Excavating the Future: Archaeology and Geopolitics in Contemporary North American Science Fiction Film and Television by Shawn Malley (review)

Fredric Jameson argues that sf film and television is more about imagining the present than the future, a standpoint that is also foundational for Shawn Malley’s new book, Excavating the Future: Archaeology and Geopolitics in Contemporary North American Science Fiction Film and Television. What may perhaps seem less readily apparent to those same readers is that a similar argument can be made that archaeology, too, is often less about imagining the past than it is about reimagining the present. Though not all archaeologists will agree with this statement, it is with the many who do that Malley interacts in this compelling investigation of how the science of the study of the past informs and is informed by screen fantasies of the future.

The main theme of Malley’s book is articulated on p. 5, where he writes: ‘This book investigates how contemporary SF televisual and cinematic representations of archaeology and their “scientific” sense of the past and of cultural interaction contribute to socio-political investigation and understanding of geopolitics’. This theme is further elaborated as a series of questions, in which Malley asks: ‘What kinds of futures can archaeology offer its audiences? How do archaeological practices shape cinematic storytelling? And, perhaps most importantly, how can archaeology expose SF futures to contemporary geopolitical discourse?’ (10). As part of the answer to these questions, Malley offers a particularly interesting thesis as he explores ‘how archaeology bequeaths to SFFTV a critical vocabulary with which to speak about the past, theorize our relationships with material culture, and excavate the discursive strata between cognition and estrangement’ (13).

Through three themed sections, Malley provides close readings of how specific examples of sf film and television are entangled with archaeological ideas. The first section is concerned with the interrelationship between Western military activity in the Middle East and its associated archaeological stewardship. Returning to Manticore (Reed US 2005) (the subject of a chapter of his previous book), Malley also reads both the film and television iterations of the Stargate franchise (1994–) as well as Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (Bay US 2009). His second section deals with ancient aliens, a subject of great interest and even greater scorn amongst professional archaeologists, looking specifically at Planet of the Apes (Schaffner 1968 and sequels), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Spielberg US 2008) and numerous episodes of Smallville (US 2001–11). Within this section Malley also interacts with the History Channel’s top-rated ‘documentary’ series, Ancient Aliens (US 2009–). The third chapter explores the ‘archaeological cyborg’, where readings of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg US/UK 2001), Battlestar Galactica (US 2004–9) and Prometheus (Scott US/UK 2012) illuminate how stable categories of past, present and future are disrupted through this form of sf film and television.

Part 1 raises unnerving and uncomfortable questions about the complicity of archaeology, sf filmmaking and the violence of geopolitical power relations. At first the stakes might seem quite low to the reader, as Malley deconstructs a forgettable SyFy-Network monster-of-the-week-style telefilm. By the end of this discussion, however, Malley has shown how sf film and television reifies archaeology’s long-standing position as a colonialist discipline enacted as part of European and later American military action in the Middle East. While Malley shows that television series like Stargate SG-1 (US/Canada 1997–2007) are able to develop more complex positions vis-à-vis military relationships that are otherwise mediated through Orientalist conceptions, fundamentally sf film and television has the potential to normalise problematic equations of militaristic archaeological heritage management with heroic values. Protecting archaeological sites becomes a means to offer what Malley calls ‘allegory lite’ visions of complex political events in which heritage management is encoded as representative of Euro-American liberation. Archaeologists have been increasingly self-aware of their own...