What Lasts of Us: Implicit Archaeology through Environmental Storytelling

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Making Waves through Play: A Historical Archaeological Examination of Archaeogaming and the Global Impact of Video Games on the Field of Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Last of Us (2013, Naughty Dog) and its 2020 sequel transport players to a post-apocalyptic version of the United States, twenty years after the outbreak of a deadly virus. Gameplay is set in the remnants of what was once a sprawling, living environment where players may collect artifacts of the past (e.g., comic books or letters) by methodically scouring the game’s locations, which helps illuminate the history of the world. To gain knowledge about previous lived experiences through material culture left behind is effectively the science of archaeology. We argue that players become "amateur archaeologists" who try to understand the history of a recent and paradoxically contemporary past through their journey in the game. In this pursuit, we will draw on the burgeoning discipline of archaeogaming (Reinhard 2018), which seeks to analyze games through an archaeological lens, in order to understand this crucial aspect of the game series.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Making Waves through Play: A Historical Archaeological Examination of Archaeogaming and the Global Impact of Video Games on the Field of Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow