The unwritten presence of emotions in archaeological research and their future in archaeo-gaming

Emotion is an integral part of the human experience and is therefore present in archaeology and history, as these disciplines study humans as well as things. It is surprising, therefore, that there is little work on emotion within archaeological scholarship. Its limited treatment within digital archaeology is particularly striking because much digital work in archaeology involves images and interactions, and these creative and artistic media are often designed to provoke emotions, or their reception is emotional.

Research by Katifori et al. 2019 (EMOTIVE Project) identifies the importance of emotion in archaeological storytelling. There is a wider range of research (e.g., work by Tringham, Morgan, and Watterson) that addresses the role of emotion in storytelling indirectly, but where it is not a central or explicit focus of the research. However, none of this research investigates in detail how the design of visual storytelling provokes emotions in the people who engage with it. Nevertheless, there was a visible possibility that the emotive research mentioned above had come across a deeper engagement but did not record it due to the different focus of each project and by further investigating this through interviews it would have been possible to extract what was laying in the background.

This paper presents an investigation of the implicit role of emotion in the work of different practitioners related to archaeological research as they designed their storytelling media. The research demonstrates that emotion is a key element in the work of both researchers and practitioners, even when they do not intentionally and directly discuss it. And further interviews discover several potential emotive tools and triggers present in archaeology that have a good potential to be integrated into a practical experiment involving the creation of an archaeo-game in future research.