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Deep Cuts: Game Night!

This month over on the main feed, we dedicated an episode to households and the home. Since we're all staying in as much as possible right now, let's take a look at what folks have been doing to while away the time over the millennia. We've got games of tag, games of chance, games of skill, games galore! Plus, we take a look at how dice can tell us a lot about the beliefs of the people playing with them, and no matter how much remains in the episode, we cannot understate how long Amber laughed at Anna's report on  the Game of the Goose. 

To learn more-- and play some games!-- check out: 

Childhood Playground Games – A Multilingual Comparison of Etymology (InboxTranslation)

The Forgotten Games of the Corps of Discovery (Frances Hunter’s American Heroes Blog)

The Cochin Jews Of Kerala (My Jewish Learning)

The Royal Game of Ur (Bead Game)

Play Royal Game of Ur (Play Online Dice Games)

How Senet Works (How Stuff Works)

The Ancient Egyptian Game of Senet (Brandeis University)

It's not how you play the game, but how the dice were made (Phys.org)

Cubic Dice: Archaeological Material for Understanding Historical Processes (Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde antique)

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.