Tag: Pop Culture
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The Importance of the Little Town Museum in “I Am Dead”
This blog post will contain some slight spoilers for the game ‘I Am Dead’. As readers may remember, I absolutely loved the video game I Am Dead (Hollow Ponds, 2020) and wrote a previous blog post about how it was actually more of an archaeology game than players may actually realise. Perhaps one of my
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You Will Never Be Indiana Jones: How Toxic Masculinity Spurs Sexism and Ableism in Archaeology
The following post is an article that was originally written and published for Lady Science, a wonderful online magazine that has now sadly ended its publication . I am very grateful for the chance to originally publish with the amazing team behind Lady Science, who gave me the confidence and the support necessary to write
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The Archaeology of Memories and Mementos: An Archaeologist’s Review of “I Am Dead”
Please note that this blog post contains spoilers for the game “I Am Dead”. So, one of the things I was most excited to get to post-PhD was my ever-increasing backlog of video games (damn you, Nintendo Switch sales!), and I was particularly excited about tackling the long list of indie games. One of these was, of course,
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Community-Led, Community-Run: The Blathers’ Approach to Museum Curation
In the Animal Crossing video game series, Blathers is the rather stereotypical curator of the local museums; a straight-laced nerd who punctuates his educational rambling with “wot?” and is dutiful in his collecting…even if he has to occasionally handle a bug or two. But what is less stereotypical is his curatorial approach as the head
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Fire, Earth, and Sky – Oh My! Looking at Burial Traditions in Divinity: Original Sin II
One of the first video games that I got hooked on during the start of the pandemic (that wasn‘t Animal Crossing) was Divinity: Original Sin II. At the time, it had been years since I played a fantasy role-playing game from a series I wasn’t already familiar with, so honestly? I had a great time
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The Witcher is a Bioarchaeologist – Okay, Let Me Explain…
Okay, I mean…technically the Witcher is more of a zoologist with a bit of forensics training, but let me shoe-horn in my expertise please! After years of being yelled at to play the Witcher 3: the Wild Hunt (2015), I am finally playing the Witcher 3: the Wild Hunt (round of applause please). And I’m
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Guardians, Gods, or Geodudes? Pokemon and Battling Animals in Antiquities
A Pokemon battle in Pokemon Moon (2016)In the Pokemon franchise, Pokemon (or “pocket monsters”, as it directly translates to English) are catchable creatures that can be trained for battle between Pokemon trainers. Pokemon battles have developed an extensive amount of lore through the video games and associated anime series, particularly through myths and legends
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“I Love Dying and Being Dead” – Late Capitalism and Modern Perceptions of Death
Lately, archaeologists have been a bit concerned about memes. No, not because they’re trying to perfect their comedic skills – rather, there’s been a relatively recent rash of popular memes that were derived from several big archaeological finds. For example, a nearly complete human skeleton was recovered in Pompeii, originally interpreted to have been crushed
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“Death Positivity” for Pets: Are We Changing Our Attitudes Towards the Death Of Animals?
Content Warning – Today’s blog post will talk at length about animal death and will have some photos of taxidermy animals. Please proceed with caution and feel free to skip the blog post entirely if this is too upsetting. The “Death Positivity” movement has truly become part of the mainstream discourse recently, ranging from a
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Terror and Tradition Over Time: A Look at the Material Culture Of Halloween
Oddly enough, I didn’t really expect to run into that many significant cultural differences when I first moved from the United States to the United Kingdom. So I was actually a bit surprised when Halloween first came around. I expected there to be streets covered in decorations, but was surprised to see only a few pumpkins
Animal Archaeology 