this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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Archaeology

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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

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Good places for a lay-person to learn about paleolithic to neolithic hominid culture? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 4 months ago by ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/archaeology@mander.xyz
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Had a cool idea for an ttrpg about growing up in a hunter-gatherer culture in a stone-age fantasy setting. The coolest part of idea, for me as the writer/designer, would be to have a section on "rituals" where I describe their technologies as magical rituals, not just a series of materials and steps. For example, instead of saying "you can get a +1 bonus on knapping checks by heat-treating your toolstone" it would be described as blessing the toolstone with fire, which leads into the idea of magic rock that has been fire-blessed by volcano spirits (obsidian).

I am vaguely aware of other technologies, such as extracting glue from animal hide and a tree fungus that smolders for fucking forever when lit, but my knowledge of these is limited. I need a more thorough knowledge of how exactly the pre-agriculture hominids did these things if I want to wax poetic about it.

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[โ€“] ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to stay eurasia-centric for now because I feel whatever attempt I make at native American history is gonna come across as very condescending.

That said, I plan on including early agricultural practices as late-game material, particularly focusing on alcohol production. I will be looking into the dates that grains and animals were domesticated so I don't include something dumb like Neanderthals keeping beehives and eating golden currant

[โ€“] fossilesque@mander.xyz 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300240214/

There's a good read on domestication. Roberts also has a book called Tamed as well.

It's still worth reading Changes in the Land. It's important and relevant as it describes how people manage nature without farming. Hunter gatherers generally died off in western Europe from plague (oversimplified). It was a population replacement. Asian neolithic is a whole different ballgame, you may want to stick more towards Europe.

[โ€“] ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the heads up about the difficulty curve. My only knowledge of how paleolithic cultures are different is that the only domesticatable animal west of the Atlantic was the Guinea Pig, and I'm not even 100% on that. I'll stick to european for now.

[โ€“] fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Lol yeah, that isn't right. Where do you think turkey and llamas are from? ;)

[โ€“] ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Well, I learned something new today. Gonna be honest, I thought llamas were an offshoot of camels native to the Caucasus mountains. (I suppose they got to the Andes through Georgia's advanced sea trade network /s)

Edit: Did some googling. They are, in fact, camelids. Why I thought this meant they evolved from bactrian camels is beyond me. They split off from their parent group during the last ice age: camels migrated eastward across the Bering land bridge into Eurasia, whereas the llamas went south.

[โ€“] ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago

Totally forgot about turkey being native to north America. They are certainly more docile than chickens.