Faynan in Minecraft

Over the past year or so, I’ve been working with a group of current and former University of California San Diego researchers, led by Matt Howland, to create a set of nested Sketchfab models related to the UCSD Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project excavations in the Faynan region of southern Jordan. That project is coming along nicely, and we now have several models of copper production sites, excavation areas, and artifacts linked together with descriptions, as well as professional translations of each page into Arabic.

One of the goals of this project has been to supplement traditional archaeological publication by allowing people to get a more immersive experience of what these things and places are like in person. This got me thinking about the possibility of importing the models into a video game, and since they’re mining sites, the first game that came to mind was Minecraft. Shawn Graham, who is certainly much better than I am at this sort of thing, did a series of posts about creating Minecraft maps using historical maps about a decade ago based on a New York Public Library workflow, and there are quite a few archaeological Minecraft maps on various Minecraft community sites, some of them quite good, so I figured I would give it a go. People still play Minecraft, right?

In principle, what I’m trying to do should be easier than importing historic maps into Minecraft. We already have the 3D models of the sites, including the surrounding terrain, so I don’t need to worry about creating terrain from low-resolution SRTM data, digitizing maps in GIS, etc. This, I foolishly thought, should be pretty easy.

I figured I would start with Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir, the site where I did my dissertation research. We have an OBJ model of the site, so I grabbed that and used ObjToSchematic to turn this into a Minecraft Schematic file. This went smoothly enough, but I did encounter the first of several issues here. ObjToSchematic can use the 3D model texture to select appropriately colored blocks, but it uses a wide range of Minecraft blocks as a “palette,” so the actual landscape, made up of shale hillsides and a sandy valley, gets a bit lost. It’s possible to choose a smaller selection of blocks as a palette, and this should help, but would have taken a bit more time than I wanted to dedicate to this today. The plants and archaeological features also just get created out of the same blocks, and I’m guessing this will take some work in Creative mode to fix. So, I’ll have to update as I experiment a bit more. After correcting the orientation, though, I was able to produce a passable schematic that does look, at least broadly, like the site.

From here, it seemed like the easiest approach would be to create a superflat world without any structures generated to import the model into, so I did that. Initially, I approached the import step using the Amulet editor, the successor of sorts to MCEdit, which doesn’t work on any remotely recent version of Minecraft. Amulet is easy enough to use, but after messing around with it for a few hours, I haven’t really been able to get it to do what I need to do. Initially, I was placing the schematic far up above the world. In retrospect, this probably isn’t a problem, as it would be possible to just set the world spawn there, but I wanted to have the model at ground level. I did this, but the site is essentially in a valley between two hills, so some ended up below ground level and Amulet filled this with water, which is not very accurate for Faynan. I figured the way around this would be to set everything to a desert biome, and this did work to remove the water. For a reason I haven’t been able to determine, though, the lighting is just always off on the maps I create in Amulet, and parts always end up looking pitch black regardless of where I place the schematic. I’m sure there’s a way to fix this, but I ended up trying another map editor instead.

I installed WorldEdit, which I was initially reluctant to use since it’s a Minecraft mod rather than a program in its own right, but it was simple enough to import the schematic into the world. Unlike Amulet, the lighting looks pretty normal and I was able to run around and take a look at the Minecraft version of the site.

A Minecraft archaeologist in the digital Area Z at the digital Khirbat Nuqayb al-Asaymir.

Obviously, it still needs a lot of work before it’s useful for much of anything, but it’s still fun to see the site in Minecraft after, all things considered, not all that much work. This isn’t a primary goal of the project, but I’m still interested to get it working, so we’ll see where it goes from here.

Some shameless self-promotion

Posts have been a little light here for a while as I finish my dissertation, but enough things have come out in the last month or so that I should really mention them here. First, and certainly most excitingly, I was profiled in the Jordan Times on December 9 in an article by the amazing Saeb Rawashdeh. Saeb did a great job of presenting the key arguments of my dissertation research and the significance of that research for Jordanian archaeology. I'm somewhat biased, but I think you should check it out!

In the realm of peer-reviewed, unfortunately closed-access work, my co-authors and I published a paper in the most recent issue of Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy (if you don't have access to AAE and would like an offprint, please feel free to contact me). In it, we report on ELRAP excavations at a site in southern Jordan called Khirbat al-Manā'iyya in 2012. As I point out in the abstract, Khirbat al-Manā'iyya is exciting because (among other things) it's the first Early Islamic period copper smelting site known in the southeastern Wadi 'Araba (actually, in the entire eastern Wadi 'Araba). In addition to reporting the site, we also discuss how Khirbat al-Manā'iyya fits into the system of industrial settlements, including other copper smelting sites, in the southwestern 'Araba, and how this system articulates with Early Islamic mining in northern Arabia, expanding on arguments we first made in our "Not Found in the Order of History" chapter. I should also note that Brita Lorentzen," who I've mentioned previously on this blog, analyzed the charcoal assemblage from the site and found evidence for the use of deadwood, which tells us some interesting things about how the sparse wood resources of the southern Wadi 'Araba were managed during this period. I was quite excited to be able to work on this site, and I'm even more excited that the publication is out. Note also that it came out in the same issue as David Kennedy's paper on the "gate" features in Saudi Arabia, which got a bit of press, and a very interesting paper by Hannah Friedman and colleagues about an Early Islamic papyrus from the Faynan region, which I hope to discuss in slightly more detail in an upcoming post.

Lastly, I've been co-editing a book called Cyber-Archaeology and Grand Narratives: Digital Technology and Deep-Time Perspectives on Culture Change in the Middle East with my advisor, Tom Levy, and it has also just come out in the Springer One World Archaeology series. It's a cool volume, based on a session at the 7th World Archaeological Congress and a workshop at UC San Diego (the chapters have been updated since then, of course). The idea was that contributors would consider how digital archaeology can contribute to investigations of archaeological "grand narratives," and the contributions both explore the potential of new methods and provide insightful critiques of existing methods (you can check out the table of contents here). In addition to being one of the editors, I'm also first author in the intro chapter, which I think is worth a read (as is the entire volume!).