The Autochthon and the Terraformed. The European Space Agency's Regolith Building Block

'Bulb of percussion' is the name lithic analysis gives to the distinctive shape created on lithic flakes from knapping, the chipping away of flakes from flint to produce tools. The paleo-anthropological narrative of early tool production identifies the bulb of percussion, which, in turn, allows the identification of sites of tool manufacture. In this essay this prototypical example of tool production is discussed in terms of André Leroi Gourhan’s notion of a cultural group’s ‘technical tendency’, a term that relates the interior milieu of an ethnic group (its cultural, historical and societal formations) and its exterior milieu (geographic, climatic environments and extra-cultural influences). This essay aims to stretch the capacity of this formulation to address the terraforming project of the European Space Agency, Foster + Partners and Monolite UK. Tasked with building habitable structures on the moon the research of these three partners has simulated a regolith building block with the aim being to manufacture these on the moon from its surface of soil, dust and broken rock (lunar regolith). Relationships between site, manufacture, technical development and symbolic value are developed throughout the text.

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