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.