"Board Games as Social Lubricants: Cases from the Medieval Anatolia and Iberia" in MEDWORLDS9. Coexistence in Practice: Politics, Trade and Culture in the Late Medieval Anatolia and Iberia (original) (raw)
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Games of Thrones: Board Games and Social Complexity in Bronze Age Cyprus
2016
This study frames research on board games within a body of anthropological theory and method to examine the long-term social changes that effect play and mechanisms through which play may influence societal change. Drawing from ethnographic literature focusing on the performative nature of games and their effectiveness at providing a method for strengthening social bonds through grounding, I examine changes in the places in which people engaged in play over the course of the Bronze Age on Cyprus (circa 2500¬–1050 BCE), a period of increasing social complexity. The purpose of this research is to examine how the changes in social boundaries concomitant with emergent complexity were counteracted or strengthened through the use of games as tools of interaction. Bronze Age sites on Cyprus have produced the largest dataset of game boards belonging to any ancient culture. Weight and morphological data were gathered from these artifacts to determine the likelihood of their portability and to identify what type of game was present. The presence of fixed and likely immobile games, as well as the presence of clusters of portable games, was used to identify spaces in which games were played. Counts of other types of artifacts found in the same spaces as games were tabulated, and Correspondence Analysis (CA) was performed in order to determine differences in the types of activities present in the same spaces as play. The results of the CA showed that during the Prehistoric Bronze Age, which has fewer indicators of social complexity, gaming spaces were associated with artifacts related to consumption or specialty, heirloom and imported ceramics, and rarely played in public spaces. During the Protohistoric Bronze Age, when Cyprus was more socially complex, games were more commonly played in public spaces and associated with artifacts related to consumption. These changes suggest a changing emphasis through time, where the initiation and strengthening of social bonds through the grounding process afforded by play is more highly valued in small-scale society, whereas the social mobility that is enabled by performance during play is exploited more commonly during periods of complexity.
2012
Board gaming has to a large degree, been studied based on historical sources. Ironically, this is true even for prehistoric games, where the Icelandic sagas have been used as a starting point for a deductive hunt for the mysterious game Hnefatafl. Later studies of gaming have to a large extent been transferring older research results. According to the author, this has created a rather skewed picture of historic games, which he means to problemise. The author of this thesis will use gaming material from Scania as a starting point for an inductive study. Both archaeological and historical sources will be used as a basis for the results, but due to the over-representation of historical studies on the subject, the archaeological material will be given far more room in this study. For the analysis of the Scanian material, studies from the whole Scandinavia will be used as a comparison material. The objective of the thesis will be to connect gaming items to their user, and to shed some light on what made persons of the past take up gaming. The author manages to deconstruct many of the widely accepted interpretations about historic and prehistoric gaming. Checkered gaming boards from the Iron Age cannot be accepted without question as being used for Hnefatafl, Chess was not a game for knights alone, and women and children might have had an even bigger part of the evolution of board games than previously acknowledged.
2021
Playing against complexity: Board games and social strategy in Bronze Age Cyprus
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2019
Social complexity requires people to create new ways of interacting with one another to counteract new social boundaries. Board games provide one avenue by which archaeologists may examine the ways in which people interacted. The act of play is liminoid, allowing for people to more easily overcome social boundaries to in- teraction, while also creating a shared experience for the process of grounding. Thus, games provide an op- portunity for people to build relationships and also to negotiate their identity. This research counters previous assertions that only complex societies play strategy games. In Bronze Age Cyprus, middle-range society became increasingly complex with the development of urbanism and differential access to wealth, while also producing a particularly large corpus of ancient board games. Determining where games were played, and then analyzing the social context of games in those spaces using multiple correspondence analysis, it was found that people were more likely to be playing in public during periods of greater complexity. This is likely due to the performative aspects of play, allowing for the communication of status in different ways when games are played in public spaces. The pattern found shows the variation in the ways people incorporated games into their social strategies during periods of different types of complexity.
Board games are often used as a plot motif in modern genre fiction, especially in detective and adventure stories. In these types of narrative a well-known pattern of storytelling or literary structure (e.g. the treasure hunt, the detection of serial crimes, the iniatory course, or the medieval tale collection) is reworked and adapted to the rules and phases of a board game such as chess, jeu de l’oie, or the tarot card pack. This literary practice is very ancient and may be traced back to a number of novelistic compositions of the ancient Near East, dating from the first millennium B.C. to late antiquity. In the Demotic Egyptian Tale of Setne Khaemwaset, from the Saite period, the protagonist Setne plays a board game (probably senet) with the mummy of a long dead and buried magician, in order to gain a powerful book of spells. The widespread Near-Eastern story-pattern of the magical competition is here superimposed on the procedure of a celebrated Egyptian game. In a late Hellenistic Greek novella inspired by the Odyssey (Apion of Alexandria, FGrH 616 F36) Penelope’s suitors play an elaborate game of marbles (petteia) in order to determine which one of them will marry the queen. This is a playful rewriting of the famous bow contest of the Homeric epic. A Sasanian novelistic work, the Wizārišn ī čatrang, adapts the age-old legend of the riddle contest of kings; the riddles are replaced with board games (chess and backgammon), which the opponents invent and propose to each other as difficult puzzles for solution. In all these texts the board game becomes a central symbol of the transformative and innovative power of literary narrative.
Histria Antoqua, 2013
In this paper, the authors analyze and make a description of the default games in ancient Siscia. The paper is divided into two main chapters which deals with public and private games based on the available materials and the materials residual and written sources. The first part covers the public games, which, according to the authors happened in a possible wooden amphitheater and the bed of the river Kupa, which could be used for running naumachia. Although so far have not found the remains of these architectural complexes, material evidences are pointing directly to their existence. The thesis of the progress of public games in a wooden amphitheater authors confirm with sources and similar examples from other provinces and colonies of the Roman Empire. In the second part authors are dealing with private segment of games for which there are direct evidence, such as tesserae and dice. There is no doubt that they have held, as in the time allowed, i.e. during the Saturnalia, which at a time when gambling, and similar games that were used for this type of leisure, were banned.
Ancient Games And What They Teach Us About Modern People
Tamil Heritage Trust, 2023
In his Talk, "Ancient Games And What They Teach Us About Modern People", Raamesh Gowri Raghavan will use game boards and pieces unearthed in excavations, games etched on monument floors, heirlooms, depictions in literature, and ethnological reports, to present a a rich culture of games and the consequent opportunities to be had by historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and museologists in the study of games to complete the picture of historical societies.