From STEM to STEAM: Towards aerospace partnerships with cultural heritage diagnostics

What would happen if archaeology and aerospace joined forces to test and develop new technology? Not only would it be the basis for an epic movie, there is considerable need in emerging fields of archaeology, like cultural heritage diagnostics, where a fruitful partnership could be forged. Both cultural heritage diagnostics and engineering groups share needs for multi-dimensional and multi-spectral surveying, immersive collaboration environments for visualizing results for analytics, and layered reality annotation systems to engage the scientific community and capture crowd-sourced feedback. The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) hosts the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture, and Archaeology (CISA3), which is focused on engineering and adapting technology towards cultural heritage diagnostics for these purposes. CISA3 would like to build and consolidate new bridges between industry, academia, and government research to develop, test, and explain new tools to explore the cultural world around us with systems typically dreamt of in science fiction space exploration. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and research is highly lauded as a means to maintain and improve society's problem-solving prowess. Recent years have seen a movement to put the Arts into the middle of STEM, thus transforming it into STEAM, to foster innovation and to deliver comprehensive, sustainable solutions to a wide range of problems and opportunities, especially those that are culturally sensitive. Utilizing this emphasis on an expanded definition of the `arts' - specifically art, architecture, and archaeology a la CISA could help the aerospace industry and its many offshoots by both providing a culturally accessible entry point to engage the masses to recruit new generations of Indiana-Jones space exploration-engineers and act as a test bed for equipment and training. Deeper collaborations with aerospace offer cultural heritage diagnostics the chance to extend its ongoing dialogue between those who can identify practical field problems for which technology has not yet been invented, like archaeologists and art historians, and the computer scientists and engineers who are capable of constructing solutions. This paper explores ways that cultural heritage diagnostics with CISA3 and similar organizations bridge the gap between pure and applied science in turn smudging the lines between the hard and soft sciences. It will explore the ways in which a STEAM movement focused not just on arts, but on art, architecture, and archaeology may be the path towards the productive and innovative collaborations between academia, industry, and government which have long been dreamed of, but not yet fully achieved. This paper will suggest ways in which cultural heritage diagnostics entities might partner with the aerospace industry to evolve well-rounded tools that reveal and preserve the treasure of our past to present audiences -to inspire and enable a future for humankind on and beyond planet Earth.