Archaeological Pedagogy

Minecraft has a fantastic history of mimesis, providing a wonderful visualisation platform through the “recreation” of medieval towns and the Ancient World. However, archaeology isn’t being done inside these pixelated historical behemoths. 

Enter Minecraft Archaeology, a pedagogical experience centred around the creation, destruction, and excavation of historically accurate dwellings across three distinct time periods.

This modpack is intended for teams of students work together to build (and then destroy) villages, walls, and farms, stripping the land of resources in their wake. The scars from their mining and harvesting will remain even after the students have vacated their settlements, compounded upon by the “civilisations” that follow. It’s up to the “archaeologists”, the final team of students, to interpret these scars and recreate the settlements built by the students who came before them. 

By building, destroying, surveying, and excavating, it is possible to run an “experimental archaeology” project within Minecraft, showing off settlements spanning geography and time, as well as demonstrating what might be missed by typical archaeological methods.

This modpack supports the project based learning template for high school and university students and has detailed construction resources available. The wiki has detailed discussion on what blocks each time period uses and thoughts about how to integrate multiple builds into a classroom experience.

Installation instructions are available.

Mod List:

• Backup:
  • Aroma1997Core
  • AromaBackup
  • When deploying a world for a multi-week/month project, having backups in case of emergency is critical. These backups can also serve as a way of documenting progress, in case a specific step was missed.
• Blocks:
  • Quark
    • AutoRegLib
    • Block of Charcoal: provides a way of having a lit fire without needing to go to the nether.
    • Sandy brick
    • Thatch: a major roofing component
  • Bagginses
    • A bunch of bags. Students will be encouraged to save their ‘almost broken’ tools in bags. Also, as this will be in survival, there will be significant mining expeditions, where bags will be quite handy.
  • BiomesOPlenty
    • BoP mainly supplies mud and mud bricks in the context of its biomes.
  • BuildingBricks
    • Adds vertical slabs, steps, and corners. The material bag and trowel will also be very handy.
  • chiselsandbits
    • Microblock support, in case people want to do detailed textures and inlays.
    • It also has a measuring tape (which is why the mod was included)
  • malisisblocks
    • Block mixer. Offers an option to combine two blocks such that the surface on one side is (for example) hardened clay and the other is (for example) mud brick. Provides an alternative to the plaster “dry wall” from metallurgy.
    • malisiscore
    • malisisdoors
      • Provides curtain based doors.
  • Mineralogy
    • Supports gypsum and plaster (as dry-wall) as well as interesting (and teachable) rock strata.
  • morematerials
    • Supports wattle and daub walls.
  • Tinker’s Construct
    • Bronze tools and more entailed tool-making setup.
• Information:
  • NotEnoughItems
    • CodeChickenCore
    • CodeChickenLib
  • JEI
  • journeymap
  • Waila
• Quality of life:
  • InventoryTweaks
  • Morpheus
  • MouseTweaks
• Administration
  • WorldEditCUI Forge Edition
  • worldedit
    • Worldedit Documentation