt to make archaeology into a science in the way physics and biology are sciences — did not begin from any modern method. It began from the Presocratics and from Epicurus, and the procedure I followed is theirs, not a contemporary one. I have explained this before only in compressed, almost poetical form. Since the work now seems close to producing something real, it is time to set the background out plainly. The essays that follow take this foundation into the body, across the sciences, and finally to the stone itself.

Dylan Foley is an independent researcher based in Ireland working at the intersection of physics, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, through his company Industrial Automata. Parmenides fragments are quoted from John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892), Diels–Kranz numbering. The technical work these essays draw on is currently under peer review; details will follow on publication.

Companion conference paper: Foley & Furey, “From Geospatial Patterns to Ancient Signals: A Signal Based Framework for Archaeological Machine Learning” (IEEE Irish Signals and Systems Conference 2025, DOI: 10.1109/ISSC67739.2025.11291309).
May 22, 2026
Why Archaeologists Couldn’t Respond to SETI in 2014

The Unanswered Question

In 2014, NASA published “Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication,” edited by Douglas Vakoch. The initiative called for archaeologists to contribute their expertise in understanding past cultures to help SETI researchers design communication strategies for extraterrestrial contact. It was a reasonable request—archaeologists spend careers interpreting artifacts from societies separated from us by time, so why shouldn’t they help interpret signals from civilizations separated by space?

The response from archaeology was near silence.

Not vigorous debate. Not counter-proposals or methodological critiques. Just quiet non-engagement from a discipline that was apparently being offered relevance to one of humanity’s most compelling scientific questions.

This silence is more revealing than any rejection would have been. It’s diagnostic evidence of something fundamental: archaeology couldn’t recognize a scientific question about information preservation and recovery across deep time as directly concerning their own discipline.

What SETI Actually Asked

Strip away the SETI framing, and Vakoch’s core question was purely archaeological. What do we know about how information degrades, transforms, and remains recoverable across vast temporal distances? What encoding strategies survive better than others? What makes signals interpretable despite massive context loss?

These are archaeology’s central problems. Every excavation addresses them. Every artifact interpretation depends on understanding what information survives and what’s lost. Every chronological reconstruction requires accounting for temporal uncertainty and signal degradation.

Yet archaeologists didn’t recognize the question as theirs.

The Paradigm Gap Is Real

This wasn’t a case of archaeologists making a reasoned decision that SETI was outside their purview. It was an inability to see the connection at all. And this failure reveals something fundamental about how archaeology operates theoretically. Its foundation is not scientific.

As Lambros Malafouris described the field’s theoretical problems: “This territory is familiar, as when the hand grasps a stone and makes it a tool, yet it remains terra incognita, since—despite a long genealogy of analytic efforts—just what this grasping implies for the human condition remains elusive, and refuses to be read in the narrative fashion that hermeneutics have promised.”

Archaeology has no mathematical formalisation of its core concepts. Technology, the primary evidence in archaeological records, remains theoretically undefined. Cultural transmission, the process archaeology claims to study, cannot be modeled with scientific rigor because, as Sperber and Claidière demonstrate, “cultural causality is promiscuous”—it cannot be neatly divided into replication mechanisms and environmental factors the way biological inheritance can.

The field operates in what amounts to a pre-scientific paradigm. Not pre-scientific in the sense of being primitive or unsophisticated—archaeological work is often brilliant and insightful—but pre-scientific in lacking the fundamental formalisation that would make it compatible with physics-based frameworks.

this matters because …

When Vakoch framed his question in signal science terms—information preservation, encoding strategies, pattern detection across temporal distances—archaeology had no theoretical apparatus to engage with it. The discipline’s conceptual vocabulary operates in interpretive and hermeneutic modes that simply don’t connect to physics-compatible frameworks.

This isn’t a failure of individual archaeologists. It’s a structural limitation of the paradigm itself. You cannot expect researchers trained in cultural interpretation and meaning-making to suddenly switch to signal processing and information theory when they have no conceptual bridge between these frameworks.

But the consequences are significant. Archaeology is the only discipline with direct access to information about how patterns survive and remain recoverable across deep time. It’s the only field that routinely works with degraded signals from past events separated from us by thousands or millions of years. This makes archaeology potentially central to SETI’s actual challenge—detecting signals from extinct civilizations across vast temporal and spatial distances.

Yet archaeology couldn’t engage with this opportunity because it lacks the theoretical foundation to do so.

Historical Context: Decades of Crisis

This isn’t a new problem. Archaeology has been in theoretical crisis for decades. The failure of processual archaeology’s attempts at scientization in the 1960s-70s led to post-processual retreat into pure interpretation. Cultural evolution remains unmodelable, if theres such a term.

So, despite decades of attempts, as documented extensively by researchers like Richerson and Boyd, precisely because cultural phenomena cannot be formalised using biological inheritance models. The field has produced sophisticated phenomenological descriptions and rich interpretive narratives.

But it has failed to achieve what Thomas Kuhn would recognize as normal science—a paradigm with mathematical formalisation, falsifiable predictions, and theories compatible with physics.

My own work spans both archaeology and computational science, holding degrees in both fields. From that position, the paradigm gap is starkly visible. Archaeology operates with concepts that have no physics-compatible definitions. Technology, culture, cognition, social structure—these remain what philosophers call “folk psychological” categories rather than scientifically formalised entities.

The Targeted Fix

In this series I’ve argued that archaeology and SETI are fundamentally the same discipline—signal science across spacetime. But making that unification practically meaningful requires solving the problem the Vakoch silence exposed: archaeology needs reformulation in physics-compatible terms.

This is exactly what our IEEE paper attempts. By treating archaeological data as degraded signals from past motion events, by representing temporal relationships as geometric manifolds, by applying signal processing methods to pattern recovery—we create a framework where archaeological concepts become mathematically defined and therefore physics-compatible.

Technology becomes “controlled motion of material creating quantifiable environmental transformation.” Cultural transmission becomes “propagation of motion patterns through observation and replication.” Archaeological sites become “persistent signals of past motion events detectable through spatial-temporal pattern recognition.”

These aren’t just semantic relabeling. They’re reformulations that make archaeological phenomena expressible in the same mathematical language used throughout physics and engineering. This creates the conceptual bridge that was missing in 2014.

If the reformulation works, archaeologists should be able to engage with questions about temporal transmission protocols, information preservation across deep time, and signal detection in degraded data—without feeling like they’re abandoning their discipline for some alien framework.

They should recognize these as core archaeological questions, now expressible in scientific terms. The Vakoch call shouldn’t produce silence. It should produce vigorous technical discussion about encoding strategies, redundancy requirements, and pattern preservation across geological timescales.

We’re not there yet. This is early-stage paradigm work. But the IEEE paper demonstrates proof-of-concept with real archaeological data—150,000+ sites, 6,000 year temporal span, statistically significant pattern recovery from noisy legacy records.

Conclusion

The 2014 silence wasn’t archaeology’s failure. It was evidence that archaeology needs fundamental reformulation to function as science. The discipline has existed for over a century producing valuable insights while operating in a theoretical framework incompatible with the rest of science.

This work attempts a targeted fix: reformulating archaeological concepts to be physics-compatible while preserving what makes archaeology distinctly valuable—its focus on information recovery across deep time. Whether this particular formulation succeeds, others can judge. But the Vakoch silence proves the attempt is necessary.

In the next post, I’ll walk through the technical implementation—showing how the signal processing framework actually works with real archaeological data, what it reveals that traditional methods miss, and what it suggests about designing transmissions for future recovery.

January 14, 2026
Are We the Transmission?: The Archaeological Record Future Civilizations Will Discover

Introduction

Four billion years of planetary history, the complete evolutionary record of life on Earth, from single-celled organisms to technological civilization. The geological transformations of a living world. The extinctions, the radiations, the slow accumulation of atmospheric oxygen. The emergence of language, art, and science.

All of it will vanish without a trace, like tears in rain.

Not through some cosmic catastrophe—though that’s inevitable too—but simply through the passage of time. Erosion, tectonic recycling, stellar evolution. Given enough time, even mountains disappear. The question isn’t whether Earth’s history will be lost. The question is whether anyone will have recorded it before it’s gone.

There’s no cosmological reason why preservation is necessary or, some might argue, even desirable. Opinions may reasonably differ on whether it should be a priority at all. But for archaeology and SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) as actual research programs consuming real resources, the question must be asked explicitly: what is the ultimate objective? The answer determines everything else—methodology, funding priorities, measures of success.

The Foundational Questions

Why is archaeology pursued at all? To what end do we construct the record? For whom do we do it, and how much resources should society invest in it?

The same questions apply to SETI: to what end do we search for technosignatures (signals from technically advanced civilisations)? For whom do we conduct this search, and how should we allocate resources between detection methods, target selection, and interpretation frameworks?

These aren’t abstract philosophical questions—they’re practical ones that determine research priorities. Currently, both fields operate with implicit objectives that may not withstand scrutiny. Archaeology typically justifies itself through “cultural heritage” and historical understanding—valuable goals, but relatively weak when competing for funding against immediate social needs.

SETI traditionally frames itself as searching for contemporary communication from active civilizations—an exciting prospect, but one that becomes increasingly implausible when you account for the temporal overlap problem I discussed in my previous post.

A Logical Foundation

We can establish a more rigorous objective by starting with what we know for certain: one technological civilization exists that can understand space and time—us. We exist, we’re capable of encoding information, and we can conceive of entities separated from us by vast distances in spacetime.

From this single data point, we can reason that other such civilizations may exist in the future. They could be our own descendants after societal transformation or extinction and re-emergence. They could be entirely different lineages evolving on Earth after we’re gone. They could be civilizations arising elsewhere in the galaxy on timescales long after our extinction. We don’t know which scenario is likely, or if any will occur. But we know it’s possible, because we exist as proof of concept.

This creates a concrete objective that unifies both archaeology and SETI: if we are the first, the only, or simply the present technological civilization in our temporal window, then even if SETI finds no signals now, we can dramatically increase the probability that a future SETI project will find a record—ours.

This isn’t metaphysics. This is practical planning.

The Dual Research Program

Understanding preservation as the shared objective of archaeology and SETI creates a productive research program with two complementary branches.

First, archaeology’s meta-objective becomes clearer: we’re not just reconstructing the past for present cultural understanding. We’re establishing what kinds of information structures survive degradation across time, what encoding strategies remain interpretable despite transformation, and what patterns remain detectable despite noise. Every successful archaeological recovery is a proof-of-concept for preservation. Every failed interpretation reveals encoding strategies that don’t work across deep time.

Second, SETI should be designing temporal transmission protocols as a practical project. This serves a dual purpose: it enables us to create transmissions for future detection, and it informs what we should look for in the present. If we’re designing durable, interpretable information structures to survive millions of years, we’re simultaneously developing detection methods for finding similar structures left by others.

The two research directions inform each other. Archaeological signal processing—like the framework we published in the recent ISSC Conference Proceedings using Ireland’s archaeological data—demonstrates what kinds of patterns survive degradation and remain detectable.

These same patterns become design principles for creating future-detectable structures. Conversely, thinking about what we would create for long-term detection informs what we should be searching for in both archaeological records and astronomical observations.

Why This Matters Practically

This reframing doesn’t require accepting that preservation is cosmically important or morally necessary. It simply recognizes that if we’re already doing archaeology and SETI, we should have clear objectives that maximize the value of the resources invested.

The preservation framework provides that clarity. It gives archaeology a concrete goal beyond heritage conservation: develop and test encoding strategies that survive geological timescales. It gives SETI a concrete goal beyond listening for messages we’ll likely never receive: design transmission protocols and detection methods for signals across deep time.

And it creates a shared research agenda that leverages both fields’ expertise. Archaeologists understand how information degrades, what remains recoverable and how to reconstruct it, SETI researchers understand signal detection and pattern recognition in noise. Combined, they could develop systematic approaches to encoding Earth’s history in ways that maximize probability of future recovery.

This is the preservation imperative, and we may be living in the only window where it’s possible to act on it.

The Window Is Closing

In my previous post, I argued that archaeology and SETI are fundamentally the same discipline—signal science. If that’s true, then both fields share a common challenge: signals degrade over time, and windows of opportunity are brief.

Consider what we know about Earth’s technological window. Modern industrial civilization has existed for perhaps 200 years. Our capacity to encode and transmit information at scale—using digital systems, materials science, and signal processing—has existed for perhaps 50 years at a meaningful level. The archaeological record we’re trying to preserve spans 6,000 years of recorded history, hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, millions of years of mammalian radiation, and billions of years of geological and biological transformation.

We’re attempting to capture and encode four billion years of history using technology that has existed for half a century. And we’re doing it while the record itself is actively being destroyed by development, climate change, erosion, and simply the passage of time.

This creates genuine urgency. We have advanced enough technology to attempt preservation—AI systems, signal processing frameworks, materials science capable of creating durable substrates. We still have an archaeological record that’s reasonably intact and interpretable. We have sufficient resources and stable enough societies to fund large-scale research programs. But these conditions are fragile.

Climate change threatens both the physical record and our capacity to study it. Mass extinction erodes the paleontological data. Urban development destroys archaeological sites faster than we can excavate them. And societal collapse—whether through climate catastrophe, nuclear war, or pandemic—could eliminate our technological capacity entirely.

If we’re in a unique window, we need to act as if it might close.

Who Receives the Transmission?

The elegant aspect of the preservation framework is that we don’t need to know who will receive the signal or when. We simply need to maximize the probability that it survives and remains interpretable across the longest possible timescales. But it’s worth considering the possible audiences, because each scenario reveals different technical requirements.

Future earthlings after civilizational collapse represent the nearest-term scenario, perhaps 100 to 10,000 years out. If our current technological civilization collapses—whether through climate change, resource depletion, nuclear war, or pandemic—survivors would need to rebuild. Having durable archives of our accumulated knowledge could prevent restarting from scratch. This scenario requires robust local storage, perhaps geological encoding or orbital repositories that survive atmospheric reentry. It’s the most tractable scenario because the audience shares our biology, our planet, and much of our context.

Distant Earth descendants operating on timescales of millions to hundreds of millions of years represent a more challenging scenario. These could be future intelligent species that evolve after we’re gone, or our own descendants so transformed by time and evolution that they’re effectively alien to us. This scenario requires extremely durable encoding—crystalline matrices, genetic insertions, or orbital megastructures that survive stellar evolution. The challenge here is interpretability: how do you create messages that remain meaningful after language, culture, and possibly even sensory modalities have completely changed?

Alien archaeologists discovering Earth after the Sun has expanded and sterilized the planet represent the deepest time scenario—billions of years. This is SETI in its purest form, but from the transmitting side. Here, the encoding must survive not just time but planetary destruction. Space-based archives, artificial structures in stable orbits, or even engineered patterns in solar system architecture become relevant. The interpretability challenge is maximal: you’re communicating with entities that share no evolutionary history, no common sensory experience, possibly no comparable physics if they evolved in radically different environments.

Our own SETI searches discovering similar preservation attempts by other civilizations could operate on any timescale, but likely fall in the range of 10,000 years to 10 million years—brief enough that technological signatures remain detectable, long enough that temporal overlap is unlikely. This scenario is particularly interesting because understanding what we would leave behind informs what we should look for when searching. If every technological civilization faces the same preservation imperative, then SETI should be searching for archives, not conversations.

Are We the Transmission?

There’s a fifth scenario worth considering, one that inverts the entire preservation framework: what if life on Earth is itself an example of temporal transmission from a previous technological civilization?

This isn’t recycled panspermia speculation. It’s a testable archaeological question. If we’re serious about temporal transmission protocols and preservation across deep time, we should apply the same investigative framework to our own origins. Archaeological SETI shouldn’t just look outward and forward—it should look inward and backward.

The timeline is suggestive. Life appears on Earth extraordinarily quickly after conditions stabilize following the Late Heavy Bombardment—perhaps within 100 million years, possibly much faster. This rapidity has always seemed remarkable. Chemical evolution from non-living to living systems is supposed to be slow, requiring vast numbers of random molecular combinations before self-replicating systems emerge. Yet it happened here almost immediately in geological terms.

The standard explanation invokes probability—given Earth’s size and the number of chemical reactions occurring, even improbable events become likely. But there’s an alternative hypothesis worth investigating: life’s rapid emergence might indicate technological origin rather than purely naturalistic chemical evolution.

If a previous technological civilization wanted to transmit information across the deepest possible timescales—spanning the death and rebirth of solar systems, surviving galactic-scale catastrophes—what would be the most durable encoding substrate? Crystalline matrices degrade. Orbital structures eventually decay. Even neutron star engravings face erosion across billions of years.

But self-replicating molecular systems that actively maintain and propagate their own information? Systems that evolve error-correction mechanisms, adapt to changing environments, and spread across planetary surfaces? That’s genuinely durable encoding. Life itself becomes the transmission medium.

Starting the Archaeological Trail: Solar Siblings

If we’re investigating this hypothesis methodologically, we should start from what we know—proper archaeological practice. Our Sun formed 4.6 billion years ago in a molecular cloud alongside hundreds or thousands of sibling stars. These solar siblings scattered across the galaxy over billions of years, but many remain identifiable through their chemical signatures and orbital trajectories.

This makes them the logical starting point for archaeological SETI. If life has technological origins involving panspermia or deliberate seeding, solar sibling systems are the most likely candidates for sharing that origin. They formed from the same material, at the same time, in the same region. If our system was seeded, theirs likely were too. If life emerged naturally here, similar conditions might have produced it there as well.

Current solar sibling searches have identified candidates like HD 162826, a star roughly 110 light-years away that almost certainly formed with our Sun. More will be identified as Gaia mission data improves stellar kinematics. These aren’t random SETI targets—they’re archaeologically motivated searches working from known relationships outward.

This is exactly how archaeology operates: start from documented connections, trace them through time, look for shared origins. Solar sibling searches become archaeological investigation across both space and time, following the trail from our Sun’s birth cloud to wherever those siblings migrated.

Investigating Technological Signatures

This hypothesis generates testable predictions. If life has technological origins, we should find evidence of engineering in its fundamental architecture. Not the kind of complexity that arises from natural selection—that’s expected regardless of origin—but signatures of deliberate design, optimization beyond what blind evolutionary processes would produce, or information encoding strategies that serve no survival function but might preserve transmittable data.

We already know some puzzling features of life’s molecular machinery. The genetic code’s error-correction properties are remarkably sophisticated. The specific amino acids used by all Earth life represent a small subset of chemically possible options, chosen with apparent optimization for certain properties. The universal use of left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars lacks obvious naturalistic explanation.

None of this proves technological origin. But it establishes that investigating life’s origins through an archaeological SETI lens—looking for technological signatures rather than assuming purely naturalistic processes—is methodologically sound. We have one confirmed example of life. We can study its architecture in detail. We know it emerged rapidly after planetary conditions stabilized. We can identify and search our Sun’s sibling systems for related signals. These are exactly the conditions where archaeological investigation should operate.

This creates a productive symmetry in the temporal transmission framework. We’re simultaneously designing preservation strategies for future recovery while investigating whether our own existence represents successful recovery of a previous civilization’s preservation attempt. Both directions use the same methodology: signal processing applied across deep time, pattern recognition in noisy data, distinguishing technological signatures from natural processes, working from known relationships outward.

And both reinforce archaeology’s central role. Whether we’re encoding information for future discovery or decoding information from past transmission, we’re doing archaeology—recovering signals across temporal distances using physics-compatible methods.

The Funding Implication

Recognizing archaeology as informing preservation as well as reconstruction transforms its justification from cultural heritage to existential responsibility. Current archaeological funding operates on the logic of “understanding our past has educational and cultural value.”, which is true, but relatively weak when competing for limited resources.

The preservation framework makes a stronger argument: we are potentially in Earth’s unique window to encode and transmit four billion years of planetary history. If we fail to do this, that information vanishes permanently, regardless of who might have been able to use it. This reframes archaeology from “nice to know our heritage” to “species-level imperative to preserve the only known record of life’s evolution in the universe.”

This is comparable to climate science or asteroid detection—fields justified by their role in preventing existential catastrophe. If archaeological preservation is the only way to ensure Earth’s history survives beyond our technological window, then it deserves similar priority and funding.

The practical implications are significant. Every archaeological excavation becomes part of a larger dataset encoding planetary history. Every paleontological dig contributes to the evolutionary record. Every geological survey maps deep-time transformations. The question shifts from “what happened at this specific site?” to “how do we encode this information for maximum recoverability across geological timescales?”

Practical Implementation

We have the technical frameworks to begin systematic preservation now. Our IEEE paper (Foley & Furey, 2025) demonstrates one approach: treating archaeological data as degraded signals and applying signal processing methods to extract patterns despite noise, gaps, and temporal uncertainty. Working with Ireland’s Record of Monuments and Places—over 150,000 archaeological sites spanning 6,000 years—we showed that we can recover territorial boundaries, administrative centers, and invasion patterns with statistical significance, even from noisy legacy data.

But this is just the beginning. The same signal processing frameworks that extract patterns from archaeological data can inform how we encode information for future extraction. If we know what kinds of patterns survive degradation, we can deliberately create those patterns at larger scales. If we understand how temporal relationships transform into spatial geometries, we can design encoding strategies that remain interpretable despite transformation, degradation and deformation.

The research questions that emerge are concrete and testable. What materials survive millions of years in various planetary environments? How do you design redundancy levels that ensure reconstruction despite 99.9 percent data loss? What geometric and statistical patterns remain obviously artificial despite transformation over geological timescales? These are engineering problems with testable solutions.

And we have a laboratory to test them: Earth’s archaeological record. Everything we successfully recover from the past tells us something about what will be recoverable from our present.

The Responsibility

We don’t know if anyone will ever receive the transmission. We don’t know if Earth descendants, alien archaeologists, or post-collapse survivors will ever decode what we leave behind. We can’t even be certain that preservation is physically possible across the timescales involved.

But the alternative is accepting that four billion years of planetary history simply vanishes, and no one ever knows it happened. If we’re right about technological windows being brief and rare—if temporal overlap really is unlikely—then preservation becomes the only realistic goal for both archaeology and SETI.

This creates a clear imperative: use the window we have to encode as much as possible, as durably as possible, using every tool available. The archaeological sciences should receive funding commensurate with this responsibility. The theoretical frameworks should be developed urgently. The encoding strategies should be designed and tested systematically.

We might be the only civilization in billions of years of galactic history that has both the record and the capability to preserve it. That’s not just an opportunity. It’s an obligation.

If we succeed, Earth’s story survives. If we fail, it’s lost forever.

Dylan Foley

Next in This Series

This post establishes why temporal transmission protocols matter—the practical foundation for both archaeology and SETI. In the next post, I’ll examine why the 2014 call for archaeologists to contribute to SETI failed to gain traction, and how the signal processing framework bridges the paradigm gap that kept these disciplines separated.

Later in the series, I’ll walk through the technical implementation described in our recently published IEEE paper, showing how treating archaeological data as degraded signals enables pattern recovery across large timescales—and what this tells us about designing transmissions for future detection.

Related Publication: Foley, D. Furey E. (2025). “From Geospatial Patterns to Ancient Signals: A Signal Based Framework for Archaeological Machine Learning.” 2025 Irish Signals and Systems Conference (ISSC). IEEE
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11291309/metrics#metrics

January 5, 2026
SETI is Archaeology: Signal Science Across Spacetime

Dylan Foley – Archaeological SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Philosophy of Archaeology Series

Words:1823

Time to read:10 minutes

We Know Exactly One Thing About SETI

In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, we face a lot of uncertainties. Although we can make educated guesses, we don’t know if life commonly emerges on other worlds. We don’t know if intelligence typically evolves. We don’t know if technological civilizations endure or quickly self-destruct. But we know one thing with absolute certainty: right now, on this planet, a technological civilization exists and actively transmits signals into space.

This single fact reveals something profound that allows us to reframe both SETI and archaeology, and when we consider the timescales involved, the implications become clear and startling.

The Temporal Overlap Problem

Our galaxy is approximately ten billion years old. Technological civilizations, based on our only example, have existed for perhaps hundreds to thousands of years, possibly extending to tens of thousands if we’re fortunate. Even if technological life emerges regularly across the galaxy, the probability that two such civilizations exist simultaneously and within detectable range approaches zero, if, as seems likely, technologically advanced civilisations undermine their own ability to survive. We see from climate change to weapons that the bottleneck through which any reasonably advanced species must endure, is inevitable.

So, if technological windows are brief compared to galactic timescales, then at any given moment, there may be only one or two technological entities active in an entire galaxy. The minimum we know is possible is one, because we exist. But this minimum also suggests that when we search for alien signals, we’re almost certainly not searching for contemporary transmissions from currently active civilizations.

We’re searching for archaeological artifacts of extinct ones.

SETI as Time-Delayed Archaeology

This realisation inverts our understanding of what SETI actually does. The conventional framing treats SETI as a search for active communication from living civilisations, perhaps hoping for dialogue across the stars. But if temporal overlap is unlikely, then SETI is actually archaeology conducted at cosmic distances. We’re looking for traces, for signals that have outlasted their creators, for information preserved across timescales that dwarf human history.

This makes SETI and terrestrial archaeology not merely analogous but fundamentally the same discipline applied in different spacetime directions. Archaeology recovers signals from entities separated from us by time. SETI searches for signals from entities separated from us by space. Both are exercises in detecting, interpreting, and reconstructing information from sources we cannot directly observe or communicate with.

The Unified Framework: Long-Distance Signal Science

If we accept this symmetry, then both disciplines are engaged in what we might call “long-distance signal science across spacetime.” The core challenges are identical in both fields. How do you detect intentional patterns against natural backgrounds? How do you interpret information without shared context or language? How do you distinguish artifact from accident, signal from noise, design from coincidence?

More importantly, if both disciplines face the same fundamental problem, they should inform each other directly rather than superficially. Archaeology isn’t merely analogous to SETI in the way that, say, forensics might provide useful metaphors. Instead, archaeological methodology is directly applicable to SETI, and SETI’s engineering concerns should directly shape archaeological practice.

The Preservation Imperative

Here’s where the framework becomes potentially transformative rather than merely descriptive. If SETI searches primarily find evidence of extinct civilizations, and if technological windows are brief, then any civilization with foresight faces an obvious imperative: preserve your planetary history in a form that can survive and remain interpretable across geological and cosmic timescales.

This isn’t just about ensuring your own descendants can access their history, though that’s valuable. It’s about recognizing that if you’re alone in your temporal window, your civilization might be the only one capable of encoding the story of your planet. Four billion years of evolutionary history, the emergence of life, the development of complexity, the appearance of intelligence—all of it vanishes unless someone preserves it before the window closes.

That someone might be us. And the window might be now.

Why This Matters for Archaeology

This reframing elevates archaeology from a discipline concerned with understanding the past for cultural or educational purposes to one with species-level importance. The archaeological reconstruction of Earth’s history isn’t just valuable for us; it may be our only opportunity to transmit that history to the deep future, whether the audience is our own distant descendants, future terrestrial intelligence that evolves after we’re gone, or alien archaeologists investigating what happened on this planet millions of years after we’ve vanished.

Every archaeological site excavated, every palaeontological fossil analyzed, every geological record interpreted becomes part of a dataset that we might encode and preserve. The urgency is real. Climate change, mass extinction, technological collapse, or simple erosion could eliminate both the archaeological record itself and our capacity to interpret it. We exist in a possibly unique window where we’re technologically advanced enough to attempt preservation while the record still exists and remains interpretable.

The Paradigm Gap: Why Archaeology Didn’t Engage in 2014

n 2014, Douglas Vakoch edited a NASA publication titled “Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication,” calling on archaeologists to contribute their expertise to SETI. The response from archaeology as a discipline was disappointingly sparse. Vakoch correctly understood that archaeologists work with traces of cultures distant from us in time and context, making their interpretive methods potentially valuable for thinking about communication with equally distant alien civilizations. The invitation was genuine and the reasoning sound from SETI’s perspective.

But archaeology as a discipline was fundamentally unable to engage with this opportunity, and the reason goes deeper than lack of interest or imagination. The vast majority of archaeological practice, even at its highest professional levels, operates within paradigms that are not coherent with physics. While archaeology has successfully incorporated some scientific methods—radiocarbon dating being the prime example—these typically arrive as extensions from natural sciences and engineering rather than emerging from archaeology’s own theoretical foundations. The underlying philosophy of archaeological interpretation remains largely divorced from the frameworks that govern SETI research: signal processing, information theory, physical causation, and mathematical formalization.

This isn’t a failure of individual archaeologists or even of Vakoch’s initiative. It’s a paradigm issue, an incompatibility in how the disciplines conceptualise their fundamental objects of study. SETI researchers think in terms of signals, transmission, detection, and information encoding because they work within frameworks derived from physics and engineering. Most archaeologists think in terms of culture, meaning, interpretation, and context because their discipline developed primarily within humanities and social science traditions. These are different languages, different epistemologies, different ways of understanding what counts as explanation.

Without a bridging framework that allows archaeology to reconceptualise its work in terms compatible with signal science, the disciplines simply talk past each other. Archaeologists hear invitations to speculate about alien culture and correctly recognize this as beyond their expertise. They don’t hear the deeper connection: that they’re already doing long-distance signal recovery and interpretation, just aimed at temporal rather than spatial distances.

The Research Reorientation

This doesn’t mean archaeology or SETI should abandon their current work. Archaeologists should absolutely continue reconstructing the past, because that reconstruction is the prerequisite for any preservation effort. SETI should continue searching for contemporary signals, because we might be wrong about temporal overlap, and the cost of missing a real contact would be enormous.

But both disciplines should recognize a deeper, unifying purpose: developing the science of long-distance signal transmission and detection across spacetime. Every archaeological excavation should ask not just “what happened here?” but also “what made this discoverable and interpretable to us, and how could we apply those principles to preserve our own record?” Every SETI search should consider not just active transmissions but also passive artifacts, durable structures, and encoding strategies optimized for discovery across geological rather than historical timescales.

Multiple Futures, Same Solution

The beauty of this framework is that it remains valuable regardless of which future scenario unfolds. Perhaps we successfully navigate our technological challenges, and our descendants millions of years from now need to understand their deep history. Perhaps we don’t survive, but other intelligence eventually evolves on Earth and could benefit from knowing what came before. Perhaps aliens eventually investigate our solar system long after the Sun has expanded and consumed the inner planets. Perhaps we discover that others attempted the same preservation, and recognizing the patterns helps us find them.

In every scenario, the solution is the same: encode planetary history in the most durable, discoverable, and interpretable form possible. This gives both archaeology and SETI a concrete, achievable goal with existential importance. Because the attempt to figure out how to preseve and transit information into the far future will also inform us on what we should be looking for if such a thing already exists in the galaxy.

Practical Next Steps

The immediate research questions that emerge from this framework cut across multiple disciplines. What materials and encoding strategies survive millions of years in various planetary environments? How do you create self-interpreting information structures that remain meaningful without shared language or cultural context? What geometric and statistical patterns remain obviously artificial despite transformation over geological time? How do you design redundancy that ensures reconstruction despite massive data loss?

These aren’t abstract philosophical questions. They’re engineering problems with testable solutions. And we have a laboratory to test them: Earth’s own archaeological record. Everything we successfully recover from the past tells us something about what will be recoverable from our present. Every failed interpretation reveals encoding strategies that don’t survive the test of deep time.

Conclusion: A Science for Deep Time

We stand at a potentially unique moment in Earth’s history—technologically capable of attempting preservation while the record still exists to preserve. Whether anyone ever receives the transmission is unknowable. But the attempt itself is worthwhile, because if we’re right about temporal windows being brief and rare, then the alternative is that four billion years of planetary history simply vanishes, and no one ever knows it happened. Which may well be the fate of countless other planets with life in our galaxy, and the reason we encounter no signals as yet.

Archaeology and SETI, properly understood, are the same science: the detection and interpretation of signals across vast distances in spacetime. By making preservation the explicit goal of both, we create a framework that unifies these disciplines, justifies expanded research and funding, and ensures that if we’re alone in our window, we at least leave something behind for whoever comes after—whether that’s in a hundred years or a hundred million.

The universe is full of signals waiting to be found. We might be the only ones in a position to create them. That’s not just an opportunity. It’s a responsibility.

References

Tarter, J. (2001). The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 39(1), 511-548.

Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

Vakoch, D.A. (Ed.) (2014). Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication. NASA Office of Communications, Public Outreach Division.

Foley, D Furey, E (2025). From Geospatial Patterns to Ancient Signals: A
Signal Based Framework for Archaeological Machine Learning. ISSC Conference Proceedings 2025.

November 13, 2025
The Persistence of Dualism: Why a Decade of Theoretical Innovation Has Failed to Advance Archaeological Science

Update of 2014 article Dualism: The “Great Divide” in the Philosophy of Archaeology.

“They made up their minds to name two forms, of which they must not name one—in this they have gone astray.”

Parmenides of Elea

Archaeology is a discipline in philosophical crisis, charged with creating a narrative, the story of our species evolution, it seeks to further understanding of how, and why, our species unique history unfolded. But, while documenting change in human history proceeds with reasonable success, progress in understanding the mechanisms driving this change has been painfully slow. As Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew points out, archaeology can explain the “when and where” but not the “how and why” of events in the past (Renfrew, 2004). Answering the how and why is now a matter of increasing urgency as humans are of such overwhelming ecological significance.

Explaining “how and why” requires a theoretical archaeology from which to generate hypotheses, something that has not happened yet. This essay discusses why integration of archaeology with science at a theoretical level has proved so difficult.

Archaeology, on the whole, has been described as exhibiting disjuncture, a lack of correspondence between what passes for theory and what archaeologists actually do or aim to do (Johnson, 2006). It is recognised that archaeology, in common with most of the social sciences, has no coherent theoretical basis (Johnson, 2006) and that the ensuing systemic incoherence actively blocks progress, both within the subject, and between it and other disciplines . To grasp why archaeology cannot explain the phenomena it catalogues, a short historical detour is in order.

The Incomplete Revolution

In broad historical context the source of this disjuncture can be traced to underlying issues inherited from the western adherence to dualistic Platonic/Christian philosophies. Familiar in academia as the Two Cultures described by C.P. Snow decades ago (Snow, 1959), these paradigms define an ontological separation of humans from the environment, and by logical extension those phenomena once thought to be unique to humans like cognition, society, language. Progress in intervening years has resulted in a confusingly fragmented interface between the humanities and sciences. Archaeology now finds itself stretched awkwardly across this interface

The criterion of a successful integration of archaeology with evolutionary theory is the ability to create empirically testable hypotheses generated from evolutionary theory, the parsimonious theory of change applicable to a science of archaeology (Dunnell, 1971). The “Scientific Revolution” pioneered by Copernicus and Galileo in the 16 th and 17 th centuries was nothing more than the application of the monistic materialism of the Ancient Greek physiologoi to the phenomena of the heavens and the composition of non-living materials, an application that immediately revolutionised physics, cosmology and chemistry.

But the fields to which this application of philosophy remained limited, through compromise with Christian and Aristotelian sensibility both biology and the humanities were largely bypassed by the new sciences. Philosophers and theologians, arguing against the possibility that physical or mechanical laws could have given rise to the complexity of life, maintained the separate causation of biological systems and there concomitant properties.

Thus dualism effectively isolated organisms, including humans, from the physical causal chain of natural science, preventing integration with physics and rendering them unamenable to scientific investigation. Within biology this was corrected in part by Lamarck in 1801 with evolution and Darwin in 1859 with natural selection bringing life forms in general within the remit of natural science.

But again the application was incomplete, this time, humans and all phenomena thought to be unique to humans, were left sacrosanct, resulting in the separation of the humanites and sciences that was such a prominent feature of the 20th century structure of faculties.

Archaeology developed predominantly within the social science departments of colleges and therefore inherited a powerful underlying dualistic philosophy. A philosophy essentially medieval in character.

Philosophy in the social sciences inherits oppositional constructs such as mind/ body, natural/artificial, culture/nature and so on, leading to phenomena that monistic approaches posit as biological in origin, for example, language or cognition, to be defined instead as immaterial epi – phenomena, meaning they exist outside or beyond the “natural” material environment. It need hardly be said that once something is construed as “immaterial”, it is hardly likely to be amenable to scientific enquiry.

Effects

t is hard for us now to understand the medieval resistance to the motion of the earth, but it stems, I believe, from an identical problem and sheds some light on the kind of process I have in mind here. Firstly, as the earth was deemed special and therefore categorised as ontologically separate from the rest of the universe, explanation of its origin and state could not, and indeed should not once one is operating within these constraints, be linked to other observed systems or objects. Therefore observations of phenomena in the wider universe were not deemed relevant to the earth. This very effectively stymied research into the origin and history of the planet. Secondly, ontological isolation required that it also must be static, because that which moves must interact and such interaction was unthinkable, as the earth was fundamentally separate from the rest of creation. Hence, we look in wonder at intelligent protaganists in these old debates arguing what seems now so obviously absurd. But to uphold the medieval paradigm as it was, they were forced to defend the indefensible.

nd just as the logic of Aristotelian physics could not countenance the motion of the earth, modern dualistic philosophy freezes humans within the environment and this is the reason our models are not dynamic but static. Archaeological data remains isolated and because of this also must remain static. So, despite repeated calls for dynamic models, no such models can be constructed. The problem remains below decks, in the philosophical engine room so to speak, and far below the awareness of archaeological theory as it now stands.

As archaeologists we should be concerned with change and consequently our most useful evolutionary perspective is one that emphasises adaptation as a dynamic process rather than as a static state.”
(Mithen, 1990:p8

n keeping with this, neither have developments in physics, such as relativity or non-linear dynamics, been possible to incorporate within archaeological theory, not because of unwillingness, but because it is philosophically prevented. Therefore archaeological data remains isolated, inaccessible and cannot be digitised or held on a database that allows universal integration.. And so our ability to generate data is unimpeded, but or ability to record and manipulate data is extremely limited. There is no translation through scales and patterns of change over large spans of space and time cannot be effectively studied. This situation has become increasingly untenable as the sciences advance and archaeology does not, highlighting more and more the inadequate nature of its philosophical basis.

The Broken Inference Chain

The archaeological inference chain has been severed by this same problem. Archaeology must infer human behaviour and development from the technological record, an inference that must be made directly across the paradigmatic boundary discussed above. Practically speaking, the inference must be drawn from a-biota (tools etc) and applied to biota (humans), but it is precisely between living and non-living systems that dualism splits our fields, and so it is at this point our models can be predicted to break down.

And this is what we see, processes occurring across the boundary have been impossible to define, and exist only as the archetypal “black box” categories of social science. Vaguely defined areas such as technology and culture, both of which straddle the boundary, endure as obscure, undefined categories of phenomena, with the result that they are therefore generally omitted from process models

Splitting the Data Stream

If it is true that the problems within archaeology stem from this paradigmatic source then we should expect effects across a wide range of disciplines whenever they attempt to cross the divide. And it is the case that problems integrating biotic and a-biotic phenomena are not unique to archaeology. Similar difficulties have occurred within biology, ecology, neuroscience and complex systems theory. We see isolation, freezing effects and curious mirror like errors whenever synthesis is attempted, which I believe are the effects of this underlying dualism

Intriguingly, confusion over the units of replication or the selective process seem to mirror each other in biology and archaeology. Sitting on opposite sides of the divide and looking at the same phenomena from a different perspective, the dualist ontology functions like a prism that bifurcates the data streams within each discipline and between them causing what I can only describe as a double image or reflection where their should be a single system.

For example, ecological system models must include the a-biotic environment as well as the life forms that are the studies focus, but this has proved curiously troublesome. Odling Smee and Laland, the proponents of niche construction, reached similar conclusions as to the neglect of active processes. Their focus on the active, dynamic interactions of a creature with its environment are of course correct. I believe they identified the same freezing effect prevalent in archaeology, in other words, the life forms they study are inherently static in system models that include the wider environment.

The model described here would predict just such an outcome. It would also predict that phenomena identified across the divide are split by the underlying dualism so that they will manifest as a reflection, or doubling of processes on ones own side of the divide.

An example of this is that after their identification of niche construction, Odling Smee and Laland then posited it as a second parallel process to natural selection “we shall have to recognize that evolution depends not on one, but on two general selective processes: natural selection and niche construction” Odling Smee et. al. have been criticised for this claim as it has been pointed out that it is unnecessary and unparsimonious to suggest a second major selective process operating within evolution. The identification (or misidentification) of phenomena as parallel replicators or selective processes is, I believe, a manifestation of the distortion effect of dualism, simply because the data becomes un-integratable and therefore a second process or force must be created to account for the seemingly parallel, but unconnected, phenomena observed.

Similarly, the memes proposed by Richard Dawkins (Dawkins, 1976) are characterised as replicative units under selection, a parallel selection process. And again this has been criticised as unecessary and unparsimonious addition to evolutionary theory, as well as a false analogy. But what is of interest here is that Dawkins felt the need to propose a parallel process for phenomena that are beyond the dualistic divide from his native biology, and again they appear as a parallel reflection of phenomena studied in his own field.

In archaeology, the fact that technology is of central importance, places it right at the coalface of the great divide, consisting as it does of a system where inanimate matter is in contact with life forms. This means that any successful definition of technology must smoothly integrate information across the paradigm boundary, a process that can be predicted to fail under current philosophical conditions, as we have seen above. And indeed it remains the case that archaeology has failed to scientifically define technology or to integrate the study of its development with evolutionary science or indeed even physics.

How to define technology, for example, remains a complete mystery to archaeologists, as Lambros Malafouris has helpfully described.

“To exemplify, this territory is familiar, as when the hand grasps a stone and makes it a tool, yet it remains terra incognita, since — despite a long genealogy of analytic efforts— just what this grasping implies for the human condition remains elusive, and refuses to be read in the narrative fashion that hermeunetics have promised“
(Malafouris, 2004)

In traditional archaeology the focus has traditionally been on a single element in the system, the tool, the object or material, it has been increasingly realised this cannot be understood in isolation. Tool use, once the pride of the anthropocentric view, has been observed in increasing numbers of species, across taxa. chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, birds such as New Caledonian Crows. A fact putting pressure on archaeology to integrate explanation of human tool use with the many examples in the animal world.

“But the significance of tool use doesn’t lie in the fact of tools,” Hauser explains, “but rather in how they’re conceived and used.” (Hauser, )

Tools exhibit many of the features of biological selection, apparent design, bursts of increasing complexity over time, stasis, inheritance of characteristics and contingency. These features have puzzled many archaeologist and have led to many attempts to explain the development of technology using evolutionary theory, and again, remembering that this explanation must cross the paradigm divide, we might predict that, unless the deeper philosophical issues are dealt with first, these attempts will fail.

The result has been that archaeology has invariably run into the same effects as encountered in ecological and biological theory noted above. Cultural Transmission theory, Selectionist archaeology and Behavioural archaeology have all (falsely) posited parallel general forces of evolution, or parallel units of selection with the result that debate over what counts as a “unit of selection” in the evolution of technology has raged within the subject. (Boone and Smith, 1998, Lyman and O’Brien, 1998, Maschner, 1996). The outcome being merely that they are generally left only with the question, what is it that is being selected? And so archaeology remains just as theoretically isolated and fragmented as before. As Colin Renfrew has said “But we still seem a long way from any well-integrated view that can bring these disparate fields together.”

Conclusions

The occurrence of this remarkably similar problem in both archaeology and ecology reinforces, at least in my mind, the identification of the philosophical division between biota and a-biota at an ontological level as the source of these discontinuities. The important point is that the effect on data has been identical in both subjects, both have static descriptions of what are dynamic systems.

From these analogies, it is clear that something very similar is happening across a wide range of disciplines, when evolutionary theory is applied to across the paradigm boundary, it results in erroneous conclusions such as parallel replicators or processes parallel to natural selection. In this analysis, this does not occur because the approaches are wrong, but because the ontological framework to which they are being applied is incorrect, resulting in duplication, an effect indicative of a dualist paradigm interfering with our models. Stemming from a common source, these errors occur as mirror images of each other.

In this way inherited dualistic philosophies have resulted in subtle but profound shifts of emphasis in fields of research. So for example in biology and archaeology, the assumption that the environment is only that which is beyond the body leads to the search for sources of environmental change to be concentrated almost exclusively externally to the organism, and while the importance of behaviour is recognised in biology (Baldwin,189) it has been consistently underestimated (Odling Smee, Laland).

We can see that dualism, by forcing the separation of either the organism from the environment (archaeology), or the environment from the organism (ecology) creates our inability to integrate biotic and a-biotic phenomena into cohesive system models and results in a skewed emphasis across many disciplines.

Also, because the physical causal chain is broken, static linear models predominate across all disciplines, resulting in motion in general to be overlooked as an essential element in the environment. Therefore motion has not been, or cannot be, recognised or modelled as a part of the environment exerting its own unique selective force. Finally, models lacking motion of any kind, certainly cannot include attributes of motion such as relativity or scale and so these have not been addressed at all.

Recognising this, we may consciously proceed with the development of a revised philosophy beginning from a holistic approach. The need for which has been recognised in the call for non- dichotomous thinking from several scholars in the archaeological field (Hodder 1999; Thomas 1996, Webmoor, Witmoore, 2008). Similarly, calls from the natural sciences on the other side of the divide, consilience from biologist E. O. Wilson, or neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran and numerous others show that physics, biology and the human sciences require synthesis.

It is hoped that archaeology, with its unique problems and perspectives in this area, spanning as it does this most ancient of divisions, may contribute to the new synthesis now being pursued across the life sciences. As ‘humanity begins with things’ (Serres with Latour 1995:166)…

“archaeology is in a prime position, a third space (which is yet to be articulated) with regard to the humanities and sciences, to set innovative and cutting edge intellectual agendas”
(Webmoor, Witmore, 2008)

Bibliography

Dunnell, R. C. (1971) Systematics in Prehistory New York: The Free Press.
Dunnell, R. C. (1996a). Evolutionary Theory and Archaeology. In M. J. O’Brien (Ed.), Evolutionary Archaeology : Theory and Application (pp. 30-67). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Dunnell, R. C. . Natural Selection, Scale, and Cultural Evolution: Some Preliminary Considerations (1996b) In M. J. O’Brien (Ed.), Evolutionary Archaeology : Theory and Application (pp. 24-29). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Jeffares, B. The Scope and Limits of Biological Explanations in Archaeology (2002) Unpublished Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.
Laland, K.N., Odling-Smee, J. and Feldman, M.W. (2000). Niche construction, biological evolution, and cultural change. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23: 131-175.
Mithen, S., 1998. Introduction, in Creativity in Human Evolution and Prehistory, ed. S. Mithen. London & NewYork (NY): Routledge, 1–15. Routledge
Webmoor, T. and Witmore, C. L. (2008) ‘Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/Things Relations under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology’, Norwegian Archaeological Review, 1 – 18.
Renfrew, C., 2001a. Symbol before concept: material engagement and the early development of society, in Archaeological Theory Today, ed. I. Hodder. Cambridge: Polity Press, 122–40. (MA): MIT Press.
Renfrew, C. & C. Scarre (eds.), 1998. Cognition and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Symbolic Storage. (McDonald Institute Monographs.) Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Malafouris, Lambros, The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement: Where Brain, Body and Culture Conflate,
Malafouris, L., 2003. Archaeology and Dissonance: Towards a Theory of Material Engagement. Paper presented at Radical Archaeology Theory Symposium (RATS), Binghamton, New York.

July 9, 2025
Beyond Typologies: Why Archaeology Needs a Signal Processing Revolution
First in a three-part series introducing a groundbreaking approach to archaeological data science

Rathra, County Roscommon

The Hidden Patterns in Ancient Landscapes

Imagine standing in a field in County Roscommon, looking at what appears to be just another Irish pasture crossed by modern fence lines. But beneath your feet and etched into the landscape around you lie the traces of something far more ancient—circular earthworks, enclosures, and pathways that once formed part of a sophisticated territorial system spanning millennia.

This is Rathra, and it perfectly illustrates both the promise and the problem of modern archaeology. We can see the ancient patterns, but they’re overlaid, interrupted, and partially obscured by thousands of years of subsequent activity. Traditional archaeological recording treats this as discrete layers—Medieval here, Bronze Age there—creating disconnected snapshots that miss the deeper story.

What if we could read these landscapes like signals?

The Typological Trap

For over 150 years, archaeology has organized its data using categories inherited from the 19th century: “Bronze Age,” “ringfort,” “barrow.” These labels seemed logical when archaeology was primarily about museum collections and cultural chronologies. But they’ve become a prison.

Consider what happens when we try to apply machine learning to archaeological data structured this way:
- Temporal relationships disappear into broad, arbitrary periods
- Uncertainty gets hidden behind confident-sounding labels
- Dynamic processes become static categories
- Observed facts get mixed with interpretative assumptions
The result? Archaeological data that’s fundamentally incompatible with modern computational analysis. We’ve been trying to do 21st-century science with 19th-century data structures.

Archaeology as Signal Science

But there’s another way to think about archaeological remains: as degraded signals from past human activity.

Every stone circle, every earthwork, every scatter of pottery represents traces of ancient “motion patterns”—the systematic ways people moved through and organized their landscapes. These signals have been subject to natural decay, vegetation growth, later human activity, and countless other forms of interference. Our job as archaeologists becomes a form of inverse signal reconstruction: working backward from degraded traces to infer the original patterns that created them.

This isn’t just a metaphor. When we apply signal processing mathematics to archaeological data, remarkable patterns emerge that traditional methods simply cannot detect.

The SETI Connection

This approach aligns archaeology with some of the most cutting-edge science happening today. SETI researchers search for “technosignatures”—traces of technological activity across vast spans of space and time. They’re essentially doing inverse signal reconstruction on cosmic scales, trying to separate intentional patterns from natural noise.

Douglas Vakoch and other SETI scientists have called for archaeological input precisely because we face similar challenges: detecting degraded signals of intelligent activity across enormous temporal distances. The mathematical frameworks are surprisingly similar.

But where SETI looks outward for signs of non-human intelligence, archaeology looks backward for signs of our own species’ complex behaviors. We’re both trying to answer the fundamental question: How do you detect intention in noisy, incomplete data?

What This Makes Possible

By treating archaeological features as signals in a unified mathematical framework, we can:
- Detect anomalies that reveal historical disruptions (like invasions) through negative correlations
- Identify persistent patterns that span millennia, invisible to period-based analysis
- Quantify uncertainty using probabilistic methods rather than hiding it behind labels
- Scale analysis to continental or global datasets using automated pattern recognition
- Integrate seamlessly with remote sensing, climate data, and astronomical datasets
A New Kind of Archaeological Science

In our upcoming research publication, we demonstrate this approach using 6,000 years of data from northwest Ireland. The results are remarkable: we can detect territorial boundaries that persist from the Neolithic through the Medieval period, identify the signatures of different political federations, and even automatically detect invasive territorial patterns like the Norman conquest—all from spatial data alone, without relying on historical records or typological classifications.

This represents the emergence of a genuinely new archaeological science: one that can operate at the scale and precision demanded by contemporary global challenges, from understanding long-term environmental adaptation to modeling resilient territorial systems.

What’s Next

In our next article, we’ll dive into the technical breakthrough that makes this possible: treating time as space within a 3D mathematical framework that transforms temporal relationships into geometric ones. This seemingly simple shift opens up entirely new ways of reasoning about archaeological data.

The third article will walk through our Ireland case study, showing how 6,000 years of human territorial behavior becomes visible when viewed through this new lens—and what it tells us about the deep continuities underlying apparent historical change.

This isn’t just a new method—it’s a new way of seeing the past.

Dylan Foley is a researcher in archaeological data science at Atlantic Technological University, working under the supervision of Dr. Eoghan Furey. Together, they are developing new approaches at the intersection of machine learning, signal processing, and landscape archaeology that bridge archaeology with SETI research, planetary science, and advanced computational methods.

Next: “Treating Time as Space: A New Framework for Archaeological Machine Learning”
July 3, 2025

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