September 2015 – Colleen Morgan

Minecraft for Archaeological Outreach

CL3_3226 — The “Real Tools of Minecraft”

We ran a “Virtual Dig” event for Yornight again this year, refined and improved from last year’s effort. The event was wildly popular once again, and utterly wiped out the researchers participating.

I re-structured the event so that there is something for each of our expected demographic–we had kids that had never played Minecraft who participated last year, as well as a few bored parents. We were able to address the former with a papercraft event, but as the papercraft was based around Breary Banks, we decided to eliminate it this year and focus primarily on Star Carr, for consistency across the activities.

For the younger kids we expanded on our “real tools of Minecraft” event last year. It was very successful for connecting the analog world to the digital world, and gave us a way to talk about the spectrum of archaeological tools. Minecraft has pickaxes, shovels, buckets, a compass, and flint, and we had the kids match up the tools from a print-out. Of particular interest was the flint, as many children did not make the connection from the digital representation to the rocks in their backyard.

I’ve uploaded a printable pdf of the Minecraft tools. I also made a sheet with a few letters that you can have the kids place next to the real tools. Feel free to steal the activity, but pleaaaaase tell me (colleen.morgan@york.ac.uk) if you do so I can show my department how useful it is to muck around with video games.

We also had our usual server running with the Star Carr landscape installed, which I wrote about making last year. I actually had to re-make it this year in a single day, due to the old version accidentally getting wiped out. Ooops!

Once again we also showed Anthony Masinton’s Yorkshire 9000BC on the big screen in back. It’s made in Unity, so we tied it to Minecraft by saying they were both video games AND both of them were based on the same digital elevation model. I’d point at the houses he’d placed on the landscape, talk a bit about how hard it was to reconstruct houses based on postholes, then end with an entreaty:

Can you build a 10,000 year old house in Minecraft?

CL3_3209 — Fabrizio, showing off his ADS viewer to Julian Richards & Gareth Beale

For the older kids and adults we had Marie Curie Fellow Fabrizio Galeazzi present Star Carr data on his ADS viewer, to show the detailed visualizations of stratigraphy within a research database. It was a great link for showing the research potential of archaeological visualizations.

Overall it was chaotic but fun–we didn’t always have a chance to collar the kids with research before they started bashing through Minecraft. I’ve yet to have a chance to see what kind of carnage they enacted upon the Mesolithic landscape. I look forward to it though, as it’s an archaeology of its own.

Heritage Jam 2015!

The University of York Archaeology Department is hosting the Heritage Jam on 25 September at the King’s Manor. Last year we hacked cemeteries, and this year it will be Museums & Collections.

You can see why I’m usually behind the camera. Tara & Paul did a great job with it, but I can’t actually watch this whole video without running screaming out the room.

Photo by Dun Deagh — Photo of a doorway at King’s Manor by Dun Deagh

BONUS: If you participate in the Heritage Jam, you have the option of sleeping over at the King’s Manor, a fantastic Grade I listed building.

There’s a huge amount of information available on the website, sign up before it is too late:

http://www.heritagejam.org/

New Publication: Dig Houses, Dwelling, and Knowledge Production in Archaeology

I was tempted to title our article, “protracted conversational barking” in honor of this hilariously cantankerous quote from Petrie. Dan and I just published a new article in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology titled Dig Houses, Dwelling, and Knowledge Production in Archaeology which was probably the most fun I’ve ever had writing an article. Here’s a link to the final draft, as it seems that most people don’t have access to JCA yet, and I couldn’t find the budget to publish it OA. Sorry.

Sadly a lot of the historical research did not quite make it into the article, but we managed to get in a wide range of archaeological dig houses, from Petrie’s tomb to the “palace” headquarters of the Tell Asmar excavation, barasti huts in Bahrain, Villa Ariadne and Harriet Boyd Hawes’ sanctified bone yard. We also looked at modern dig houses, often hotels, and tried to make a case for more lively places of knowledge production on excavations. And we sneaked in a bit about dig houses hearkening to Goffman’s total institution. But maybe that’s just Çatalhöyük.

Speaking of Çatalhöyük, our case study in the article describes the destruction of a re-purposed building on the project called the “Chicken Shed,” which we argued was an example of what Stewart Brand calls a “low road building”–good to think in, and a great place to come together and remove structural barriers in a project. It was torn down in 2011, in a way that became very symbolic to much of the former team as the end of an era. The virtual reconstruction of the Chicken Shed shared a similar fate, after the end of Okapi Island in Second Life.

Anyway, give it a read and let me know what you think about our “archaeology of us.” If you’d like a copy with the figures, drop me a line.

Morgan, C. & Eddisford, D. (2015) Dig Houses, Dwelling, and Knowledge Production in Archaeology. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2.1 169-193.

Palmyra: A Lamentation

I could write about the strange aesthetics of annihilation, iconoclasm, nationalism, symbolism, weaponized cultural heritage and the murder of people, a place, an archaeologist. I am supposed to be an expert in this, after all. Intimate of the ancient.

Or, on a more personal level–how Palmyra blushed toward the blue desert sky. How I was ragged sick so I didn’t take very many photos, but dragged around the site anyway, sitting in the shade of columns. Picking out details. Petting the friendly cats in the ruins. Now every time I hear about something else being destroyed I go back over the same photos. How it was the same when I found out about the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, the Al-Madina Souq, Crac de Chevalier, Bosra, the Dead Cities–a UNESCO listing is a death sentence. These are only the big, well-known sites, there is extensive looting, destroying sites beyond all recovery.

It is easy to be glib (oh, now we can get to everything underneath! they were recorded anyway!) or post-modern (it’s only my white, western, colonialist/orientalist thinking that makes me care about old stacked stones), or relativistic (concrete houses & Greco-roman art, it’s all the same) and I’ve struggled through and re-written these scant 267 words. Yes, I care about people, I care about places, I care about things.

But I’m supposed to be an expert in caring about heritage and I still can’t find any fucking words. (though these help tremendously)

So I have my photos. And I give what I can when I can. And wait to study the new ruins caused by murderous men.

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