The Afterlives of an Archaeological Project: adventures in the Remediation of the Berkeley Archaeologists @ Çatalhöyük (BACH) Project

The Afterlives of an Archaeological Project:

adventures in the remediation of the Berkeley Archaeologists @ Çatalhöyük

(BACH) Project

Ruth Tringham, Dept of Anthropology, UCB and Center for Digital Archaeology

Presentation to the Archaeological Research Facility, UCB, Bag Lunch series.

12 March 2014

CoDACenter for Digital Archaeology

1Sunday, March 16, 14

In October 2010, Karin Sanders of the Scandinavian Dept at UCB gave a Bag Lunch talk: “The Afterlives of Accidental Masterpieces". Her title inspired much of my thinking in this presentation. Paraphrasing Karin talking about the discovery of the "Bog Bodies" in Denmark, when we publish the final report of an archeological project, we tend to think of it as the culmination of its life journey through time, but it seems to me to be "rather the point of departure from which a new journey begins" - an afterlife.

Afterlives of my projects


This is certainly true of my research at the Neolithic settlements of Selevac and Opovo in Serbia, and Çatalhöyük, in Turkey with their afterlives in my adventures in remediating/recontextualzing/milking the materials of the original events of excavation, analysis and interpretation ever since Alison Wylie, Meg Conkey and Henrietta Moore gave me the green light to do so the year the Berlin Wall came down. The other green light was the development of the WWW and the democratization of digital technologies to manipulate photographs and create drawings and non-linear video editing (thanks mostly to Apple) that allowed my freed imagination to be liberated also from my limitations in analog imagery and sound. Unlike Karin Sanders whose afterlives refer mostly to literary and analog visual works, most of the afterlives that I have produced and have encouraged others to produce have involved the dissemination of our data and ideas to a broader public through innovative use of digital technology and media.

Afterlives of my projects


Many wonderful afterlives of especially Çatalhöyük have been created by students and artists and professionals including currently a playwright, using both analog and digital media, and sometimes both. My purpose today - and forgive me if this annoys some of you -is to focus on my own adventures in the creation of afterlives - what I actually prefer to call remediations - to show you how it is quite logical that I end up now in an enterprise in which I am sort of out of my depth - the construction of a computer game as an afterlife of both the Çatalhöyük and Opovo projects. So my finale will be to show you some of the first steps in this design, which has certainly been inspired by the work, among others, of Erik Champion who gave a Bag Lunch a few weeks ago,.

The Afterlife of the Opovo Project

1983-1989


The Opovo project lived 1983-89 and is probably better known from its afterlives (after 1989) since its final publication has yet to see the light of day - mea culpa as well as the Yugoslav Civil War. But it will soon burst into afterlife thanks I hope to the ARF publications and CoDA.

Project Chimera 1993Michael Ashley Senior Thesis


1993-4 Michael Ashley Senior Thesis, the first afterlife of Opovo, when Michael and Julian Liao created the reconstructions of a burning Neolithic house and a shimmering curtain that could be passed through to enter the world of Yugoslavia of 1993 - in political disarray.

Chimera Web1994-1997 StorySpace, Macromedia

Director6Sunday, March 16, 14

1995-1997 StorySpace and Director. The project died with the software, although a “tame” version exists on the web as a series of html pages. It also died in the year that I began the project at Çatalhöyük - distraction

Chimera Web (1994-97)7Sunday, March 16, 14

The web was created as a tangle of fragments around the topic of fire and burned houses in the Neolithic settlements of southeast Europe. A web that you were supposed to become enmeshed and entangled in (more on this later) like the Sleeping Beauty forest. Imagined stories drawn from the excavation were built on the first products of my archaeological imagination created for the Conkey and Gero volume (1990) Engendering Archaeology. Other items in the web were drawn from archaeological database of Opovo and Selevac in Serbia.


Dream of the integration of an interpretive web with the database itself, or at least selections from it. Imagined narratives along with other components of archaeology


Publication envisioned on CD-ROM, NOT web-based.

Opovo Figurine Game (1997)10Sunday, March 16, 14

1997 Opovo Figurine Game for UCB Intro to Archaeology (Anthro 2) to counter the Mother Goddess theory popularized by Marija Gimbutas. Built in html for the Web

the BACH (Berkeley Archaeologists@ Çatalhöyük Project

1997-2005


In this presentation I will talk very little about the original journey of the Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük (BACH) project that culminated in the printed publication Last House on the Hill. I will focus, rather, on the project's afterlives, since its completion and closure in the field, as well as since its memorialization as a printed monograph.

Real Audiences, Virtual Excavation (RAVE) (2001-2)http://diva.berkeley.edu/projects/bach/rave/default.html


2001, 2002 Performances of RAVE including at European Archaeology Association conference in Thessaloniki: short videos interspersed with live presentation, drawn from video collection of BACH project. Videos are still viewable

http://diva.berkeley.edu/projects/bach/rave/default.html

http://diva.berkeley.edu/projects/bach/rave/default.html

Remediated Places (2004-2007)http://chimeraspider.wordpress.com/about/remediated-

places-on-youtube/13Sunday, March 16, 14

2004, 2006 (AAA), on-site videowalks that harvested the BACH database and media collection to be viewed on iPod. Designed for technology that was not yet available, certainly not at Çatalhöyük: mobile devices with GPS. Project not continued after Michael Ashley, Steve Mills and I ceased participating in the post-BACH field seasons at Çatalhöyük

http://chimeraspider.wordpress.com/about/remediated-places-on-youtube/




Remixing Çatalhöyük (2007)http://okapi.dreamhosters.com/remixing/mainpage.html


Prize-winning Remixing Çatalhöyük 2007 funded by FIPSE grant. Web-site. Themed collections of media from the BACH project media collection with rich captions and metadata. Downloadable and re-usable. Enticing Flash-based front page. Still viewable.

http://okapi.dreamhosters.com/remixing/mainpage.html

http://okapi.dreamhosters.com/remixing/mainpage.html

Okapi Island in Second Life (2007-2011)http://www.ruthtringham.com/Ruth_Tringham/Okapi_Island.html


2007-2011 Okapi Island was created in 2006 by the same team that created Remixing Çatalhöyük as a mirror of the East Mound at Çatalhöyük, as it exists today, and as it may have looked in the past. We were able to hold events such as tours, a public lecture, film festival, “chat-with-the-archaeologist,” videowalks. Around a campfire—mirroring the real thing at the site—we were able to communicate with our visitors from around the world, who included our archaeological colleagues. In spite of its seductive immersive power, and in spite of the landscape that you build, you cannot avoid the fact that you are immersed in and learning the strange culture of Second Life, not the culture of Neolithic residents of Çatalhöyük nor the culture of archaeologists excavating there. In 2011 Linden Labs took away the educational discount for “land” in Second Life thus doubling our land rent for Okapi Island. We “pulled the plug” on Okapi Island in February 2012, thus creating an archaeological artifact in Second Life.

http://www.ruthtringham.com/Ruth_Tringham/Okapi_Island.html

http://www.ruthtringham.com/Ruth_Tringham/Okapi_Island.html

Last House on the Hill,

printed edition(2012)


The traditional “culmination” of the BACH project life.November 2012 - almost an afterlife!

Last House on the Hill Filemaker DB database edition (2007-)

(LHotH)


2007- The Last House on the Hill database built in Filemaker, is the prototype of the Center for Digital Archaeology’s (CoDA) CoDiFi platform and is currently in its final phases of development as a cross-platform downloadable and iPhone/iPad ready product. It comprises the enrichened digital mirror of the printed final report of the BACH project at Catalhoyuk. But by contrast with the printed edition, the LHotH database claims to have collected together every piece of media, raw data of all 150 features and 1200 units, and documents and diaries of every working day of the project, as well as the contents of the printed edition itself. Each item is recorded as a separate entity of place, person, thing, event or representative media in the database with its own URL, and related in a number of different ways to other entities. It is what Janet Murray describes in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck as an “encyclopedic environment” that can provide a huge wealth of potential narratives. It is true, that we feel that we have captured the full documentary evidence of the BACH project. But I have no desire to write an encyclopedic linear narrative history of the project

Last House on the Hill web edition(2013-)http://lasthouseonthehill.org/


December 2013. Web-based selection of media and items drawn from the main LHotH database, complete with rich metadata and relations intact.Invites comments. Currently (March 2014) filled with intro movies/presentations and daily videos from 2000 and 2001 seasons and their relations, but is being added to as the CoDiFi DB is being completed. Based on Mukurtu CMS - and early example of CoMuNN.

http://lasthouseonthehill.org/

http://lasthouseonthehill.org/

Recombinant History: Dead Women Do Tell Tales (2009-)


The next part of the presentation describes what has been an ongoing process since 2009 in the construction of a recombinant history about Neolithic Anatolia and Southeast Europe called Dead Women Do Tell Tales (DWdTT) that not only rests on top of the LHotH database, but is in fact drawn out of it - or put another way - harvests the database - in other words a set of database narratives. It is an extraordinarily complex mesh of fragments about the archaeological construction of Neolithic households, from the records of the excavations themselves and interpretive vignettes from my creative imagination. The ultimate challenge has always been what was to be the format or platform through which I could disseminate this tangle.

DwdtT Harvests

LHotH


DWdTT mirrors the LHotH database in that the fabric of both is made up of entities that comprise people, places, things, events, and their appropriate media. The entities of the LHotH database are structured around observable phenomena and their interpretations that do not stray far from the latter. The same entities in the context of the DWdTT game - by contrast - are structured as narrative fragments that are likely to be thickened by their association with creative imagination. The impact of these fragmentary narratives, whether created from the database or my imagination is the most engaging, I believe, when they are collected together as a multiply mediated vignette or microhistory of a small place explored at a very intimate scale of everyday life

Dead Women Do Tell Tales (2009)

Interoperable databases prepared for filtering

RET Recombinant History DWdtT

Other authors, public creativity

My

Fragments, Vignettes


Iteration 1 of Dead Women Do Tell Tales (created for Utah Household Archaeology conference in 2009) envisions three forms of publication which together create a recombinant prehistory: 1) accessible and interoperable databases of the BACH and Opovo projects. 2)Fragments of history, vignettes that bring together small events of photography, videography, drawing, diary-writing and form-filling and article writing, into fragmentary narratives about prehistory and modern archaeology3) the major database narrative – Dead Women Do Tell Tales itself – in which #1 and #2 are recombined into a history of people in different places at different times.

Dead Women Do Tell Tales (2011-2013)http://www.ruthtringham.com/Ruth_Tringham/Dead_Women_Do_Tell_Tales.html


2011-2013, Iteration 2: for the purposes of SAA 2011 Annual Meeting and its subsequent publication (Van Dyke and Bernbeck eds. Against Objectivized Subjects - in final steps of publication process), I made use of a mind-mapping software “The Brain”, knowing that this was just a stepping-stone to an interface for Dead Women Do Tell Tales - not the interface itself - that would be sharable with a broader audience. Here we can see the use of the concept of microhistories (five red letter titles) into which the different fragments/vignettes are collected for the purposes of the 2011 demo.

http://www.ruthtringham.com/Ruth_Tringham/Dead_Women_Do_Tell_Tales.html

http://www.ruthtringham.com/Ruth_Tringham/Dead_Women_Do_Tell_Tales.html

“The potential narratives are more pastiches than creative emplotments, they work almost like a video game except that they have no clear direction. The emplotment of most video games is unrealistically simplistic. But did you consider this issue for the stories potentially resulting from users wandering through DWDTT?”

Ruth van Dyke and Reinhard Bernbeck, editors of “Against Objectivised Subjects” 2012 in response to RET’s chapter submission


My response to the commentary of the publication editors in this slide was to think deeply about it. I toyed with the idea of having a plot and a quest and a linear direction for Dead Women Do Tell Tales, with the archaeologists of the BACH project as the heroes, the life-history of Building 3 as the quest, and the prehistoric residents - or perhaps the house itself - along with myself as author as the all-knowing authorities. But I quickly rejected this traditional requirement in favor of moving in the direction of so-called “affective-expressive” narratives – following a tradition of Japanese literature, in which entities/fragments are drawn together without a plot into a lyrical or poetic narrative, often as “episodic ‘ensembles’ of event, voice and image”. Which, as many have said, is much more in keeping with the idea of database narratives.

Iteration 3: Dead Women Do tell Tales: A Game That Harvests and Mirrors a

Database (2013-


I need to be able to frame the web of narratives and their empirical anchors in a format that will retain their fragmentary and non-linear nature, and yet provide a rich exploration of the past that will be meaningful and engaging for a variety of audiences. I feel I’ve got to the point in this endeavor when I’m ready to embark on a radically new strategy. I’m turning - just as Ruth and Reinhard suggested - to the medium of computer gaming.

Dreaming about a Game

•What kind of narrative•What kind of environment

or world - 3D/2D but also genre

•What kind of navigation and interactivity


Don’t expect a full fledged game demo. Today I am concerned only with the “dreaming” or (in movie parlance) “treatment” phase. Gradually I have to make decisions (hopefully with a supportive team - any help is much appreciated) about:NarrativeEnvironmentInterface, navigation, interactivity

Narrativefragments

about people, places, things, events

in Neolithic time (THEN)

fragments about people,

places, things, events in project time

(NOW)

microhistories


Non linear linking of fragments that themselves may have linear narrative, especially when drawn together as microhistories.Now and Then like Swigart Stone Mirror. Through exploration, as your knowledge and familiarity accumulates, you start to make connections between now and then, or different people, the narratives gain color and sound, as more microhistories, more people, more details about their lives, etc become available to you, the more you explore. Some mystery is scaffolded in, but you have to work at it.

DidoLori basket

Now

Then

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004closure

B3.5B B3.5Aclosure

B3.4B B3.4A B3.3 B3.2 B3.1B-D

Mic

rohi

stor

ies

B3.1A construction

feetGhosts children singing doughclosure roof plasterhouse


Although the narrative of the game is non-linear and seemingly without direction, there is a certain amount of chronological structuring of the entities as can be seen by the timelines interface. The upper timeline is the world of the “Now” (BACH Project time) - the unfamiliar (for many) culture of the Çatalhöyük archaeologists – that proceeds in a traditional linear fashion from start on the left in 1997 to the end in 2004 with the filling in and closure of the BACH Area. In that time the archaeologists have slowly peered into the history of the place going back ever further in prehistoric time as the life of the project proceeded. The lower timeline is the world of “Then” - the 9000-year old Neolithic culture of the even less familiar residents of the BACH Area. The timeline of “Then” passing through the lives of the buildings and people of the BACH Area (focusing on Building 3) is read less traditionally with its start as construction at the right and ending with its closure and abandonment on the left. In this interface, the player has access to all the microhistories available..

Hermeneutic or Cultural Environment or World

In designing such an environment, the aim is to engage the visitor in another culture “where a participant begins to use and develop the codes of other cultures in order to orient and solve tasks, and to communicate the value and significance of those tasks and goals to others.” (Champion 2011:55).


Erik Champion’s defintions: (contrast to inert explorative and activity-based). For my own creative pursuits (DWdtT), these have the greatest potential for engaging broader audiences in what we do as archaeologists and historians, but it is also the most difficult to engender. In our case the “other culture” is both the prehistoric inhabitants of Neolithic Çatalhöyük and the world of the archaeologists investigating them.

The Environment of DWdtT

Below

Floor-level

Roof


Originally I avoided the idea of having players explore a 3D virtual world, mostly because of my own technical limitations in 3D landscape modeling. Moreover, I thought that moving through a virtual world would detract from in depth problem solving and exploration. Now, after perusing the literature on games, serious and otherwise, I am thinking it is essential to involve exploration of a 3D environment somewhere in the game in order to engage players more intensively in the unfamiliar cultures. So now the heart of the game -the database narratives around Building 3 - can only be entered through one of three portals in a 3D virtual environment. Whether the complexity of the database narrative will also be offered as a 3D or flat 2D environment is not clear. 1) The first portal is above the building via the roof; the player is set the task of finding the correct ladder through which to climb down into Building 3. 2)The second portal is at “ground level” along the narrow alleyways between the closely-packed buildings, avoiding dung and garbage (minus points unless you take on the mode of being an archaeologist). 3)The third portal is found by tunneling through the mound, past the many layers of history and ancestry beneath Building 3; the player is set the task of finding the specific burial pit that will give access to Building 3;

DidoLori basket

Now

Then

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004closure

B3.5B B3.5Aclosure

B3.4B B3.4A B3.3 B3.2 B3.1B-D

Mic

rohi

stor

ies

B3.1A construction

feetGhosts children singing doughclosure roof plasterhouse


The aim for the explorer of Dead Women Do Tell Tales is to experience as participant observers two very different cultural contexts: the world of residents of a place – a settlement mound - that is 9000 years old for us and at least 500 years old for them; and the also unfamiliar world of the archaeologists who are revealing the Neolithic residents and constructing the Neolithic world from its material remnants. The archaeologists are revealing the life-history of a building and a neighborhood from the uppermost deposits down towards the earliest deposits. They do not know the past, but that is the aim of their investigation. The Neolithic residents of Building 3, on the other hand, are living their history from the first construction of the house forward into the future and the end of its and their own lives. At some magical points, these two timelines will coincide and cross perhaps with some surprising results. Knowing “when” you are is the point of some of the detective work for the player, in addition to where and perhaps “who”. Each “microhistory” is localized on both timelines and will give access to entities from both timelines.

when am I?what happened in year.....what phase was excavated whenhow many people lived in this housethe starting point of each microhistory is a specific phase of the building’s history, can you work out whichthe ghost microhistory has not been created. You will do that

The Basket in a BurialThe basket of this microhistory was associated with burial in Feature 634, but was it as a container of the dead, or as an accompinament for the dead person?

lori

children

house

roof

closure

Dido

dough

feet

basket


The intro to a microhistory shows its position of focus within Building 3

The Basket in a Burial

discovering

the basket

the place of the

basket

excavating the

basket

The basket:

Feature 640

Lori Hager

burial Feature

634

analysis of the

basket

who made

the basket

biography of

the basket

baskets in

Building 3

Willeke Wendrich

accompany the

dead

making the

basket

who is buried

in F.634?

lori

children

house

roof

closure

Dido

dough

feet

basket


The current iteration (#3) of game development retains the same configuration as iteration #2 of entities of people (blue frame), place (red frame), things (white frame), and events (red frame) assembled into microhistories. A microhistory assembles fictional narratives of the world of “Then” (yellow writing) and the empirical documentation, observations and interpretations of the archaeological project (“Now”) (red writing) on which the former are based or - in other words - have been mediated. The menu of assembled entities is contextualized depending on the nature of the particular microhistory, but an entity may be gathered into more than one microhistory, where its contexts may very well transform its affect. This arrangement of the entities of this microhistory about a basket follows the circular arrangement of the basket base.

Accompanying the Dead

I am a ghost. I am a shadow of my former self. I have almost no substance. Amazingly, I am still with Dido. She is also a ghost, but more corporeal than I, being made of bones. I have been resurrected as ghostly fragments, some by her ankles, some above her knees. How did that happen? Why am I here? Did she climb inside me? Or was I placed next to her in this cave? I can’t remember yet. Maybe later. But I do know how I was born in the grassy fields.

lori

children

house

roof

closure

Dido

dough

feet

basket


The current game development retains this same configuration of entities assembled into microhistories, with the addition of a system of rewards, by which the structure of the game allows a player to recognize that the narratives are cumulative. Thus to understand one microhistory leads gradually to a more richly clothed, noisier, and more colorful unfamiliar culture, whether of the past residents or the archaeological project, as an infinite array of new microhistories to be explored opens up until the player feels quite familiar in this unfamiliar culture So we have clicked on a imagined story of the Neolithic. We are just at the beginning of our journey (only two squares blocked out, only a red ring round the microhistory..I now click on another fragment in this microhistory, “excavating the basket”

Excavating the Basket

Related MoviesSame Day

LHotH_BACH_080100_F156




LHotH_BACH_080100_Space158


LHotH_BACH_080100_F607_02



Same Entity


LHotH_BACH_080200_F640F760

Related Things, Places, People






This is a videoclip about excavating the basket. You will see how these archaeologists work in their own strange world. Listen to the sounds of the excavation. From here you could jump to Lori Hager the excavator or Willeke Wendrich the basket specialist

lori

children

house

roof

closure

Dido

dough

feet

basket


Excavating the Basket is an entity from the Now universe. This is a movie in which we are encouraged to listen to the soundscape of an archaeological excavation (cacophany). By now we have explored a number of the fragments of the basket microhistory, so the background as well as the basket icon have suddenly gained full color and substance. Now we have a choice to pivot to Lori Hager’s microhistory, but first we are tempted to jump to another video in the database about the basket. This option will occur whenever a video is playing in DWdtT.

LHotH_BACH_080100_F640DWdtT


This movie is harvested from the LHotH DB itself. From here we could pivot within LHotH into related entities or jump back to DWdTT

Lori HagerLori Hager was the human remains specialist with Basak Boz of the BACH project team. Together they excavated and documented all of the burials in Building 3. Lori Hager excavated the basket in Feature 634 and was interviewed about her experiences at Çatalhöyük and her thoughts on excavating burials.

lori

children

house

roof

closure

Dido

dough

feet

basket


Here we have jumped for the first time to Lori Hager microhistory. All is grey.

Lori Hager - archaeologist

discovering the

basket

the place of the

basket

excavating the

basket

The basketFeatur

e 640

Lori Hagerburial

Feature 634

the rope on

Dido’s hip

aches and

pains

revealing the

dead

Basak Bozreveali

ng te dead

accompany

the dead

containing

the dead

who is buried

in F.634?

lori

children

house

roof

closure

Dido

dough

feet

basket

health of the BACH

people


The entities of this microhistory are arranged in 3 ellipses to reflect the precision two handed excavation technique of Hager and the focus on the human remains. Many entities in this microhistory were shared with the Basket microhistory, so that they are already filled in with substance since they have already been explored. We choose to explore the entity on health of the BACH people

Feature 640 ImagePeople Things Events Text DWdtT Places

Media

Metadata

LHOTH-REP_080200_20210

1.jpg/080200_202101.jpg

A comparative post-Neolithic sample of people who buried their dead at Çatalhöyük and possibly lived nearby, presumably with different genetics and different nutrition, displayed similar results, suggesting that the commonality of landscape is the best explanation for the similar patterns in bone development. In particular, terrain has been shown to have a significant effect on postcranial robusticity (C. Ruff 2000; C. B. Ruff 2000; Ruff, et al. 1984). Relative to the labor force, few modern agricultural societies use children under six years of age, but slightly older children between six and ten years begin to work in light, unskilled tasks while a more significant entry into the labor force is generally made after ten years of age (Bradley 1993; Moberg 1985), not unlike the local children of the nearby village of Küçükköy where the children are seen herding on a regular basis. A labor force pattern such as this may have been in effect at Çatalhöyük, particularly if the agricultural fields or other resources were located some distance away from the site in the upland areas (Asouti 2005). Confirmation that the young adult female (8113) from Building 3 experienced elevated levels of physical activity is the presence of spondylolysis, a stress fracture in the lower back. Activities involving the bending and extending of the back are associated with this condition which is consistent with the inferred well-developed lower back muscles for this individual (8113) A genetic component has been forwarded for spondylolysis but there is strong evidence to suggest that mechanical stress is responsible (Larsen 1997). Molleson et al. (2005) noted spondylolysis in two males and one female at Çatalhöyük which they suggest may have resulted from heavy loading in the lower back region.Non-articular facets were noted for two individuals in the BACH sample. From Building 3, the older female (8115) has lower limb facets suggesting extensive kneeling, and the older male (8410) has lower limb facets suggesting squatting occurred on a regular basis. Kneeling and squatting for extensive periods of time for the BACH individuals are consistent with the findings from the 1995-1999 excavations at Çatalhöyük (Molleson 2000; Molleson, et al. 2005) and with those from the Neolithic sites of Çayönü and Aşikli (Özbek 2004).

Health and Diet of the Neolithic People in the BACH Area pp.320-321

Hager, Lori and Basak Boz 2012 Death and its

Relationship to Life: Neolithic Burials from

Building 3 and Space 87 at Çatalhöyük. In Last

House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey

(Çatalhöyük vol.11), edited by R. Tringham and M. Stevanovic, pp.

297-330. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

Publications, UCLA.

DWdtT

Text


This takes us directly into a fragment on this topic harvested directly from the LHotH DB which itself created this fragment as an entity from Lori Hager’s chapter in the printed edition of Last House on the Hill. Here it is displayed in searchable format complete with citation. This demonstrates the power of LHotH as a means to a different form of digital versioning of printed publications where the editable text entity is related to any other entities in whatever medium in the database. From here we will jump back into the Lori microhistory in DWdtT

The Guides

SAA 2011 Buffalo 2013

NOW THEN


Originally, in all my designs of database narratives, I was aiming for confronting the user with the complexity and ambiguity of the historical process by encouraging confusion in the tangled web of related entities. After reading literature on design and listening to advice from designers themselves, I realise that such confusion impacts negatively on players to the extent that if they get lost or can’t find help, they are more than likely to leave the game. I realize also that there are many ways in which this guidance can be achieved through scaffolding without turning the experience into a didactic tour of the Building 3 microhistories. This idea is in fact in keeping with my own pedagogical philosophy. Interface design is obviously crucial in this. In the “Brain” iteration of DWddT presented at SAA 2011, the imagined stories were expressed as responses to an informant - unseen and unheard - a curious traveller who has landed up at Catalhöyük by accident 9000 years ago. In the first iteration of the game version of DWdtT presented at the conference in University of Buffalo in April 2013, I chose two guides, one for each of the different “worlds”; in the world of the archaeologists you are guided by a wise all-knowing owl; in the world of the imagined past, a familiar comforting figure in the guise of the ever-victorious detective Tin-Tin shares the strange experiences with you.

The Guides

Roof


In the design since the Buffalo conference, the guides set the first tasks and challenges which prepare the player for the more complex world of the interior of Building 3 and the BACH project. Thus they first make themselves known in the 3D world of the portals. In the portal at roof level, while looking for the ladder, the player must prove to a shadowy guide with help from a chorus of local brats that s/he is from these parts by showing a familiarity with what can be seen from the rooftops in terms of how Building 3 sits in its neighborhood and the villages of the mound and the broader landscape.

The Guides

Floor-level


In the portal at floor level, the player is set the task of finding access through the side-wall of Building 3; while looking for the doorway, the player must show the caprine-looking guide that s/he can tell the difference between real sheep and goats and sheep that are in fact humans in the guise of animals; a chorus of helpful sheep (that gradually become more human) give hints about sacred phrases spoken on special occasions.

Below

The Guides


The “Below” portal is the domain of the gophers whose attitude to archaeologists is quite ambivalent; the player will need to show a gopher guide – who may or may not be an archaeologist - that s/he knows something about Building 3 and the archaeologist’s language (helped by a gopher chorus who are less than helpful); they may also be required to engage in a debate about the value of digging human remains, or who owns the past. I can’t wait to get some people and some money to help me build this.

The Audience


The question that is always asked at the outset of designing a game is who the audience is. So I end with my response to this question before you can ask it: The anticipated audience of Dead Women Do Tell Tales are lifelong learners (i.e. any age from 9 to 90), people who have curiosity and imagination, who love small intimate stories of everyday life, who fantasize in dreams or daydreams, who love “aha” moments of solving mysteries, who love to work things out for themselves when presented with information (clues), and people who love to participate in other cultures, learning the language, tasting the food, and listening to stories.And of course the possibility for players to comment, create their own narrative fragments, and even create their own microhistories has to be an integral aim of this enterprise.

★BACH team friends and colleagues★CoDA team friends and colleagues, especially Michael

Ashley★My dear friend Meg who encouraged me to step out

on the ice to see if it cracked★My colleagues and dear friends at the ARF who have

constantly supported and even rewarded my experiments

★Ruth Van Dyke and Reinhard Bernbeck for putting the idea of a game in my head (I think, unbeknownst to them)

★Erik Champion for his infinite stream of feedback and suggestions (hopefully the first of many more to come) during his recent visit to UC Berkeley

Thank You


Education

The Afterlives of an Archaeological Project: adventures in the Remediation of the Berkeley Archaeologists @ Çatalhöyük (BACH) Project