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
CoDA
Center 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 1993
Michael 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 Web
1994-1997 StorySpace, Macromedia
Director
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)
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)
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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 archaeology
3) 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.

“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:
Narrative
Environment
Interface, navigation, interactivity

Narrative
fragments
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 2004
closure
B3.5B B3.5A
closure
B3.4B B3.4A B3.3 B3.2 B3.1B-D
Microhistories
B3.1A
construction
feGhosts 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 2004
closure
B3.5B B3.5A
closure
B3.4B B3.4A B3.3 B3.2 B3.1B-D
Microhistories
B3.1A
construction
feGhosts 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 when
how many people lived in this house
the starting point of each microhistory is a specific phase of the building’s history, can you work out which
the ghost microhistory has not been created. You will do that

The Basket in
a Burial
The 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
discov
ering
the
basket
the
place
of the
basket
excava
ting
the
basket
The
basket:
Feature
640
Lori
Hager
burial
Feature
634
analys
is of
the
basket
who
made
the
basket
biogra
phy of
the
basket
baskets
in
Building
3
Willeke
Wendrich
accomp
any 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 Movies
Same 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.

DWdtT
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 Hager
Lori 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
discove
ring
the
basket
the
place
of the
basket
excava
ting
the
basket
The
basket
Featur
e 640
Lori
Hager
burial
Featur
e 634
the
rope on
Dido’s
hip
aches
and
pains
reveali
ng the
dead
Basak
Bozreveali
ng te
dead
accom
pany
the
dead
contai
ning
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 DWdtTPlaces
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

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

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