CAA 2023: Colleen Morgan
0Within fiction and game creation, worldbuilding is the act of integrating history, ecology, geology to bring an imaginary world to life. I argue that as archaeologists we are intimately involved in our own worldbuilding, using archaeological remains to try to understand past lives. We bring together environmental data, zooarchaeological assemblages, evidence of trade and foodways, osteobiographies, architectural remains, and all other textual and material traces to holistically generate tableaux, our own snapshots and postcards from the past. The characterisation of archaeological interpretation as worldbuilding stands in contrast to the ubiquitous trope of archaeologists as storytellers, those who weave a narrative with a beginning and end, motivated by specific actors or event. Further, when we build past worlds, we can invite others to play in this world, to be the multiple storytellers of the past. In this paper I develop worldbuilding as a primary, critical mode of archaeological inquiry. I follow on from Tara Copplestone’s (2017) work to argue that metaphors of game creation can be powerful heuristics for changing how we collect, consider and
reuse archaeological data. As she argued, game developers “tended to describe the past as systems, interactions, agency, and multilinear narratives” (2017, 85). This is in contrast to archaeologists who describe the past as “physical things, linear narratives, and the known outcomes of a process (ibid). By shifting from storytelling approaches we can move away from grand narratives to craft open-ended past landscapes to think and play in. As such, archaeogaming has considerable potential to intersect with existing theory-laden archaeologies inspired by new materialism and posthumanism
and perhaps lead toward a new digital imaginary. To think through the implications of this provocation, I examine my previous work with the OKAPI team in rebuilding Çatalhöyük in the virtual open world of Second Life (Morgan 2009) and in my current work in creating avatars based on bioarchaelogical evidence in the UKRI-funded OTHER EYES project (Morgan 2022). In both projects we generated virtual worlds from multiple strands of archaeological data for others to play and inhabit, to create their own stories. While stories emerged, they were plural and crafted by participants. As Politopoulos and Mol (in press) argue, “archaeogaming is about collectively making,
exploring, and playing in this wild new, digital playground.” By engaging in virtual world creation engendered by archaeologaming we think through archaeological data in new and exciting ways, but also leave room for others to intervene, play, and create their own stories inspired by the past.
Copplestone, T. J. (2017). Designing and developing Archaeology as Worldbuilding.
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