Spelestology


Spelestology (Latin spelaeum ‘cave’ and -logy; English spelestology) is a sub-discipline of historical science and materiality research that specializes in man-made underground structures, sites (earth stables) or passages (Schratzllöcher).
German Wikipedia

Spelestology is a fake, this term does not exist. When I stumbled across this rather strange term, I was very irritated and started a search and found the following content on this term.

In science, terms are coined, you define a name for a thing. It has four legs, is made of wood, and you can sit on it, which is how I define the name chair. Later you have to adapt such definitions, for example you find chairs that are not made of wood, that only have three legs. You can also find armchairs that you can sit on but which are not chairs. Such processes can be found in abundance in speleological literature, terms that have changed and adapted to knowledge as understanding has increased.

So what about the term spelestology? This term seems to have been coined for a Russian conference that took place in Nabereznye Cheln in Tatarstan in 2010. As a result, a journal was launched, also called Speleology and Spelestology. A facebook page was also created. A completely normal process. And if the term has a certain value, it will soon catch on in the scene. In other words, other researchers in the same field will use the new term, but only if it makes sense. However, that has not happened here. An obvious assumption is that the corruption of the term speleology was merely a joke to indicate that not only natural caves are being worked on. In this case, the term would have never been intended as a technical term, which also explains why it was never used by others.

After 15 years, exactly one other scientist, namely the above linked Dr. Lea-Katharina Steller, used the term exactly once. Presumably she then realized that there was something wrong with the term and has not used it since. Her research group “Spelästologie” produced a three-page report but never published anything else. Similarly, although the journal still has its own website, it has its home at a pedagogical university(!) in Tatarstan, whose website does not even mention an institute, let alone mention this journal as an official publication of the university. The journal’s page on researchgate has also been deleted in the meantime; they have obviously noticed that something is wrong. After all, the word does not appear in any publication, is not on the UIS list of technical terms and so on. But what is wrong?

So again for a better understanding. The scientific term spelestology does not exist because it has never been defined by anyone in a scientific paper. That would be the minimum requirement for someone to say: you have four legs, I call you a chair. The Russian term спелестология exists, even if it is only used by a single journal. It is not used in the articles this journal contains, as far as I could find any. Again, how it came about is unclear, and as for the meaning of the st, one can only guess. Furthermore, the term is not used in German because we have the term Erdstallforschung, which actually means the same thing. And finally, the term never caught on in Russian either, which may be because it is a joke, which Russians recognize and laugh heartily about.