The Lamplough-Lidster collection

I’ve mentioned the wonderful opportunity I’ve been given to gain some work experience whilst studying at the University of York. The volunteer work I’ve been doing on the Lamplough project has been invaluable experience for me, and has really opened my eyes to the way that Heritage institutions work. 

Click here to see my introductory post on the YMT blog.

My thesis in the making: archaeology in gaming.

I decided to make this post because the time has come to really start thinking seriously about writing my masters thesis. This is a somewhat daunting prospect, and really rather new territory for me. I am, by the very nature of my undergraduate training, a prehistorian. I relish dealing with weighty theoretical discussions centred around really rather ephemeral evidence. Now I am required to mentally shake myself and enter the real world. My masters is in Digital Heritage, and as such I must deal with some sort of digital media in my research.  The data I’ll be dealing with will be qualitative data provided by living, human participants.

Yes, this will be very new territory for me.

The title on my thesis proposal was as follows:

Experienced archaeologies: A qualitative study of the way in which people engage with the past in role playing games.

I’ll come up with something catchier at a later date, but for now I feel like this pretty much sums up what I want to do.

My primary focus will be on the way that people (everyone!) interact and engage with the past in video games – RPGs in particular. I’ll use my research to construct ideas about how gaming technology might be used for disseminating experiential interpretations of archaeological data.

I feel like I might be jumping on a bit of a bandwagon, as it seems that archaeology in gaming is about to become a hot topic. However it is something that I feel very strongly about, and I think that if I come up with a robust enough methodology my research could be some of the first of its kind (in archaeology at least) and potentially of use to others in the future.

All in all I think this is going to be an exciting piece of work to do, and something that I hope to learn a lot from. I’m pretty sure that my primary source for information is going to be my good old friend, teh interwebz, so I feel that recording some of my musings about it here is quite an appropriate thing to do.

Earlier this evening I tweeted to gauge interest in the research, and to see if anyone would be interested in participating. My plan is still very much unformulated, but I think that at this stage it would be wonderful to hear people’s thoughts on how this sort of research would be best carried out (I’m not afraid to ask advice when I’m completely new to something!) and if anyone has any resources that they think might come in useful.

An MSc in Digital Heritage: contemplations on a personal future.

I can hardly believe that I’m in my final week of timetabled master’s lectures (and have under two weeks in which to finish my final summative assesments, oh god!) – the time has absolutely flown! I’m feeling very reflective about the whole experience, and whilst I’ve struggled at times, both with the content of my course when placed alongside my previous research interests and the simple case of balancing work and study, I wouldn’t change it for the world!

I’ve learned a lot about what the real world of Heritage is like, beyond the Universities. I’ve become more independent, and grown up a lot. But I think that most importantly, I’ve made contacts.

I’ve been extremely lucky to be involved in a hugely interesting project with the York Museums Trust, and last week the past few months of contemplation on the project came together as I interviewed a certain Mr. Lamplough on camera. Mr. Lamplough, now in his 70’s I believe, has donated a large and extremely important collection of Bronze Age objects to the Yorkshire Museum. These objects were retrieved from a series of Neolithic and Bronze Age sites across the North York Moors in a series of rescue excavations in the 1950s and 60s when Mr. Lamplough was a boy of around 10. The work was pioneering and of the utmost importance.  I will be blogging about the collection on the YMT blog and visual material from the interview will be pushed over the web over the next few months.

I’ve also been offered the opportunity to go and do some work on the ever-changing and often challenging museum at Çatalhöyük. This will happen at some point during the fieldwork season, and wouldn’t even be happening without the influence of my greatly admired supervisor, Dr. Sara Perry, to whom I am hugely grateful!

All of these opportunities have been amazing and eye-opening, and I really don’t know what to do with myself next (although I have an entire thesis to write before I can move on to the next adventure!). I have moments where I think oh god, what am I doing? I need to get out now before it’s too late! but I just know that it’s not over yet. I’m not done with archaeology yet.

I came into this course with a very simple aim: to equip myself with the qualifications necessary to get paid (ha!) work in a sector that I am passionate about, rather than end up doing work that will suck my soul out through any available orifice (I’m looking at you, retail). A group discussion via Google Groups between students on the second Cultural Heritage Management module at York has made it absolutely clear that almost everyone is worried, nay terrified, about finding permanent and stable work in the heritage sector. And I’m getting that itching feeling that I had at the end of my bachelors where I’m thinking I’ve come this far, why not just carry on!? I could be the first person with a Doctorate in the family!

I think if I do decide to attempt to get funding for a doctorate though, I need a good long time to evaluate just what I want to get out of it. The course I’m on now was a quick decision, and whilst it is one I don’t regret for a second – it’s brought me to a wonderful place –  it’s caused me to deviate hugely from my primary interests in archaeology. As I’ve learned and developed intellectually, I now find myself lost. I can’t remember what my original interests were in the first place (if I ever really had any!) and I’m pretty sure that they will have changed and morphed over the academic year.

Are archaeologists afraid of their imaginations?

This is a subject that has been, in one form or another, plaguing me for a long time. And the fascinating thing is that it is touched upon in so many of my various lectures and seminars, yet there doesn’t seem to be anyone doing much about it. It is steadily driving me more and more insane, and if no one else does something about it, I might be forced to do a PhD about it, and that’s just an appalling idea because. Well, because I’m already an imposter at Master’s level.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve just come out of a couple particularly engaging seminars and it’s times like these, when I’m practically foaming at the mouth because I am so riled up by a subject and the rant that I want to rant is so tantalisingly out of reach, that I realise that this is why I just keep coming back to archaeology. Because archaeologists are SO frustrating at times. No, no no. Let me rephrase that; academics are so frustrating at times. I’m getting my A-words mixed up again.

The first seminar was about the authenticity of experiences and meaningful experiences with archaeology and heritage. One of the main points that came out of our discussions was that, to the lay person, authenticity has little to do with truth and fact, and more to do with the quality of the experience that they are having and the way in which they are engaging with that experience.

The second seminar was about 3D imaging and virtual realities in archaeology. Obviously, conversation quickly turned to gaming. In my previous post I articulated some of my feelings about the potential of games and gaming technology for archaeological dissemination, but now I have even more opinions on the matter.

So the overriding question in both of these seminars was, what is stopping us from moving forward and engaging with the archaeology/heritage in a more emotional, reflexive manner? 

And I think that it’s this huge reluctance in the profession to properly utilise and stretch our imaginations. Which, really, when you think about it, sounds absolutely ridiculous. After all, and especially in prehistoric archaeology, the imagination is key to the process of interpretation.

Scholars seem to be afraid of losing credibility or respect by using imaginative and emotive narratives to communicate the knowledge and theories that they have extracted from their data. I believe this is seriously narrowing the potential for the dissemination of archaeological knowledge.

It’s all well and good for the academics to sit and seek out scholarly articles on the architecture of Florence in the Renaissance, but there’s no chance that the average, intelligent lay person would ever consider doing such a thing (or even be able to access such articles, but that’s another rant). They would, however, be able to access and immerse themselves in the (IMHO) utter glory that is Assassin’s Creed II.

VR and gaming is just one example of an untapped resource with huge scope for the development of new ways of communicating our collective heritage. Those such as Mike Shanks have asked questions like the one I ask in the title of this blog. Clearly the time has come to stop asking is this true? or why is this so? and to start trying to overcome the barrier that is stopping those responsible for knowledge-making from circulating their work into wider circles in an exciting and engaging manner. I hope that soon we’ll be able to move on from this terrible, invisible divide between scholarly pursuit and ‘entertainment’.

Good news!

I’ve done it! I’m into York for the MSc in Digital Heritage! Hurrah et cetera.

However now I’ll be panicking about finding funding, accommodation and new friends, so maybe it’ll be writing on hold. I’ll blog if anything ever comes to mind; perhaps I’ll try and log my experiences at York. I think it would be interesting to look back on this blog in a years time and see what I’ve learned and how I’ve changed.

Now I must write a million letters to people begging for money, because I am so unable to fund this by myself. Even the biggest loan won’t cut it.

In the mean time, I’ll probably be drawing (something I possibly enjoy more than writing) in the name of procrastination.

in the name of jazzing up this post