Saturday 16 December 2023

Anthropology and Archaeology: The RPG Blog Carnival

This is essentially a slush-pile post: last September, user Rook of Beneath Foreign Planets on the Weird and Wonderful Worlds discord server hosted the RPG Blog Carnival with the theme Anthropology and Archaeology. The complete list of posts is at this link is a veritable treasure trove.

Beautiful Neolithic figurines, Gozo Museum of Archaeology, Malta

My first (and I should add, incomplete) degree was in anthropology and it's a discipline I would dearly like to return to one day, possibly when (if?) I (get to?) retire. Consequently I had a few ideas but never, had a chance to expand on any of them. The following is a list of posts I’m likely never going to write out in full: I hope they might inspire someone to make something more of them. In no particular order...

Archaeology and the Delve

This meme is itself an archaeological relic

Like archaeologists, dungeon delvers unearth relics of the past and return them to the surface. Obviously there exists a world of difference between the two occupations in terms of care, professional liability and interest in truth (as opposed to getting the shiny-shiny) but the trope of the adventurer-archaeologist has a number of strong precedents, from Indiana Jones to Alien: Covenant (and more about the other tropes in that movie below).

Archaeology as in in-game activity presents a rich seam of inspiration for the RPG world, and I toyed with how best to manifest this concept in-game. Ultimately Sea of Stars did a grand job of developing this idea.

Ancient Aliens & the Ancient Apocalypse

This was going to be hard enough to summarise in a blogpost, so my brain-splurge here is probably not going to help explain what my intention would have been... the topic is quite divisive, and understandably so, so please enjoy this bulleted list with an open (ish?) mind....

  1. The level of scholarship in the TV show Ancient Aliens is non-existent. The show (and related media) is great fun, if viewed as a piece of speculative however, except for…
  2. …the horrible disservice this does to the cultures of the past that (probably) created them, and the contemporary cultures that have inherited their legacy.
  3. On top of that, all of the monumental architecture that attracts the attention of this show is located in countries that are emerging from a history of colonial exploitation. The [racist] subtext apparent to the people of those nations being: "these people (tm) were primitive until Europeans brought civilisation to them: how could they possibly have achieved this without the assistance of a more "advanced" culture than their own?"
  4. By no small coincidence this is the most egregious criticism that can be levelled against the parallel trope of the Advanced Ancient Humans , more recently epitomised by Graham Hancock's Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse however...
  5. ...Hancock does use the "civilising hero" myth prevalent in a vast range of human cultures (from Quetzacoatl to Prometheus) as a general launch point into his investigations and...
  6. ...his dismay at the ruin wrought by colonialism, particularly in mesoamerica, appears genuine but...
  7. ...he is definitely, definitely an individual who enjoys whipping up controversy and false dichotomies in order to continue to grow sales of his multiple books...
  8. ...nonetheless I'd love to sit down and have a long talk with him and...
  9. ...the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis is compelling, and the volume of evidence supporting the so-called “Clovis comet” is growing, even if it is not yet convincing.

    That said, this archaeologist probably analyses everything wrong with Hancock's hypothesis better than I can (video courtesy Janet of Sailing the Stygian Seas : https://discord.com/channels/621283674624622603/700140980472512552/1142630454353215498
Ultimately, the reason why the fantasy trope of the precursor culture remains so pervasive is because a) it’s fun and b) it’s an ingrained element of the human psyche. While hard-working archaeologists and historians point at the absence of any real evidence, it remains popular because it paints a picture of humanity that is somehow more fantastic yet also more simplistic.


The Anthropology of RPG Creators 

A bit meta, but wouldn’t this make for an interesting ethnography? 

Gaming as experimental archaeology I

This post concept  arose from the work of Barney Dicker of the (currently mothballed) Loco Ludos podcast. Barney’s Mesolithic RPG The Alluvial Plains was used as means by which to imagine and explore life in Doggerland. I think this is especially relevant to the study of prehistory, where there the absence of written records exacts a heavy burden on the objects archaeologists recover and the contexts in which they are found.

Sidebar: how useful would a crunchier Dialect be to linguistic anthropologists in reconstructing cultures around dead languages? Probably a bit too hard Sapir–Whorf hypothesis?

PARIAH Appendix N

There’s a fair few anthropological texts in the list (and one or two surprises) but this needs a thorough treatment. A post idea that might make it out the other side.

Gaming as Experimental Archaeology II

There’s one or two RPGs about playing RPGs… what about an RPG about archaeologists playing an RPG as part of their work? Alternatively, a game within a game: characters reconstruct an ancient mystery by acting it out.

Storytelling as in-game worldbuilding device

Say around a campfire at the end of a tiring day, the party recount the folk tales of their various cultures to one another. Players can use this to introduce monsters, artefacts and locations into the game world.

Storytelling magic 

Alternative to the above and drawn from multiple indigenous cultures, a magic system based around folk tales that are recited to inflict curses or to inspire.

Alternatively: instead of rumours, “dreaming tracks”: the aboriginal tradition of tying a story to the landscape. PCs hear the tale of an ancient spirit or else god, and retrace that journey in hopes of finding wisdom/treasure/stories. Again, one I might reasonably work on at a later date.

~

I've never done a slush-pile post before (I think?) though maybe these might count. My understanding of its use in the world of RPG blogging comes from (predictably) Arnold K and I think this post is an early example of a public-facing slush pile. The king of the slush pile, however, sits on a Throne of Salt. This man's trash is our treasure.

Much as I'm happy to contribute to this blogging event 3months late and with a pile of undeveloped ideas, there's some guilt at play given the quality of what was shared. A personal highlight was the Gift Economy post by Homicidally Inclined Person .Thanks to Rook for putting this cool event together.

Links

Publishing Slush Pile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slush_pile

Rook's blog
https://foreignplanets.blogspot.com

Weird and Wonderful Worlds blog
https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/

RPG BLOG CARNIVAL MEGAPOST
https://foreignplanets.blogspot.com/2023/10/archaeology-and-anthropology-blog.html

Adventurer Archaeologist Trope
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdventurerArchaeologist

In-game archaeology
https://seaofstarsrpg.wordpress.com/2023/09/25/rpg-blog-carnival-archaeology-of-the-sea-of-stars/

Othering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_(philosophy)

Advanced ancient civilisation trope:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdvancedAncientHuman

Dead Birds
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/search/label/%23deadbirds

Goblin Punch: How to Be Creative
https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/07/how-to-be-creative-also-blobbins.html

Tales From the Slush Pile
https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2015/01/tales-from-slush-pile.html

Throne of Salt's posts labelled as slush
https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/search/label/slush%20pile

Gift Economy 
https://homicidallyinclinedpersonsofnofixedaddress.com/2023/04/28/gift-economies/

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2 comments:

  1. maxcan716 December 2023 at 15:52

    Balancing that thread between "this is a cool idea" vs. "this cool idea is often rooted in colonialism" is rough lol, but you describe it well here. I like what you do in Pariah, and what I've read from anthropologists like Graeber, or from reading into traditional Animist/Spiritualist beliefs, in finding ways to demonstrate that kind of grandness and wonder within ancient cultures themselves. From that perspective, which is more interesting, ancient aliens who more closely resemble white peoples' beliefs about advancement secretly being responsible for all the ancient wonders, or that there are all these ancient beliefs and practices way outside the realm of Eurocentrism that produced these wonders, and many more (materially or ideologically) that no longer remain? And, wondering what might come from the synthesis and extrapolation across all of these ideas (as opposed to the merely linear gain of what might come from encountering ancient aliens as conceived within a strictly Eurocentric imagination).

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    1. Sofinho - Alone in the Labyrinth16 December 2023 at 19:06

      Right! Surely from pure aesthetics/formalism it's the latter, but there's also an element of the "experimental archaeology" here that is alluded in the other potential post headings... namely, the possibility of reconstructing ancient beliefs and practices that emerged in non-eurocentric contexts. Of course, there's the age-old issue of ethnocentricism of any flavour being unavoidable when an act of translation (literal and figurative) occurs.

      As ever, I really appreciate you taking the time after reading to comment so thoughtfully.

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