ArcheoLogia Data 4/2024

After millennia of associative and cultural interaction between human communities and the Cosmos, since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the first artificial satellite in History, Space has become a natural environment with which today’s societies constantly interact for their own economic, scientific, political, and military needs: the development and proliferation of human activities in Space represents one of the shaping and characterizing factors of contemporary society in the 20th and 21st centuries. Space Archaeology emerged in the late 1990s (mostly in the US and Australian academic context), and it examines the contexts of human and robotic Space exploration analysing the relationship between Material Culture, human behaviour and the natural environment, according to the theoretical model of Cultural Landscape. This article represents a synthesis of a broader research carried out for the writing of the master’s thesis (Forassiepi, 2023): an overview of the general principles and methodological aspects of the discipline is provided, and then developed in the case study related to the ESA’s (European Space Agency) Rosetta mission (2004-2016), presenting data and results.