User:DHBoggs

Anthropologist and Professional Historian

Appalachian raised scion of an old, Scotch-Irish colonial family of Kentucky (father) and Pennsylvania Dutch(mother). Four of my ancestors were Revolutionary War veterans. My wife is from the island of Mindanao.

BA Communications 1990 Penn State (film, writing, text analysis, and production)

MA Anthropology 2004 SUNY University at Albany

(plus another four years as a Ph.D. candidate - stopped when I ran out of funding and had a family to feed)

Archaeology and research in ten states, Iceland, Ireland

Currently: With age comes wisdom. Having worked as an archaeologist for many years, I moved into National Register work in 2020 for the State of New York in the Department of Historic Preservation, primarily but not exclusively working with built resources and social and architectural history

Anthropology Interests: Circumpolar Subarctic archaeology and ethnology with an emphasis on island environments, particularly the North Atlantic during the Viking expansion, the Aluetians, Hokkaido/Sakhalin/Kurils, and a and similar interest in the European Paleolithic and, in contrast, the South Pacific. I utilize the approaches of Symbolic Interactionism Symbolic Ecology, , Complexity/Chaos theory, Contingency and Dual Inheritance theory, and most particularly Historical Ecology to study community and settlement pattern in mixed subsistence systems. I research how the symbolically encoded, culturally defined perception of the environment influences survival related activities, crafts, vernacular architecture and praxis, and how people form social organizations, communities, hierarchies and heterarchies. Ultimately, I work toward understanding how various cultural practices result in long term success or failure, and how they effect quality of life, thereby applying those lesson to life and community development.

Related interests include: Material Culture and its recursive psychological effects. Household Archaeology, shelter in general, and Folk Technology. Small Community, sense of community, and Evolutionary adaptation. Prehistoric technology and landscape use – particularly of rangifer hunting societies. Neolithic to Viking Age technology and landscape use – particularly of North Atlantic islands. Small farms/circumpolar mixed hunting/sheep farming economies. Philippine, Polynesian, and Mayan Ethnography. Contact and Viking Period living history Hunting and Fishing Archery Cooking and Family

Side Work: As an RPG gamer since 1982, I've long dabbled in game design and have published a few rulebooks and supplements (Dragons at Dawn, The Book of Elder Magic, The Lost Dungeon of Tonisborg, The Lanthorn of Velzarkis, etc.) and served as the chief historical consultant for The Secrets of Blackmoor documentary. I'm also the leading subject matter expert on Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign booklet, and a lead researcher in the early years of the RPG hobby as it unfolded in the Twin Cities. My 'blog Hidden in Shadows contains many of the insights I've uncovered on that topic over the years.