Had a cool idea for an ttrpg about growing up in a hunter-gatherer culture in a stone-age fantasy setting. The coolest part of idea, for me as the writer/designer, would be to have a section on “rituals” where I describe their technologies as magical rituals, not just a series of materials and steps. For example, instead of saying “you can get a +1 bonus on knapping checks by heat-treating your toolstone” it would be described as blessing the toolstone with fire, which leads into the idea of magic rock that has been fire-blessed by volcano spirits (obsidian).
I am vaguely aware of other technologies, such as extracting glue from animal hide and a tree fungus that smolders for fucking forever when lit, but my knowledge of these is limited. I need a more thorough knowledge of how exactly the pre-agriculture hominids did these things if I want to wax poetic about it.
You might like books by Alice Roberts, also check out Richard Bradley, who is more technical but honestly hard to put down. What area of the world are you interested in? Those two are mostly Europe centric. I’d also have to recommend Changes in the Land for ideas, though not set in the palaeolithic. https://archive.org/details/changesinlandind00cron_2
Bradley does a lot on rituals… Also look into the field of “experimental archaeology” for practical descriptions of how things may have been done.
To recap: 1. Roberts for how we came to be, 2. Bradley for how we interpret and act in our landscape and 3. Changes for how we affect the landscape in alternative systems.
Concerning Europe: Culture really pops off during the mesolithic for reasons there’s lots of theories on. Neolithic is basically like wild gardening at first (and happened at multiple places at similar and not so similar times around the world… or at all). Monoculture is more towards Roman times to support army movement (oversimplified). Field boundaries are a Bronze Age thing, generally, which is right before the Romans, Vikings etc. depending on localities.
https://aeon.co/essays/an-archeological-revolution-transforms-our-image-of-human-freedoms
There’s lots of old grimoires found, notably from the 17th century which you can adapt. There are a few museums for this with libraries, notably in northern Iceland and Cornwall, UK. I’ve been to both and both reproduced various texts from their libraries. There’s lots for other parts of the world, but I got eurocentric vibes from your post.
I’m going to stay eurasia-centric for now because I feel whatever attempt I make at native American history is gonna come across as very condescending.
That said, I plan on including early agricultural practices as late-game material, particularly focusing on alcohol production. I will be looking into the dates that grains and animals were domesticated so I don’t include something dumb like Neanderthals keeping beehives and eating golden currant
https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300240214/
There’s a good read on domestication. Roberts also has a book called Tamed as well.
It’s still worth reading Changes in the Land. It’s important and relevant as it describes how people manage nature without farming. Hunter gatherers generally died off in western Europe from plague (oversimplified). It was a population replacement. Asian neolithic is a whole different ballgame, you may want to stick more towards Europe.
Thanks for the heads up about the difficulty curve. My only knowledge of how paleolithic cultures are different is that the only domesticatable animal west of the Atlantic was the Guinea Pig, and I’m not even 100% on that. I’ll stick to european for now.
@fossilesque @ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling
I can recommend Richard Bradley’s work, having contributed to it myself. There is quite a bit on ritual meaning in the landscape as expressed by Neolithic monumentalism, derived from the pre-existing perceived meaning over various natural places.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203630228/archaeology-natural-places-richard-bradley
