Trading Shovels for Controllers: A Brief Exploration of the Portrayal of Archaeology in Video Games

Archaeology has been a persistent theme for video games, from the long-running Indiana Jones and Lara Croft franchises to more recent uses of archaeology in games like Destiny and World of Warcraft. In these games, archaeology is often portrayed as a search for treasure among lost worlds that leads to looting and the destruction of cultural heritage. In this article, we review the current state of archaeological video games, including mainstream and educational games. While this is not an exhaustive discussion, it provides an introduction and overview to the current landscape. We propose that an understanding of current popular archaeological video games is important to archaeologists for three reasons: (1) it is a source of potentially dangerous misconceptions about the discipline that must be addressed; (2) it can be a source of inspiration for funding and a means to recruit new students to the discipline; and (3) games can be leveraged as teaching moments in classrooms and public discussions. It is important that archaeologists recognize the ways the discipline is being portrayed in such public contexts, in order to maximize the potential benefit for archaeology and to prevent further misconceptions about the subject.     

THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES: A PORTRAIT OF THEIR SOCIETY: Second Edition KENNETH MADDOCK

Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books. 1982. Pp. x+ 197. Map, figures, notes, bibliography. index. Price: $A7.95.     

No Idle Past: Uses of History in the 1830 Indian Removal Debates

I n April and May 1830, heated debates occurred in Congress over whether to remove the Cherokee Indians from certain sections of Georgia and resettle them further west, in what would become Oklahoma. Numerous accounts exist examining the events surrounding removal, which resulted in the notorious "Trail of Tears," and the various motivations of the debate participants. Historians have attributed desire for removal to land hunger, humanitarian concern for the Indians'welfare, a desire to shore up national security, and blatant racism. Some see it as part of a continuing struggle against the perceived Indian enemy, and even as a component of the new rhetorical struggle between the Democrats and Whigs as they sought to define political participation during the Second Party system.¹ No author yet, however, has undertaken an examination of the ways in which the debaters manipulated past events in constructing their arguments either in support of removal or against this policy. This article deals specifically with the uses to which history was put in the 1830 congressional debates on Indian removal.     

Hobbes and the Rationality of Self-Preservation: Grounding Morality on the Desires We Should Have

In deriving his moral code, Hobbes does not appeal to any mind-independent good, natural human telos, or innate human sympathies. Instead he assumes a subjectivist theory of value and an egoistic theory of human motivation. Some critics, however, doubt that his laws of nature can be constructed from such scant material. Hobbes ultimately justifies the acceptance of moral laws by the fact that they promote self-preservation. But, as Hobbes himself acknowledges, not everyone prefers survival over natural liberty. In this essay I show that Hobbes can argue that the desire for self-preservation is rationally required by modifying his subjectivist theory of the good to equate what is good for an agent only with the satisfaction of desires (for her own life) that she has at the time that they are satisfied. It is thus irrational to prefer postmortem glory over survival since an agent must be alive for glory to have any value for her.     

A Place to Rest Your (Burnt) Bones? Mortuary Houses in Early Anglo-Saxon England

This article presents a fresh interpretation of square and rectangular mortuary structures found in association with deposits of cremated material and cremation burials in a range of early Anglo-Saxon (fifth-/sixth-century AD) cemeteries across southern and eastern England. Responding to a recent argument that they could be traces of pyre structures, a range of ethnographic analogies are drawn upon, and the full-range of archaeological evidence is synthesized, to re-affirm and extend their interpretation as unburned mortuary structures. Three interleaving significances are proposed: (i) demarcating the burial place of specific individuals or groups from the rest of the cemetery population, (ii) operating as ‘columbaria’ for the above-ground storage of the cremated dead (i.e. not just to demarcate cremation burials), and (iii) providing key nodes of commemoration between funerals as the structures were built, used, repaired and eventually decayed within cemeteries. The article proposes that timber ‘mortuary houses’ reveal that groups in early Anglo-Saxon England perceived their cemeteries in relation to contemporary settlement architectures, with some groups constructing and maintaining miniaturized canopied buildings to store and display the cremated remains of the dead.     

Peonage, Power Relations, and the Built Environment at Hacienda Tabi, Yucatan, Mexico

The social and material conditions of postcolonial haciendas in Yucatan, Mexico, were greatly influenced by power relations intrinsic to the institution of debt peonage. Although landowning elites exercised enormous control over debt peons, hacienda social relations involved continuous negotiation between master and servant. Recent investigations at Hacienda Tabi, a sugar hacienda in southern Yucatan, explore the interplay between power relations and the creation and maintenance of the built environment. The evidence from Tabi suggests that during the Porfiriato (1876–1911) hacendados manipulated the settlement landscape to emphasize an order of social inequality. The spatial and structural elements of the hacienda's settlement reflected and supported the owners' attempts to control resident peons. However, those attempts were challenged by the resident Maya community, who defined the hacienda landscape imposed on them in alternative ways.     

West African Tradition in the Decoration of Colonial Jamaican Folk Pottery

In the early colonial period, Jamaican slaves manufactured pottery that incorporated traditional West African technology with selected European innovations. Recent examination of Afro-Jamaican wares from the seventeenth-century site of Port Royal suggests that the decorative elements are consistent with those that are in wide use among West African pottery traditions, particularly those of the Gold Coast (Ghana). Stamped designs prevail as the clearest example of this continuity. Potential Amerindian contributions to the Jamaican folk pottery industry during this period are considered and shown to be unlikely. The isolation of decorative traits demonstrates how certain craft elements of West African peoples were transported to the New World and integrated with other cultural traditions. It also corroborates the documentary record pertaining to the geographical origin of Jamaican slaves during the early colonial period.     

Social integration at a frontier and the creation of Mississippian social identity in southwestern Virginia

ABSTRACT

Frontier areas are poor in labor but rich in land. To be successful, frontiers must attract people and socially integrate them using both low- and high-level social integrative mechanisms, which can range from basic work groups to elaborate feasts. Craft production can be a useful means of accomplishing low and high levels of social integration because it can be done as part of a work group but for special purposes, such as exchange. In the process of social integration, social identity specific to the types of crafts produced and their uses emerges. This paper examines a Mississippian frontier site, Carter Robinson, and discusses evidence for the production and use of ceramics and shell beads as integrative mechanisms at the Southern Appalachian Mississippian frontier area. Through the use of these types of mechanisms I argue that both a communal social identity and an identity of social inequality were created at Carter Robinson which resulted in the production and reproduction of Mississippian identity.