RPG setting content based on the real sunken subcontinent of Sundaland. Imagine a land where the progenitors of the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indus Valley and American cultures came from. I also post about ancient history topics that can serve as inspiration.
The overall tone is Bronze Age to Classical Antiquity type civilisations with a touch of Sword & Sorcery.
I've used Areca / Betel nut smuggling as a plot hook in my solo game and this article points to how the use of it goes back thousands of years. The real history of the part of the world is ever more fascinating. Reminder that you can find all the real history posts here: Real History
"Our new study, published in Science Advances, suggests betel nut use originated much earlier than previously believed – perhaps as long as 25,000 years ago. We also found evidence that the modern practice of chewing these palm seeds evolved from an older and simpler form of drug use – one that also carried health consequences."
On remote islands of Papua New Guinea, people carry a story that ties us all back to our deepest roots. Although their striking appearance once puzzled scientists, new genetic evidence shows they share a common ancestry with other Asians, shaped by isolation, adaptation, and even interbreeding with mysterious Denisovans. Yet, their unique history — marked by survival bottlenecks and separation from farming-driven booms — leaves open questions about the earliest migrations out of Africa and whether their lineage holds traces of a forgotten branch of humanity.
Two great articles about the the remains of cultures that existed in South America. I find this type of culture fascinating and imagine many of the cultures in my Sundaland setting exist.
The first article includes some artist impressions of what the area could have looked like.
Archaeologists using 3D mapping are uncovering the remains of thousands of green metropolises with composted gardens, fisheries, and forests groomed into orchards
This article prioritized studying the roads and paths that are interconnected to geoglyph-type sites in the Western Brazilian Amazon, not only because of their originality, but also to understand some issues that permeate the universe of geoglyphs, such as how was gave the spatial distribution of these roads in the region, what meaning they had within the sociocultural context of that society.
Another day and another lost Mayan city has been discovered:
“The larger of Valeriana’s two monumental precincts has all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital: multiple enclosed plazas connected by a broad causeway, temple pyramids, a ballcourt, a reservoir formed by damming an arroyo (a seasonal watercourse), and a probable … architectural arrangement that generally indicates a founding date prior to AD150,”
“The ancient world is full of examples of cities that are completely different than the cities we have today,” Auld-Thomas said. “There were cities that were sprawling agricultural patchworks and hyper-dense; there were cities that were highly egalitarian and extremely unequal. Given the environmental and social challenges we’re facing from rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and expand our view of what urban living can look like.”
An interesting video about the Bronze Age, aimed at people who are just learning about the period. The information presupposes a focus on the Bronze Age in Europe and the Middle East (referencing the importance of grain agriculture, bread, beer, wine, wool, flax, linen etc.) but a lot is still relevant to my Sundaland setting.
This is a sensationalist article that vaguely implies the discovery of some kind of Atlantis but the reality is that this part of the world was indeed dry land until the floods started and there is now more evidence of people living in these now submerged areas. Hopefully these kinds of discoveries will lead to more archaeology in these kinds of locations and the acceptance that a lot of human history happened along coastlines that are now under the sea.
Various artifacts and signs of human life were discovered on the northwest shelf of Sahul, located off the coast of the northern region of Kimberley on a landmass that connects to New Guinea, according to a study in Quaternary Science Reviews.
It is clear that the temptation to ignore the continental shelf margins of Late Pleistocene Sahul in debates of early peopling and expansion carries the risk of both oversimplifying and misunderstanding important elements of this period of history. Our analysis indicates the Northwest Shelf was a large habitable landscape that connected the now-separated ancient archaeological landscapes of the Kimberley and Arnhem Land. Reconstructing the palaeoecology of these landscapes in sophisticated ways remains an important goal for future research to understand the potential lifeways of the First Australians. The appearance of new and distinctive rock art styles in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land coincides with major shelf-drowning events and a noticeable increase in stone artefact discard across both regions. We interpret this as the retreat of human populations from the Northwest Shelf as sea levels rose. Now submerged continental margins clearly played an important role in early human expansions across the world. The rise in undersea archaeology in Australia will contribute to a growing worldwide picture of early human migration and the impact of climate change on Late Pleistocene human populations.
An interesting video about the linguistic history of New Guinea and what it reveals about the past of the people of the island.
The first inhabitants Indigenous people of New Guinea, from whom the Papuan people are probably descended, adapted to the range of ecologies and, in time, developed one of the earliest known agricultures. Remains of this agricultural system, in the form of ancient irrigation systems in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, are being studied by archaeologists. Research indicates that the highlands were an early and independent center of agriculture, with evidence of irrigation going back at least 10,000 years.[38]Sugarcane was cultivated in New Guinea around 6000 BCE.[39]
The gardens of the New Guinea Highlands are ancient, intensive permacultures, adapted to high population densities, very high rainfalls (as high as 10,000 mm per year (400 in/yr)), earthquakes, hilly land, and occasional frost. Complex mulches, crop rotations and tillages are used in rotation on terraces with complex irrigation systems. Western agronomists still do not understand all of the practices, and it has been noted that native gardeners are as, or even more, successful than most scientific farmers in raising certain crops.[40] There is evidence that New Guinea gardeners invented crop rotation well before western Europeans.[41] A unique feature of New Guinea permaculture is the silviculture of Casuarina oligodon, a tall, sturdy native ironwood tree, suited to use for timber and fuel, with root nodules that fix nitrogen. Pollen studies show that it was adopted during an ancient period of extreme deforestation.
In more recent millennia, another wave of people arrived on the shores of New Guinea. These were the Austronesian people, who had spread down from Taiwan, through the South-east Asian archipelago, colonising many of the islands on the way. The Austronesian people had technology and skills extremely well adapted to ocean voyaging and Austronesian language speaking people are present along much of the coastal areas and islands of New Guinea. They also introduced pigs and dogs. These Austronesian migrants are considered the ancestors of most people in insular Southeast Asia, from Sumatra and Java to Borneo and Sulawesi, as well as coastal new Guinea.[42]
A look at a Bronze Age civilization in Southern Spain. This site was deliberately buried so the architecture is well preserved and you get a great sense of what it must have been like to walk through the building thousands of years ago.
A look at the Chaco Canyon culture in New Mexico. The architecture of the great houses is especially interesting and a provides great inspiration for alternative types of urbanism in an ancient setting. The average contains 200 rooms and some as many as 700.
Thought to have arrived from China in 2000 BC, latest research shows domesticated rice agriculture in India and Pakistan existed centuries earlier, and suggests systems of seasonal crop variation that would have provided a rich and diverse diet for the Bronze Age residents of the Indus valley.
A look at why the wildlife in Southeast Asia and Australia, Papua New Guinea etc. are so different from each other. Useful setting knowledge for the world of Sundaland. The clue is in the past, the time of the last Ice-Age.
