Fantasy Worlds / Fantastic Labs
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 02/02/2023

Laurence Ferland (Université Laval)

Fantasy worlds encountered in books and games are primarily escapes from reality, though 
they are also laboratories in which creators explore aspects of the world they know in pushing 
boundaries, tweaking power dynamics, enhancing environments, materializing ideas and 
concepts as well as simplifying complex situations in giving protagonists clear goals to achieve. 
Another world where the characteristics listed above agree with is a multiverse many 
contemporary humans inhabit: the Internet. When online, dynamics change, filters and barriers 
fall, and codes of conduct transform according to the corner of the Internet where a particular 
universe unfolds may it be a forum, a game or a full blown metaverse environment. Access to 
a parallel and immaterial universe however real and having ties as well as repercussions in the 
material world is a fantastic opportunity for the exploration of archaeological questions and 
hypotheses about interactions with immaterial universe in the past. Discussions about the 
material remnants of these interactions are found at every corner of archaeological literature. 
Ethnographies and ethnoarchaeology have been wonderful tools for approaching this aspect of 
archaeology and this paper wonders if the contemporary experience of multiple immaterial 
worlds could be another laboratory to better understand the relationship people in the past 
maintained with the immaterial in their own world(s).