I haven't put this up on Academia.edu or ResearchGate.net yet because the Internet in Teuchitlan is being really slow. But here's a Google Drive link to the text followed by the slides.

Enjoy!

Today's Hidden Gem

Taking a wander through the National Museum today, I nearly walked past this cute lil' carving of an Ox!

This wee beauty hails from East Lomond Hill, and dates to c.AD 500-800. Carved into (I believe) a rough block of sandstone is the ox, with clearly defined leg muscles, ears and tail!

Oxen were domesticated and utilised by farmers to move heavy loads and plough fields.

Sooo... I came out to Indy Croft as a lover of giant women. And to keep the gag going live my truth, I decided to draw a giant Lara Croft. Then, since I was drawing the temple at Tikal, I decided to make a kind of Maya version of Lara, hence the huipil.

I kinda tapped out on the huipil because there's already so much detail in the image. And I wanted to keep it mostly blue to match Lara's classic shirt.

Next, I have to start developing my fursona

It’s been a ridiculously long time since the last Arte-Factual deep dive. I’d almost forgotten how much I enjoyed researched and writing these articles! So without further ado, let’s take a look at one of the many Mesoamerican-inspired artefacts Lara Croft found in Paititi’s Hidden City: the metatl. 

Continue reading the full article over on Tomb Raider Horizons!

Master Ciara's Counsel - 08/25/2022

AC15 - Brotherhood Discovery Tour

Happy Fryeday! My AC Podcaster friends - The Science of Assassin's Creed, ACLandmarks & Historian's Perspective - and I will be continuing our AC15 Discovery Tour series on Sunday. We will take you on a Virtual Tour of Rome during the Renaissance in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood! We will also be joined by a special guest - Ammit - an archaeogamer and Ph.D candidate with a background in antiquity.

We’ll be streaming on Sunday, 08/28, at 12:00pm EST/9:00am PST on my YouTube channel. Hope to see you there!

Valhalla Giveaways

On this stream, ACLandmarks will be doing two giveaways for codes to Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Ultimate Edition, which includes:

Main game

Season Pass, which gives access to Year 1 DLC, Wrath of the Druids & The Siege of Paris

Ultimate Pack, which include a set of Gear, Settlement items, Longship items, and Runes

The codes are good for any platform - PC or console - in US and Europe only.

The Ones Who Came Before & Assassins In Need

For this stream, we have partnered again with The Ones Who Came Before, who are doing a fundraiser called Assassins In Need: Heart of the Creed. This fundraiser campaign will raise money for the British Heart Foundation and the American Heart Association to fund critical cardiovascular medical research and provide education to families around the world. If you're interested, please donate to the campaign at the fundraiser website: Fundraiser by Colum Blackett : Assassins in Need: Heart of the Creed Fundraiser (gofundme.com)

Trivia Time!

From the Revelations Discovery Tour streamed by @science_creed:

Complete the following sentence said by Yusuf Tazim: "Unless the legend is a lie, you are the man I long to meet - renowned Master & Mentor ______."

Who rescued Ezio and took him to Rome after escaping the Siege of Monteriggioni?

Which was the armor that Arno could get when he completed all of Nostradamus's Enigmas?

Who are the two Vikings who visited the Hagia Sophia?

Where is the Abstergo facility where Desmond is being held located?

What was the name of the human tax imposed by the Ottoman Empire on Christian territories which forced young boys into the Janissaries?

Mar 17, 2023, 10-11am, Price Theatre Arts Building (PTAB), Room 109

Kaitlyn Kingsland

In Ersilia’s footsteps :  Reusing 3D digital assets of a Roman archaeological site for video game production

With 10 million copies sold and $500 million dollars of revenue, the 11th installment of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, Assassin's Creed Odyssey (2018), showed how a videogame based on ancient Greek history and archaeology can make a splash in popular culture and that the distant past can become an extinguishable source of infinite engaging gaming narratives. As pedagogic and research counterparts to videogames of this kind, serious games and archaeogames focusing on Greek and Roman civilizations move from different premises, though aspiring to the same level of success. Serious games, created for a primary purpose other than solely entertainment, have found their way into classrooms and museums to educate students in a variety of discipline mostly relying on digital storytelling strategies. Archaeogaming encompasses, among other things, the creation of video games by archaeologists, who create 3D representations of the ancient material culture subject of their study, initially for the purpose of testing hypotheses in simulated environment and later to popularize archaeology and cultural heritage studies, finding a more ‘serious’ use in the higher education. In this presentation, I will showcase an archaeogame of my design, In Ersilia’s Footsteps, featuring Ersilia Caetani-Lovatelli (1840-1925), the first female archaeologist in Italian history. The game narrative follows her in the exploration of the Roman Villa del Casale in Sicily, a 4th century CE Imperial countryside residence, and UNESCO World Heritage site. The game revolves around the use of 3D digitized assets, created employing digital photogrammetry and 3D laser-scanning to capture the archaeological site, that significantly contributed to increase the realism of the game environment influencing the game creation process towards telling stories of real historic characters in real historic places. Those assets represent at the same time an example in best practices in reusing 3D data, since, once used to achieve research goals, they are repurposed and in combination with an original narrative and a user-friendly interface and mechanics they become the core of an engaging and exciting exploration game.

Bio Kaitlyn Kingsland is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of South Florida (USF) and is currently the Lab Manager at the University of South Florida’s Institute for Digital Exploration (IDEx). She is an anthropologically-trained archaeologist and specializes in 3D digitization of tangible cultural heritage. As of 2019, she is the manager and editor for archaeogaming.com, a website dedicated to exploring archaeology in and of games. Her research focuses on the applications of serious games for cultural heritage and the generation of game assets using 3D scanning of artifacts and sites with global projects and partners. In the field of archaeogaming and digital archaeology she authored several papers in peer-reviewed journals.

It's because of you i had the thought of "wow the archeology of this place would be wild wish there was a fanfic about it" while playing a video game.

Have you ever had a similar thought while playing/watching something?

Great news: you don't even need a fanfic to experience video game archaeology! Check out archaeogaming-- it's archaeology in and of video games.

I've never really been a huge video game person, so I'll admit that I don't really know much about any specific video games and what would make good archaeology. But there are people out there thinking about it!

I'm honored that I was able to spark this thought!

-Reid

CALL FOR PAPERS

My friend and I are running a session at the 2019 TAG Archaeology conference in London! The topic is the archaeology and history of gaming 😃🎮♟🎲

Confused? Fair enough 😅 If you’re wondering how the archaeology of games (otherwise known as Archaeogaming!) works, we made a zine about it:

https://florencesmithnicholls.itch.io/archaeogaming-zine

We welcome papers from ANYONE. If you have a good idea, send it our way! If you’ve never done this before and need help or have questions let us know 🙂 You can find all the details here:

https://powerplaytag2019.home.blog/

If you can’t come to London but still want to get involved we will also have a Twitter conference running alongside our session 😊💻📱

Spent Sunday night at Starbucks drafting out the last section of the paper that’s due on Thursday.

*internally screams*

This is the last weekend of 6 weekends that I’ve stayed home to just work on the paper. Can’t wait to not feel guilty about leaving the house for fun!

That being said, I still love every moment of writing this paper.

-the arcegyptologist-

(via Crossing From Asia, the First Americans Rushed Into the Unknown - The New York Times)

& more from our Archaeology titles!

Only a few more hours until this month's #FinallyFriday live Q&A session! Here's a little sneak peek to pique your interest: . Ready player 1? Archaeological interpretation is often focused on the physical objects from our past, either in excavation, replication through experimental archaeology, or exhibition in museums. But what other ways are available to interact with the past? In this month's episode of Finally Friday, we speak with two experts focusing on the exciting new ways that videogames can be used in archaeology. . Join us this evening (Friday July 2nd) at 18:30 Amsterdam Time on the EXARC Discord server to hear all about the different possibilities that video games can provide for archaeological interpretation, the current state of "archaeo-gaming", and exciting plans for the future. It may sound like an easy topic, but you'll soon learn that it's not all just fun and games! . Details on how to join can be found through the link in my bio. Hope you see you there! . #archaeogaming #exarc #podcast #newepisode #podcastepisode #podcaster #videogames #archaeology #experimentalarchaeology #archaeologist #publicoutreach #scicomm https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ09WUirObm/?utm_medium=tumblr

I realized I never really posted my Minecraft Ur here, mostly because the version I did for school has my actual name on it, but... I do want to share it here. Under the cut is, no joke, a significant portion of a thing I submitted for actual college credit. (I got an A on it, if you’re wondering.)

I do have a blueprint of the city walls and part of the river, which I’d LOVE to extrapolate on. I have ground plans and general knowledge about what housing districts of Ur were like, and I would love to build that out as an example of the space humans once lived in day-to-day, a space you could imagine yourself in and humanize these ancient faceless people. If anyone is interested, I am fully happy to do that and give you a full academic explanation of why I did what I did, just give me the word.

The default scale for Minecraft is 1:1, with one block equating to approximately one meter (this scale is largely based around the player avatar, which is two blocks - or approximately six feet - tall). Adjusting the scale ratio so that there are more blocks per meter does allow for greater detail in construction, but because the size of the player avatar is not adjustable, the more you alter that scale the more the final creation moves away from any scale at which a human would experience that structure in reality. Because of this, I elected to sacrifice detail in favor of maintaining a relationship between the player avatar and the building that feels natural. Also I have some custom furniture and decoration blocks that only fit in a 1:1 scale - admittedly a secondary concern, and not one that factored into the decision-making process, but it is a nice bonus to the scale I already chose.

    I decided to use Leonard Woolley's map of the Neo-Babylonian terrace rather than other eras because it's the most intricate, and especially with the two shrines flanking the ziggurat's stairs added since the Kassite period, this plan creates an oddly circuitous route to reach the ziggurat itself that I wanted to try and puzzle out. It didn't hurt that it's a little more aligned at right angles than the walls of previous periods, which, again, was not a major factor in my choice but definitely made it a lot easier to build in Minecraft where blocks are fixed in a single orientation and can't be rotated.

    The dimensions of the ziggurat are well-documented at 64m long and 45m wide; the full height is speculative, because only the first level survived to the present day, but at least 30m tall seems to be generally agreed upon by archaeologists, so I went with that. Knowing the exact length and width of the ziggurat in meters (and therefore blocks in Minecraft), I was able to use an image program to scale Woolley's map so that the ziggurat was 64x45 pixels, giving me reasonably precise measurements for the rest of the temple complex. (In the beginning stages of this process, before circumstances forced me to scale back my plans, I had several different semi-transparent maps layered over each other - because the ziggurat is always clearly marked in maps of Ur, it allowed me to keep different maps in scale in relation to each other, meaning I could conceivably build parts of the city walls or housing districts on the same map at the correct distance from the ziggurat without having to guess blindly at how far away to place them. I do still intend to do this later on my own time, but the point is, I'm really proud of this method of reconciling different maps from different sources and I wanted to brag about it a little.) With a map now on a scale of 1px:1m:1block, I was able to trace over Woolley's map (with the full-sized map on hand to consult for reference, because the scaled-down map was unsurprisingly pretty blurry at this point) to give myself a blueprint I could follow to build the structure in the game.

Behold my glorious artwork. Plus a shot of the layers panel so you can see what I was working with re: multiple maps.

The same linework with the bottom map removed so it's clearly visible. I didn't bother coloring in the parts of the blueprint that are solid brick, but they are solid structures in the actual game.

(This will be continued in Part II, bc this is a long post.))

Uhtred son of Uhtred

Who exactly was the REAL Uhtred of Bebbanburg? (that's right besties he was REAL!)

In this weeks video we take a look at Uhtred and His Pretty Boys, the time they lived and the impact Uhtred's reign had on the North of England.

#WelcomeToGoblinTown happened again tonight. Promised my friend I would start making NPCs based on hot chicks from the 90's so here's Neve Campbell.

Happy with the session but disappointed that the party didn't notice the thing with the bird

https://twitch.tv/goblintownrpg

Let this curated collection of Tomb Raider research papers and articles serve as a launchpad for your own research!

Click here to access the archive!

MinecraftHenge - Saturday Minecraft Project

MinecraftHenge – Saturday Minecraft Project

So I spent my day building this in Minecraft

Now this was built as part of Kyliroo Gaming’s, my brother, weekly Minecraft stream, mainly as a place to put his Nether Portal. But when he asked me to be part of the weekly stream, I said I had some archaeology themed projects I would like to try out and this is really the first of those.

This was very much playing with a concept and what can…

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