Guest: Dr Christina Reich

Pregnant Queens of Esrolia Unite! 0:00-4:30Today’s interviewee is Dr Christina Reich, an archaeologist and member of Jeff’s gaming group in Berlin, or, to give it its full name, the ‘Moon Design House HeroQuest Glorantha Campaign’. In both Berlin, Germany and Melbourne Australia it’s a bit rainy, causing MOB to diagnose a convergence in the time space continuum.The Moon Design House Campaign aka thereafter ‘Jeff’s Gaming Group’ is perhaps slightly unusual in that it is a majority female gaming group. Or rather, Jeff claims it is majority female, but is then corrected by Christina who says that if you count Jeff it is fifty-fifty. The question of whether the DM is to be counted as a member of a group is then (quite wisely) left for another day. A majority (kinda) female gaming group leads to some interesting changes in plotlines. The current campaign they are playing is set in Esrolia, which is a matriarchy. This does not make that much of a difference to the storylines, but Jeff feels that there is a lot more pregnancy in their scenarios than in other groups he has played with.

Archaeology and Glorantha 4:31 – 16:20MOB asks Christina about the influence that her background as an archaeologist has on her appreciation of the world of Glorantha. Christina feels that the main difference between Glorantha and the majority of other RPG fantasy worlds is that Glorantha is at a Bronze Age level of development, as opposed to most other fantasy worlds (e.g. Game of Thrones) that are more medieval in inspiration. Since Christina’s field of study concerns the Bronze Age, she finds that Glorantha has more to involve her than other settings.Christina is an expert on the Bronze Age peoples of the Carpathian Basin, which starts in Hungary, and follows the route of the Danube through Slovakia down to Bulgaria. These peoples left encrusted pottery, which was often left in graves, either containing or next to human remains. The encrusted pottery is intricately decorated and often very beautiful. MOB thinks this sounds a bit Indiana Jones, as it involves looking in graves, but Christina says that she works in museums after the pottery has actually been dug up, which is much less dirty and wet than digging into graves, although, admittedly, not quite so much like Indiana Jones.This pottery was dug up last century, and the excavator sold them to various museums. It’s now being studied to try to define a continuous culture along the Danube – although this involves not just grave goods, but also settlement structures and population proximity along the river. Although it was the Bronze Age, there was not much bronze in these graves, so it was more like the pottery age. There seems to have been as much variation in burying or scattering ashes in the Bronze Age as there are today, although there are more bones in Bronze Age funeral urns than in modern urns – Christina explains this is because Bronze Age funeral pyres weren’t as hot as a modern crematoriums.These people were, funnily enough, called the Danubians, and they lived in the middle bronze age. The society was not literate and there are no written sources, so there is no knowledge of what they called themselves. They settled along the river, their settlements are strung along the Danube like a string of pearls. It was a river-based culture. No boats have been found, but these might not have lasted (not being made of pottery or bronze) or may be yet to be found, as there has not been much underwater archaeology in the Danube.One of the other things that makes the Danubians hard to date is that bronze or precious metals were not left in graves, but are found concentrated in hoards. These presumably were intended as gifts to the gods, or maybe rich Danubians were just very careless... The hoards vary in size, from 10 items up to hundreds. This is an interesting way of removing wealth from society. These hoards are found all over Europe