Originally scheduled for publication in June 2014, a PDF of Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication was accidentally released a month before the intended date and reviewed by Gizmodo.

A quote about ancient terrestrial stone carvings, rhetorically stating that they "might have been made by aliens"[1] for all that they were understood by modern anthropologists, was misreported by publications such as TheBlaze, The Huffington Post, and Artnet.

Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication was written as part of an expansion of the field to humanities and social sciences, focusing on the role archaeologists and anthropologists play in extraterrestrial intelligence research.

NASA's SETI program was small and provided few jobs that would make cutting it politically complex; widespread skepticism about the existence of intelligent alien life also made the project inherently controversial.

NASA's funding also suffered through the 1990s due to publicized issues with the Hubble Space Telescope, weakening its ability to defend a marginal program such as SETI.

Representation of the social sciences in SETI research began during the field's early days in the 1960s and 1970s, but was, according to the essay, often tokenistic; Dick traces significant interdisciplinary work as beginning in the 1980s, with particular focus on the publication of Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience in 1986.

The second essay, "Beyond Linear B" by Richard Saint-Gelais, analyzes potential alien communication through a semiotic lens, commenting on the issues involved in interpreting the signs and symbols of a fundamentally different culture.

He refers to the controversy regarding the meaning of Paleolithic cave art, as well as the relative recency of identifying stone tools as the intentional productions of intelligent beings.

He takes an optimistic position of the benevolence of extraterrestrial civilizations, referring to his own anthropological research that shows societies that endure for long periods tend to be more peaceful and less aggressive.

He discusses how as early as The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, published by Christiaan Huygens in 1698 and one of the first works to consider the lives of extraterrestrial beings, the possibility was raised that aliens would have similar body plans to humans (such as walking upright) but look radically different within such confines.

He notes the assumptions involved in constructing interstellar messages, such as that aliens will have senses and that aspects of cognitive function (e.g. intentional behavior) will be shared between all intelligent organisms.

[10] In a 2002 interview with Dennis Overbye for The New York Times, he discussed his criticism of the natural sciences focus of SETI research and his work to view the subject through a humanities-focused lens, including the comparison of interstellar communication to cross-cultural interactions between terrestrial societies.

[16][17] Perhaps all this attention towards a misinterpretation of a single sentence of this book—be it from negligence by bloggers rushing to meet a daily quota of posts, or a deliberate effort to drive traffic and advertising dollars—is instructive.

[12] The review began with an out-of-context quote from William Edmondson's essay on how mysterious stone carvings "might have been made by aliens"[1] as a metaphor for the difficulties in researching long-lost ancient societies.

Though it went on to note that this should not be interpreted as a literal statement, the quote was picked up by publications such as Artnet,[19] The Blaze, and The Huffington Post as a clickbait headline.

[21] Michael Franco of CNET lauded its comprehensiveness,[22] and Jolene Creighton, co-founder of the science news site From Quarks to Quasars, called it "a fantastic text to save for a rainy day".

He referred to the conclusions reached by the essayists, such as Lestel's discussion of the implications involved in being unable to understand or decode potential alien messages.