Haunted Futures and Alien Archaeologies

Just before Christmas I attended the annual Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Chester. To be honest, I mostly steered clear of the hardcore theory – while I do quite like it, I liked it on my own terms and when my brain is feeling fresh and focused: the week before Christmas, at the end of a long and tiring year, not so much. But there was a lot else going on at the conference and I attended several inspiring panels about outreach, engagement and how archaeology relates to other fields. I’ve written about the conference in general over on the CREWS blog, but here I wanted to go into a little detail about my own paper, which was firmly in this blog’s thematic ambit since it was about the archaeology of alien megastructures in fiction.

Making Maps for Board Games or Illustrations

One of the comments on my post about my board game, Ancient Horror, asked how I made its board, which features a Mediterranean map. I responded with a short answer there, but I thought it would be worth doing a more in-depth look. I need hardly stress how important maps are in science fiction and especially fantasy, but they’re also very important for archaeologists. I had to draw at least half a dozen for my PhD, showing artefact distributions and other things, and I also redrew one of the maps in a recent new edition of a book by my former supervisor.

In this post I’m going to show you how I tend to go about it.

This isn’t the map for my supervisor. This one’s from The Hobbit.

One of the maps from my PhD thesis

H.P. Lovecraft meets the Bronze Age – Designing Ancient Horror

I wrote recently about the excellent Lovecraftian board game Eldritch Horror. That post was actually something of a preliminary to this one. You see, for the last several months I’ve been working on my own version of Eldritch Horror, set in the East Mediterranean Bronze Age.

Earlier this year, my friend and colleague Anna Judson called us together to play something else – her excellent Mycenopoly: an Aegean Bronze Age themed version of Monopoly, complete with barter system and utilities such as textile works and the ability to build megara instead of hotels. I highly recommend checking out her own blog about it, which went a bit viral, and deservedly so. Apart from having an excellent time with Mycenopoly, the evening left me wondering if it would be possible to do something similar for the game we most often play together, Eldritch Horror.

Board Game Review: Eldritch Horror

Board games. Board games are good, aren’t they? I discovered this rather belatedly after being a dedicated video gamer for most of my teens and early adult life. In the last few years, as I’ve been liberated from the cramped confines of student accommodation or a field archaeologist’s bedsit and acquired a circle of like-minded friends, I’ve found myself becoming more and more interested in board games. This will hardly be news to most people, but it turns out there’s a vibrant and fascinating wealth of games beyond the old childhood staples of Cluedo and Labyrinth, covering every possible subject-matter under the sun. In our semi-regular board-game meet-ups, my friends and I have played quite a few, mostly historical in theme: Escape From Atlantis; Game of Thrones; Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. Cyclades sits waiting for us to get round to it. But there’s one game we play more than any other – Eldritch Horror.

Science Fiction and Archaeology: Part 2 – Grave-robbers, explorers and dilettantes

See Part 1 for why I think archaeology and science fiction share certain approaches and why they ought to go well together. This post will explore how they’ve tried and often failed.

Two Prometheuses (Prometheis?) bookend the relationship so far, and between them exemplify many of the recurring tropes which have characterised archaeological SF: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, seen by many as the first true SF novel; and Ridley Scott’s 2012 cinematic Prometheus. They take us from Gothic grave-robbers, through von Dänikenesque Chariots of the Gods to Big Dumb Objects and the Ozymandian relics of long-dead alien civilisations.

Frankenstein, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson

Now obviously, archaeology’s far from central to Frankenstein. As a discipline it was still in its infancy in 1815; anatomy and the fledgling science of galvanism were Shelley’s immediate inspirations, not the work of those adventuring plunderers who kept western aristocrats and museums in Greek vases and Aegyptiaca. Nevertheless, many of Frankenstein’s themes resonate strongly with those of archaeology. As the work’s very subtitle makes clear, it’s a work which understands the present with reference to antiquity. The link it draws between ancient myth and modern science is one that SF would revisit again and again over the next two centuries: the seeds of Chariots of the Gods? were sown there in Shelley’s masterwork. What’s more, Gothic literature’s obsession with the dead revived, the buried uncovered and the forgotten past restored blends naturally into the concerns of archaeologists. After all, what do archaeologists try to do every day if not raise the dead, give them some manner of life again with their arts?

Science Fiction and Archaeology: Part 1 – Building worlds in the past and future

Science fiction and archaeology are two sides of the same coin. No, really. For all that one’s a literary genre and the other an academic discipline, they share a great deal in terms of goals, preoccupations and techniques. There also seems to be a good deal of overlap in the interests of practitioners: archaeologists – especially those who work actively in the field – often tend to be young, highly-educated and, in a word, geeky. With that kind of demographic, it’s no surprise that many have at least a passing interest in SF. For its part, SF has had a long-standing – if not necessarily productive – interest in the themes and motifs of archaeology.

Mummies as Monsters: Reviewing The Book of the Dead

It’ll be obvious from even the briefest glance over my past posts here that I’ve got a strong interest in both archaeology and monsters. Slap-bang in the middle of that Venn-diagram lies (or staggers stiffly around) the Mummy. More than any other creature, perhaps, the monstrous mummy of literature and film embodies (no pun intended) that fundamental archaeological tension between artefact and person. Most potent when it concerns human remains, the transition from living, breathing person (or the daily accoutrements of a person’s life and world) to an artefact, an object of scientific study, isn’t a comfortable one.