Board game archaeology

He is also a journalist, freelance writer and book reviewer who lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The stone board game featured a grid-like pattern and cup holes to hold game pieces.

Archaeologists search for Bronze and Iron age artifacts at the Oman dig site, located in the Arabian Peninsula. An archaeologist examines a copper artifact found at an exvacation site in the village of Ayn Bani Saidah in Oman. Post a Comment. However, this theory has been a battleground between different scholars favouring India, Persia, China and elsewhere in Asia, as Ancient Board Games in Perspective makes abundantly clear.

The comedy Shatranj ke Khilari The Chess Players , directed in by Satyajit Ray, depicts the self-destructive obsession with the game of two Muslim noblemen in Lucknow in the 19th century. At one point, so desperate are they to play after their chess set has been stolen by one of their irate wives, that they resort to sketching a chess board in the dust and later to using nuts, fruits, vegetables, spices and other objects as substitute chess pieces: cashew nut for pawn, lime for knight, tomato for bishop, chilli for rook, and phials of attar stoppered and unstoppered for king and minister.

Boards can be scratched on stone, burnt into wood, or even drawn on the ground for a single game… Pieces, likewise, can be seeds or pebbles, twigs or small balls of dung… Where games have been played with natural bits and pieces they will not usually survive to be identified by archaeologists.

In Malaya, for example, simple chessmen are cut from tender shoots of bamboo, and captured men can be chewed up on the spot. Perhaps the most famous early survival is the Royal Game of Ur, dating from the mid 3rd millennium BC, discovered by Sir Leonard Woolley in the s, and now known to scholars as the Game of Twenty Squares , since examples have subsequently been discovered at sites other than Ur.

The Omani-Polish findings are not the only archeological achievements to have been made recently. As reported in December , archeologists in the U. Also in Britain, archeologists were able to reveal more information about the striking foot-tall naked chalk figure known as the Cerne Abbas Giant in southern England last year, with data suggesting it may have come from the late Saxon period between and AD.

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