Mount Everest’s upper slopes are littered with oxygen tanks, abandoned tents, food packaging, and human waste — the accumulated debris of more than a century of expeditions to a place our bodies were never designed to survive. Most people see it as a cleanup problem. Two archaeologists see something else entirely.
The same methods used to study how astronauts behave aboard the International Space Station are now being applied to the world’s highest peak — and the material record left behind may reveal something deeper about why humans keep going back.
Archaeology without a trowel
Justin Walsh and Shawn Graham did not start their careers studying extreme environments. Walsh’s background is in Greek archaeology; Graham’s is in Roman. Both ended up asking the same question: what happens when you apply archaeological thinking to places where no one can dig?
Walsh founded the ISS Archaeological Project in 2015. The premise was unconventional — space archaeology is the study of human activity in the space environment, defined as 100 kilometers above Earth and beyond. A seat to the ISS through Axiom Space costs roughly $75 million, and no research grant covers that.
The solution came from an unexpected source. UCLA anthropologist Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project gave disposable cameras to migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, letting them document obstacles researchers could not otherwise observe. Walsh saw the parallel immediately: NASA had published tens of thousands of photographs showing astronauts inside the station. Put those images in chronological order, and you have a record of material culture changing over time. No trowel required. Graham joined in 2023, bringing expertise in large-scale image analysis developed through earlier work tracking human remains traded online.
What the ISS photographs revealed
Analyzing photographs from a period when roughly 250 people had lived aboard the station, Walsh and Graham mapped how different population groups used different areas. The gender split was approximately 84% men and 16% women — but distribution across the station was far from proportional.
On the U.S. side, women were underrepresented in photographs of areas dedicated to science, eating, sleeping, and exercise. One exception stood out: the cupola, the panoramic window overlooking Earth. Women appeared in 24% of published cupola photographs — about 50% more than their overall population share would predict. The researchers interpret this as evidence of unconscious bias in NASA’s public image selection, favoring aesthetically striking images of women over images of them working.
The station’s Maintenance Work Area told a different story. Designed as a workbench with seven ranked priorities — maintenance first, then science — it was photographed over 60 days as part of a crew experiment, and researchers found it was almost never used for maintenance. Most of the time, it functioned as storage. These findings carried real-world consequences: Vast, the commercial space station company, confirmed that the ISS Archaeological Project’s research influenced the interior design of Haven-1, its upcoming station.
Everest as an archaeological site
The new project, called Archaeology Impossible, applies the same photographic methodology to Mount Everest. The mountain holds an enormous material record — oxygen tanks, food packaging, tents, human waste, prayer flags, poles, respirators, and memorials to those who died attempting the climb.
Two locations serve as fixed reference points. A boulder at base camp, spray-painted with the words “Everest Base Camp,” appears in hundreds of photographs and gets periodically repainted, making it a reliable anchor for tracking material change over time. Farther up, a zone of memorials to deceased climbers has grown and shifted as new deaths added to it. The project plans to crowdsource its image collection, inviting anyone who has climbed Everest to submit photographs for analysis — mirroring De León’s original insight that people passing through extreme environments often document things outside researchers cannot.
Nationalism, culture, and the human need to conquer
Nationalism shaped Everest expeditions long before it shaped activity aboard the ISS. Until the 1990s, the mountain’s history was largely a competition between nations over routes and firsts. Walsh draws a direct line between that history and what the ISS data revealed about national differences in how crews used the station.
Graham puts it plainly: nationalism shows up in the material record. Flags appear on clothing, on equipment, on the mountain itself. The impulse to mark territory — to say we were here, and we did this — appears consistent across extreme environments, whether the extreme is altitude or vacuum.
Opening a field that once left people behind
Walsh’s involvement with AstroAccess, a nonprofit working to make space accessible to people with disabilities, has shifted how he thinks about extreme-environment research. His argument is direct: everyone who goes to space is effectively disabled by the environment. The same applies to Everest, where the human body operates well below its normal capacity.
That framing opens the field in two directions at once. Perspectives from people with disabilities could reveal design insights able-bodied researchers might miss entirely, and it points toward an archaeology that does not require physical presence in dangerous places. Other environments are already on the list: Antarctic research stations, oil rigs, submarines. The broader goal is practical — Walsh and Graham want to help design better habitats that reflect how people actually behave under extreme conditions, not how mission planners assume they will. As Archaeology Impossible expands its dataset, methods developed to study a station 400 kilometers above Earth may tell us something new about the oldest human ambition: the drive to go somewhere no one has any business going, and leave a mark there.