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Techno Heresy in the Grim Dark with Mason Niquette and Alex Craib - Ep 152
3.2k Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Carlton is joined by Alex Craib and Mason Niquette from Cultural Resource Analysts, inc. to talk about about archaeology in the 41st Millennium in honor of the return of the Lion of Caliban. Yes, in perhaps the nerdiest episode ever of A Life in Ruins Podcast, we cover the history and techno-archaeology of the Warhammer 40k Universe.
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Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/152
Links
- 40K Minis Painter, Ethan Handwork, Instagram: @handys_hobbies
- Games Workshop Warhammer 40k Webstore
- MajorKill YouTube Channel
- Baldermort’s Guide to Warhammer YouTube Channel
- Leutin09 YouTube Channel
- Oculus Imperia YouTube Channel
Literature Recommendations
Guest Contact
- Alex Craib’s Email: [email protected]
- Alex Craib’s Instagram: @elbraibo
- Mason Niquette’s Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're
Introduction and Guest Mishaps
00:00:01
Speaker
listening to the archeology podcast network. All right, everyone. Well, we just interviewed, uh, Alex Craig and, uh, Mason, it's not per cat shit. Yeah. Well, everyone, we just interviewed, uh, Alex Craig and Mason, but I said it fucking wrong again. I did an M this is going to go in the front. Chris is going to edit this to the front. This other episode is going to.
Meet the Hosts and Guests
00:00:28
Speaker
Welcome to episode 152 of a life ruined podcast, where you investigate the careers and research of those living a life in ruins. I'm her host Carlton, shield chief Gover, and I am joined by my featured co-hosts, Alex Craig, who previously joined the podcast for episode 26 of our ruin lives with Alex Craig and appearing for the first time is Mason and Niket, Mason and Alex. Thank you guys so much for joining. How are you guys doing this evening? I guess we'll start off with you, Alex. How have you been since you've last been on the podcast?
00:00:58
Speaker
Not too bad. Not too bad. Finishing up this PhD at some point, except to the salary job at cultural resource analysts out in Lexington, Kentucky and living the dream, having a blast. Excellent. And then Mason, yeah, please introduce yourself to the audience for the first time, basically just where you went to school, what degrees you have, and where you're at now in life. Sure. So my name is Mason Catt. I did my Master's and PhD at the University of Kansas. I'm a georgyologist,
00:01:28
Speaker
My master's was on a pretty cool late paleo through mid-archaic site in the Ozarks, and then my dissertation was looking at site formation and geochronology at a rock shelter in West Texas. Currently, I'm also working for culture research analysts in the license in Kentucky.
00:01:44
Speaker
Excellent. We're really excited to have you both on the podcast for this very riveting discussion we're about to
What is Warhammer 40k?
00:01:50
Speaker
have. So for context, we're going to be talking about the archaeology of Warhammer 40k. And we'll delve into that subject and kind of the background behind it. But in the nerd world, some big happenings caused me to text Alex about some of the most recent reveals and like, we need to have an episode about this.
00:02:10
Speaker
and Alex, I actually have a coworker who's also a huge Warhammer 40k nerd. And just so happened when we were at the SAAs, I was having some drinks at the bar and ran into Mason. Mason's like, yeah, I know Craig, but I work with him. And I'm like, are you the 40k friend? And he was like, yeah. And I was like, okay, we're going to have you on the podcast to talk about this. So this episode is going to be kind of very similar in what we did with
00:02:34
Speaker
the archeology middle earth, however, we've done really dotted our eyes and crossed our T's with this episode, uh, or hoping to fit it all in. Cause it's, it's extensive. The lore behind Warhammer 40 K is more extensive, I would say than what Tolkien has. Tolkien did it himself though. Like let's, that's the caveat. The Lord of the rings middle earth is Tolkien's baby. Whereas 40 K is the contributed by many different authors.
Favorite Armies and Collections
00:03:00
Speaker
And, you know, basically a company that has been producing the, this game and the lore behind it since the late eighties, I think like 1989 or something like that. So real quick, Mason, what, what armies do you collect and which factions are your favorite? Well, right now I'm working on a little like black templars army. Got that going for me. Got a little leagues of Botan.
00:03:22
Speaker
got a bunch of random chaos, like Norway models, so like plate Marines. Yeah. I kind of just like to paint a lot of stuff and spending way too much money, just getting kind of whatever. What about you? So yeah, I started 40K, I think when I was in fifth grade with fourth edition and my first army were the Tyranids.
00:03:41
Speaker
So I have some of those old school termagants and then harmagants and those like pewter models of old one eye and like an old school hive tyrant and a couple of lickers. And then like, I think I ended up collecting over 64 harmagants and termagants alone. Cause they used to come in those big box sets of 32, uh, before they got, you know, you can only buy like 16 at a time at the same price range now. And then I got back into it in undergraduate,
00:04:07
Speaker
And with seventh edition, and I started playing tau, because I really like the idea of shooting armies. But then I got really bored because they're just a shooting army. They don't do melee. They don't do any of the fun stuff. And then I switched to blood angels became my, I went like hardcore the opposite direction. I want a melee army, just full melee. And I love red's my favorite color. So I was like gravitated and I love their lore in the backstory. So Craig, what about you, man?
00:04:35
Speaker
I'm an OG Dark Angels guy. I think I started my armies right around when you did 5th, 6th, 7th grade. And then I did a little bit of Tau, a little bit of Eldar just to branch out. I don't really like either one. And now I've been doing like a kit bash homebrew chapter based on my fraternity colors and heraldry and all that stuff. So it's basically like a best of all world space marines chapter. I call it heavy assault.
00:05:06
Speaker
Excellent. Excellent. So there's product background behind 4DK just for our viewers. It is a tabletop minis game that you paint. And early on in the 80s and 90s, it was like the background and the story you would get through your little army handbooks, codexes. There was a big old rule set that came in a book, and then you had to buy your individual army booklet.
Warhammer 40k Lore and Setting
00:05:28
Speaker
And then there'd just be kind of lore and history spread out through that. It wasn't until like the 2000s did books about Warhammer 40k be published. And for those that might be familiar with gaming, there's like Donna war Warhammer. And there is, you know, like Warhammer, where do you kill all the rats on steam?
00:05:48
Speaker
Same companies early on, they were actually connected. Warhammer and Warhammer 40k were kind of these weird extensions. But really since the 2000s, they've cashed in on expanding the lore of Warhammer 40k. So what is Warhammer 40k? Well, the term 40k for us archeology nerds and geologists, it stands for 40,000 years. So this universe where we play in the tabletop realm,
00:06:14
Speaker
we're year 40,000. So we're 20,000 years, no, like 38,000 years in the future. That's where we're at. And a lot of stuff happened. And with that, archaeology is present and we'll get to that. But we're going to go through like a very, very surface level, like not even cutting the skin, like basically just like cutting the smallest pieces of hair off of your arms of the Lord to kind of set the stage for why archaeology is present in
00:06:43
Speaker
in the lore itself. 40,000 years in less than four minutes. Probably into the second segment is like
00:07:00
Speaker
we're going to go through. It's not even like 40,000. We got to set the stage for like, it starts 60 million years ago. That's when the universe starts. So we're just going to real quickly just go through the time of the universe and into the future and then get into like, okay, what's the archeology? So the first part of this, and it does actually relate to 40 K itself. Like these people show back up is what's called
00:07:28
Speaker
the war in heaven, and this happened 60 billion years ago, there's two main factions. The old ones, they're this benevolent beings, this race that saved the universe. They're friendly, peaceful, and then you have the Necrontyr. Mason, could you describe the Necrontyr for us real quick?
00:07:46
Speaker
It's like the Care Bears fighting against the anti-Care Bears. Yeah. So you got a group of people that are all about feelings and then the Necrontyr who decide to sacrifice their mortal beings to space gods in exchange for immortality so that way they can spite these Care Bears. Yeah. So pretty much the Ogones were just a bunch of like weird lizard space gods that just kind of hung out, created a bunch of life, had a great time and then get
00:08:16
Speaker
the necrometeer, who were a weird little flesh species that are planning to have to be too close to a star. They just got cancer all the time, and it turns out that even if they left that space, they can't be eaten cancer. And so it turned into a whole big to-do.
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah, so the Necrons here, they're basically like cancerous space Egyptians is the best way to describe that faction. Their lifespans were like 40 years. They were too close to a star. And there's some other things that were happening that created this weird stuff. Super focused on immortality through basically everyone wanted to be an Alexander de Grey. And that was their focus on. So their space-faring society was a fucking wreck because everyone was concerned about themselves. It wasn't holistic.
00:08:58
Speaker
They united against the old ones because the old ones wouldn't basically help their space cancer and they went to war. Didn't go so great for the Necrontyr. They ended up coming in contact with basically a different race of space gods and a different dimensional plane known as the Catan. They made an alliance and they absolutely wrecked the old ones. As a response, the old ones created
00:09:24
Speaker
species specifically meant to fight the Necrontyr in the Catan, the Eldari and the Cork, and the Cork are basically ancestral orcs and they ended up losing to the Necrontyr and the Catan, but then the Necrontyr found out that the Catan were the troubles of all their space cancer and during the war tricked the Necrontyr into giving up their fleshy beings and downloading themselves into mechanical automaton where only the elites of the Necrontyr kept their
00:09:54
Speaker
Their consciousness. Their consciousness. And so they betrayed the Catan and one of the most epic battles of betrayal and just hunted them. But as a result, the Necrons here were severe. This is when they become the Necrons, is when they go from fleshy Egyptians with cancer to mechanical Egyptians, basically. There's pyramids. There's a whole thing. And you just have to Google what they are. And everything is very Egyptian. There's pyramids and obelisks. That's the vibe.
00:10:24
Speaker
I'd also like space office and like space pyramids. Yes. Like space scarabs, like it's fair, but they're green. They glow in mechanical, you know, it's like, it's a whole thing. Yeah. And, but during this war, the Eldari and the court kind of made a comeback and the Necrons, the Necrons were like, we need to go into hibernation and basically, cause we're going to lose. Like if we keep fighting, we're going to lose. So they basically put everyone in stasis and go to sleep up until
00:10:50
Speaker
the 41st millennium. So that's the background. But during that time, there's a dimension called the warp, which is where you basically light speed occurs and it's a reflection of the material world. And because there is so much chaos and death, it turned this like gorgeous wellspring of life into a chaotic mess. And it basically becomes known as the warp and it's
00:11:14
Speaker
We'll get to that later because that's just like a whole separate, you got the, you got the material plane and then you got space. It's space hell. And that space hell is where space travel takes place and it gets fucking crazy.
00:11:29
Speaker
Yeah, it gets that the whole war in heaven basically poisons that and it just becomes this horrible, horrible place. That's a reflection of the war in heaven. Cause the war in heaven took place over like millions of years, basically genocide on a galactic scale moving forward up until 40,000 years ago from this is the age of terror. So just, it's the same earth history up until today, but there are some pretty important events that occur.
00:11:53
Speaker
could you take a crack at some of the more pivotal moments of how what happens here on Earth affects the universe in Warhammer 40k? So arguably the most important event that happens is the birth of the emperor of mankind or the being that would become the emperor of mankind.
00:12:13
Speaker
He's basically a immortal space being that can reanimate himself in different bodies and accrue this long term kind of memory and understanding of time. And he gets the idea that he's going to start directing humanity on the right path.
00:12:37
Speaker
So, the star child emperor comes about sometime 10,000 BCE, you know, fertile crescent, that sort of area. And he gets born because basically a bunch of mystic shamans, like, predicate in the future, shit's gonna be bad for humankind. Yeah, so there's a couple different theories about how the emperor came about, whether he was just an individual being that appeared,
00:13:05
Speaker
and had this psychic magnitude to him or if he was actually a culmination of multiple kind of psychic beings coming together seeing the future and knowing that humanity needed like a protector kind of deal and they fuse their psychic might together and created this
00:13:27
Speaker
God-baking, kind of like Jesus in a, you know, tuxedo t-shirt. Yeah. So basically like all these like mystic shamans from across like the old world come together at Chateau Huyuk and commit ritual suicide to fuse their mental spiritual essence into the Emperor of mankind. And he does become Jesus because he's, he's like right now in our, in our world, he's just laying low. He's, he's immortal and just kind of pops up through history to like
00:13:54
Speaker
tried to steer people in the right way. So he is Jesus and Muhammad and all these leaders throughout our history that kind of show up and try to change things and ultimately like just disappear. He's just hiding. Yep. He's, it's super important for 30 K. 30,000 years. It's fine.
00:14:17
Speaker
He's just sitting in the back with popcorn just like, this is fucked. And then so, so Mason, why, why are the middle ages important for the context of, of the universe? So the middle ages are kind of when shake us sideways. So we briefly mentioned like the idea that warp, the warp is kind of like a reflection, uh, uh, humanity, aliens, all their kind of things and all their like feelings, thoughts, ideas, all this kind of stuff, like bringing yourself in manifests within the warp. That makes the best sense.
00:14:47
Speaker
It's like a psychic reflection of what's happening. But pretty much during this time period we get the crusades and the birth of the blood god Korn during a long time of hyper violence who wants skulls for the skull throne and blood for the blood god.
00:15:02
Speaker
You get massive periods of disease from the Black Plague and you get the creation of this new god called Nurgle, who is all about decay, decay and disease. And then Joss gives Zeej, who I admittedly do not know nearly enough about.
00:15:20
Speaker
Yeah. So, so Korn is born basically from, from the crusades. Like there's so many people out there trying to kill for their God that their psychic energy creates a fucking terrorist God in the warp who is just the, the God of war and death. Then there's Zinc who is kind of like this
00:15:40
Speaker
God of knowledge, but it's like the, it's the warranted pursuit of knowledge, which is bad. Just like knowledge for knowledge's sake. And he's born from like all these feudalistic scholars trying to reinvent society and religion. So he's a reflection of that. Nurgle comes from the black plagues where there's massive death from plague from, you know, China all the way to
00:16:02
Speaker
No, Europe and North Africa. And he's like the most like, he's not really evil. He's just, he loves life, but the, the greatest and most numerous life in the universe is bacteria and viruses. So he wants to infect everything else with, with disease. So it's like, he's bought, like people love him. He's Papa Nurgle and his whole idea is just to spread his children of death.
00:16:25
Speaker
across the universe. And so as, as these things are happening, but like people in our history don't know because we don't have access to the warp yet. We have a little bit of what's the psychic energy. That's this reflection. So those three gods are born during. So the mankind contributes out of all the races in the universe, mankind contributes to these, these three gods.
00:16:45
Speaker
We get through the dark age of technology, which is from 1500 to 25,000 in which mankind just does its thing and spreads across the universe. And we don't know much about it. We just know during this time mankind settles the stars. We have really advanced technology, which becomes important for later and we become the dominant species across the universe.
The Rise of the Emperor and the Primarchs
00:17:07
Speaker
And during this time, the Eldar from the war in heaven are still around. They're basically space elves that live forever. We come in contact with them. We're pretty chill. They recognize humankind's kind of superiority. But then we have the age of strife and like two important things happen. One, basically,
00:17:25
Speaker
Terminator Judgment Day happens where all of our machines rise up against us and start going on a human genocide, and it just absolutely destroys human civilization across the stars. Everyone becomes isolated. It's not a great time, but also as the Eldari, the space elves, the Eldar, they become so ingratiated in pleasure and lust. They basically become space Romans to an effect where they get just so
00:17:49
Speaker
carried away in the pleasures of life, that their psychic energy borns the chaos god, Slaanesh, who when he is born, it creates this like portal to hell in the universe and kills most of the Eldari race. He basically takes up their souls. Some survive. You get the Eldar proper. These were like Eldar that lived in the stars on craft worlds. That's how they survived.
00:18:14
Speaker
And then you get the Dark Eldar and in order to combat Slenesh, basically the Dark Eldar become sadistic BDSM elves. Like their whole thing is we're going to just torture and kill and make life a living hell for anyone we capture. They get into piracy and slavery. So you have the Dark Elves and the Light Elves.
00:18:35
Speaker
very original here. But during this time, humanity is spread across the stars. All the worlds pretty much are isolated from one another. The automatons are beaten, but during this time, space travel becomes impossible because the birth of Silesh basically makes the warp space hell where light speed occurs.
00:18:55
Speaker
extraordinarily dangerous and unpredictable. This is where the emperor comes back. Crapes, what does the emperor do in the year 30,000? Towards the end of the space war against the machines? The emperor spends most of his life, like Carlton was saying, chilling in the background,
00:19:16
Speaker
Hoking at things trying to get them to change and I think after the the birth of slash She kind of realized that that he needed to be a little more proactive about things and it was about that time that he Kind of revealed himself
00:19:32
Speaker
and started uniting clans on Earth, ancient Terra. And I'm pretty sure it started in kind of the India Himalayan region, and it expands out. And he starts messing around with genetics, and he starts creating this race of super soldiers, which would eventually become the Thunder Warriors.
00:19:53
Speaker
And he would use these kind of genetically superior genetically might think about like Russian athletes, but like dumb, right. You know, actually if the Russians weren't in charge of doping programs, we actually did a real doping program.
00:20:10
Speaker
It's a group of genetically superior men that are, you know, large, faster reflexes, faster healing, all that jazz. And he basically takes over the planet and then institutes this Primark program, which I think Mason could explain. Yeah.
00:20:33
Speaker
Yeah, so pretty much what happened with the Thunder Warriors, they were great for what the members goals were on Terra. However, they were unstable, they were prone to all sorts of weird issues, including like, super, super space cancer and stuff like that. So the idea basically was after that,
00:20:53
Speaker
Come up with an idea for a new set of soldiers to go take over the stars and take over the go back and reconquer effectively all the plans that were lost during the age of strife.
00:21:05
Speaker
And so, yeah, the primary program started where he was going to make 20 perfect genetic sons, partially from his DNA and all sorts of different things. And they each were supposed to be kind of a different aspect of being to be an idealized version of, you know, one facet of humanity. Right, right. And so each one is supposed to be like a perfect facet of some aspect of humanity. But
00:21:34
Speaker
Things kind of hit the fan and the, and so they wound up getting swept out by the KS gods that we mentioned earlier. So Nurgles, Monash, Deech and Korn. And so they got dispersed across the galaxy and he's like, well, we ain't got time for this. And so he jumped back into the stars with his new super soldiers who were the space Marines. Yeah, we glossed over some heavy shit there, but yeah, so.
00:22:03
Speaker
Allegedly, the God Emperor made a deal with the Chaos Gods and the Chaos Gods figured out he tricked them. The Primarchs may be warp demigods in the human super soldier form, we don't know, and they got spread across the galaxy to other lost colonies and societies of Earth. So they get raised by different Terran societies, some really good.
00:22:30
Speaker
some turn into gladiators with nails in their heads. That's a spectrum. That isn't fantastic for some. And with that, we should probably take our first break before we get into the great crusades of humanity. So we'll be right back with episode 152, a life of ruins goes 40k here after these messages.
00:22:51
Speaker
And welcome back to episode 152 of life ruins podcast. I am still here with Alex and Mason, and we were getting into the second half of the lore and, and we're almost done through the lore, but this is the critical part. And this is the great crusade in which the God emperor of mankind, like unifies earth and leads humanity back into the stars to reclaim its lost territory.
00:23:12
Speaker
Mars is like the big number two. They basically become like a super production facility with human hybrid robots. They're great. And the emperor is doing two things. One, reconnecting the galaxy, but also two, trying to find his lost sons, the Primarchs. And these are essentially demigods. And out of the demigods, gene seed or DNA,
00:23:32
Speaker
he creates the Space Marine Legion. So there's 20 Primarchs, there are 20 Space Marine Legions, and the Primarchs are made out of different aspects of the God Emperor's DNA and also a different Eternals DNA. The Primarchs have a mom. I forget her name.
00:23:47
Speaker
They have different aspects of him. They're all like 20 pieces of a whole, and each of the Space Marine legions are a piece of their Primark father. They have different attributes, and the Space Marines aren't just roided up people. They have different organs. They have a different biology to become a Space Marine. It's like the Spartan II program from Halo.
00:24:07
Speaker
on black tar heroin. It is on a whole different level of how they made these people. It's like limitless. They gave them a bunch of that drug to unleash their brains. They just became multiple hearts, new organs, like, you know, just look into the world.
00:24:24
Speaker
This is all on YouTube. Like if you get interested in this, you can go down a YouTube rabbit hole and you can learn all of this. And the first Primark that gets recovered is, um, the lion. No, he's Primark number one, but the first recovered is, um, no, it's, well, oh shit. That's weird.
00:24:49
Speaker
The first, the first official is like Horace Lupercal of the space wolves, but technically there's 21 prime marks because the alpha Legion, which is the 20th Legion, they're actually twins, Alpharius and Omegon. And it turns out that probably one of them never got lost and was with the emperor in secret. They're basically like the emperor's CIA and they're just like, no one knows they exist for like ever. And apparently one of them is fine.
00:25:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's a whole, thank you Mason for that reminder. But the first official that everyone knows about is Horace Lupercal, who's extremely important later. He has the most time with the Emperor and he also helps find his recovered brothers. He's the Emperor's best boy. Yeah, the best boy. He is the Primarch of the, what are they called? The Luna Wolves. Yeah, the Luna Wolves. Oh, the 16th Legion.
00:25:46
Speaker
And then, like, they all get renamed when they find their Primark. Their Primark basically, like, renames the Legion. So they were the Luna Wolves. They are the Luna Wolves. They were the Sons of Horus later. They become the Sons of Horus after Ulanor. That's true.
00:26:07
Speaker
And so all the space Marines are basically, they come from Terra, but as they find their Primark in the Primark's home world, that becomes the new recruiting ground for that Legion. So once Horus is reunited with the Emperor, all the new Luna wolves, they come from...
00:26:25
Speaker
They all kind of get found. We don't need to go through the list of who gets found when, but open to this, there are two lost legions and two lost primarchs. We know nothing about what happened to them, but something big enough where they erased from the Imperium's everything, they basically wipe them from existence and even went as far to wipe their memories from their brother's brains.
00:26:47
Speaker
They know they existed, but they don't know what happened. They forgot. Like it was basically, they were totally expunged.
What Caused the Horus Heresy?
00:26:53
Speaker
Part of this is like, it's fun. Second is like, when you make your space Marine Legion, you can be like, Oh, they're the part of the lost Legion, right? So there's like kind of a marketing aspect to it. But as the universe is almost fully unified,
00:27:05
Speaker
It's like towards the end and mind you that the technology being used in the great crusade is nowhere near the advanced technology that was used in the age of technology. Like it's still not to that level. Like the ships that we have are basically space cathedrals. Like it's very different. It's very gothic. It's very, uh, what's the word for it?
00:27:28
Speaker
It's a perfect future. There's a word for it, right? That's kind of the whole point of it, right? Is that just like how the medieval world was kind of looking back on Roman ruins going, oh my God, the world was amazing during Roman times. We're living in the dark ages of the future, looking back on these wonderful times that existed prior to us. Grimdark, I think is what you're after.
00:27:56
Speaker
But yeah, the whole idea is that we are living in the modern or the futuristic middle ages where we've lost so much and we're surrounded by all these great things and we don't understand it, but it's here. Yeah. Trying to recover lost technology, lost human societies, and not many worlds went in peacefully because they're like, we don't want to bow down to this space emperor. We don't care. And also like,
00:28:23
Speaker
A very important aspect of this is the background of what's happening with chaos. The emperor bans all religion. He's like, we're not doing this because he knows religion feeds the chaos gods. And he's hiding their existence from the universe. He's doing his best. Doesn't tell his sons about chaos, the dangers of the chaos gods. He is actively trying to reclaim the entire universe, get rid of all religion, and fingers crossed it kills the chaos gods because he knows how fucking bad news they are. But with this comes
00:28:53
Speaker
We get all the Primarchs back. Some are better than others in terms of their mental state. They all have their own little niche. And then while this is going on, the Emperor with his fleets across the world, some of these legions, they're like tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, Space Marine Strong, which is
00:29:16
Speaker
in which is supplementing the Astra Militarium, which is the space army. Millions of human beings, millions of people in like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of spacefaring vessels, like going across the stars. The emperor puts remembrancers with a lot of these fleets and these are artists, historians, like basically people of the liberal arts, like all the liberal arts majors that can't get jobs today. They get sent on ships and spread across the galaxy to record everything.
00:29:44
Speaker
They get a lot of jobs during this time. They all became more correspondents. Yeah, basically. Yeah. So they're trying to record everything and then also the cultures are coming into and they're like reestablishing these lost human worlds back into the Imperium. And it's like, but then we get the Horus heresy. Who wants to take a crack at explaining how Horus falls to chaos?
00:30:08
Speaker
Oh, God. So we don't we don't need to go into the the lodges or the the the demon sword. So you look like you're chomping at the bit to talk about Horace's fall to the chaos. I'm just sure I'm trying to figure it out. I have to say this the quickest way possible. Oh, man. A real quick way is like one of the prime marks.
00:30:40
Speaker
What is his name? Lorgar. Lorgar and Erebus. Fuck Erebus. He is just the chaplain of the wordbearers legion whose prime mark is Lorgar. Alright, so I'm gonna say something if I'm wrong.
00:30:59
Speaker
My bad. Basically what I recall is Horace and his Legion go hang out on a planet and they're trying to take it over and all of a sudden there's a bunch of weird chaos stuff happening. There's a bunch of weird little Davin that is the name of the planet, which is a great name by the way, Davin.
00:31:18
Speaker
Just has a good... Damn it, Daven! Fucking Daven. Anyway, so Horace goes and hangs out trying to take over this place. And he gets hurt, which is surprising because, you know, he's a fucking primarch. And anyway, he is cut and we're gonna skip a couple little steps, but long story short, the only way to heal him, he winds up getting taken into this lodge to...
00:31:47
Speaker
be taken care of and turns out that they're a bunch of cultists and start kind of getting him into the chaos lifestyle and he realizes that he's super here for it. And long story short, he jumps chaos and starts rebelling against Stanford.
00:32:05
Speaker
Yes. And the people that convert him are primarily from the 17th Legion under Lorgar. His real quick backstory is he worshiped the emperor as a god and every world he brought into compliance, converted them to basically a religion of the emperor, which comes up later. The emperor's like, I fucking told you we don't do religion. Sent in the ultramarines, the 13th Legion, and genocides the homeworld and says, Lorgar, we're not a fucking god.
00:32:33
Speaker
like, stop it. During his, basically his sad boy phase, his chaplain, Erebus, is like, oh, I do know of gods. They do exist and like brings Lorghar into chaos. How Erebus finds out about the chaos gods, there's a whole book about it. So they kind of set the stage
00:32:49
Speaker
to turn Horus basically. And that's how this starts. Horus gets tainted by chaos and turns against the emperor, secretly turns half of his brothers against his father and the loyalist legions
00:33:04
Speaker
creates the Istavon atrocity where he, it's a whole fucking thing. The universe goes into galactic civil war. The loyalist Primarchs get scattered because air, because fucking towards the end of the great crusade, Horace has made war masters so the emperor can go back and basically create a different way of traveling through the universe. And everyone is upset that their father left them and they put their brother in charge. And they're all like super, you know, jocks that want to be number like daddy's big boy.
00:33:34
Speaker
It's a summer jealous. It's just crazy. Emo decks that are like, daddy doesn't know me. He left me out here, put me in charge. And Horace capitalizes on this and betrays the Emperor, betrays his brothers, kills one of them outright at the Istvan and the world is set in flames. And it ends in like space opera style, Horace versus daddy.
00:34:02
Speaker
Horace like hurts the Emperor because the Emperor can't quite do it because Horace is completely overwhelmed with Chaos God energy like some of his brothers become like paragons or antagons I don't know of the Chaos Gods so each there's like four that basically become you know worshiping demons and it's a fucking mess but like the Emperor wins and
00:34:27
Speaker
basically kills Horace with mine bullets and erases him from existence. The traitors flee, the emperor wounded gets put upon the golden throne, which is keeping it. He's basically becomes a space zombie and his mental energy is lighting a universal lighthouse to make space travel happen.
Humanity's Struggle with Technology
00:34:46
Speaker
And ever since then, like 10,000
00:34:49
Speaker
basically human psykers, basically warlocks are sacrificed to him every day to feed his second energy. It, it's not a great time to be a human like the lore of Warhammer 40 K is fucked. So this all happens in the year 30,000. There's basically a time jump. The prime marks are basically gone. There's two that just came back. One just came back, which is the impetus for this. Like it was a huge reveal that Lionel Johnson of the first Legion has come back.
00:35:15
Speaker
of the Dark Angels. So that's where we are. But with this, there's like a couple of things that we talked about. The Necrons are back too. They're the Necrons here from earlier. And we're also in this grim dark period of this future that looks back on the past and they're still actively looking at the past for information.
00:35:34
Speaker
People worship, uh, the God emperor. They basically took, uh, Lorgar's book of the daddy Bible and instituted it after the God emperor's death. And it's just made things so bad. It's basically like Warhammer 40 K is as the Catholic church on black tar heroin and feudal. It's a good time. Russian super soldiers, man. So.
00:36:00
Speaker
how does archeology fit into all this? We've hit a couple points. There's clearly a very long and deep time of the universe that spans millions of years of various alien races, of various levels of advanced technology. And the primary, like, I guess archeologists, I guess to say from humans, the human standard is the adeptus mechanicus.
00:36:30
Speaker
I mean, they... So during the whole age of strife, so humans colonized the cosmos, right? And then the age of strife happened and we all went back to Earth and there were disparate colonies all over the place. One of our colonies was Mars and the Mars colony basically started worshiping a machine God.
00:36:55
Speaker
and devoted themselves to understanding engineering, mechanics, stuff like that. And the Mechanicum is essentially a semi-church, semi-corporation that is focused on technology and maintaining it, but also finding
00:37:16
Speaker
what they call new technology. I'm doing air quotes because what new technology in the 41st millennia is actually just finding old technology that was better, particularly in the form of these things called standard template constructs, which are like these really smart machines that
00:37:36
Speaker
produce different kinds of materials in mass at very high quality. So like an STC, a standard template construct could be for tanks, like an armored personnel carrier like the Rhino in 40k. They found an STC of a Rhino and it's this kind of perfect machine basis for
00:38:01
Speaker
troops. And the Mechanicum is always after these SDCs, always after esoteric knowledge, always after lost technology. So it's kind of the basis of their mandate.
00:38:15
Speaker
And they're also like the mechanic, these aren't people like the mechanicus like turn themselves basically into living robots. A big thing with mechanicus is that they believe the closer to like the machine they are, the closer they are to their God. So they try to replace as much as their, the can of their body with
00:38:33
Speaker
robotics, and then they have a bunch of crazy science, so like, really just that neurons go to control the stuff, but you wind up with these like giant minstrosities are the priests of the mechanicus and constantly trying to chase out these old technologies. And one other thing that's important, I think important to say in terms of the mechanicus is they're within the context of the cult mechanic, the religion there is they don't believe in
00:39:02
Speaker
I guess like engineering and creating their own new technology all that much. There's a bunch of stuff that gives that and taboos against creating technology. Hence why they're always trying to find old stuff and looking for these old STCs because the STCs themselves
00:39:20
Speaker
Yeah, so they were made for trying to go find new planets. And so the idea was you could have this machine with you to build literally anything you could ever need for your colony as you're going into this new planet that's never been explored. And so there's only elements of it that exist left. And so the mechanicists are always trying to find anything they can of these technologies that have been lost to try to bring the 40th
00:39:47
Speaker
Millennium. All in the context that Zenos technology is fucking heresy. Can't touch it. Can't reverse engineer it. New technology is also forbidden. And also like these people aren't that like if your laptop broke, they'd pray over it because they believe like every machine has its spirit. Like this is a backwards ass technician where they they've created a religion around machines and they like they're even further back. Like if 30,000 Warhammer 40 30,000 like the crusade.
00:40:15
Speaker
is pales in comparison to humanity's the age of technology. 40K pales in comparison to 30K. Like they can't create their own shit. They're basically scavengers. They lost how to like fix things essentially. They know kind of how, but like, and also AI is forbidden. Like after the age of strife where the, you know, the automatons rose up, not allowed to have AI. And so how do things work? Oh, if you're a heretic or a bad person, they lobotomize you and turn your brain
00:40:45
Speaker
into basically a processor and you become a floating skull with lights and you like, like video cameras are literally a floating human head, like skull and cerebellum with a fucking lens put in one of the eye holes. Like it's not great. There's a lot of skulls. There's a lot of skulls, you know? Yeah. And so, and these are the people that are in charge of like,
00:41:15
Speaker
going out and recovering lost human technology from 30K, but also from the great crusade, but the age of technology. There's a fun short story where basically people from the age of technology develop a time traveling device and actually time travel to the year 40,000 and try to make contact with the Imperium. They all get fucking tortured as heretics.
00:41:37
Speaker
and the ship is so advanced, the mechanicist doesn't know what to do with it, space marines don't know what to do with it, and there's an AI on board that is absolutely fucking livid with what's happened and what's happened to humanity, is able to infiltrate the space marine armor and suit, shuts them down, and the mechanic just starts praying and waving incense, trying to calm down the machine spirit, and then it's just like this AI is like, what the fuck happened?
00:42:02
Speaker
Cause it's like, yeah, it's killing my crew, killing my crew. Like what the fuck? Like who, you know, it's just like things just went so ass backwards. And so one of the thing I want to mention really just quickly is we keep talking about like 40 K and all this stuff, what are they doing? One thing that is, I think really important to note within the board of 40 K and that universe is there's been kind of a, a massive loss of knowledge and people are kind of just,
00:42:32
Speaker
doing these rights that they know that makes technology work and it's become ritualized and part of like religion and all these things that you just do. There is no real understanding of how the technology works or how to fix it. Hence why people are constantly trying to find SECs and why they're trying to do
00:42:50
Speaker
all of these things to get new technology to keep things working. There is no real understanding of the intermechanics of like how the ship works or how the gun works. This is just what you do. You put oil on it and then you praise it. Yeah. And there's factions of the mechanic that have their own STCs and won't share it. And as Mason said, they're not allowed to innovate. There is one dude who it does innovate.
00:43:11
Speaker
And he was kind of seen as heretical. And like we said, two prime marks returned. They're gone for 10,000 years. They come back, and they're like, what the fuck happened to our daddy's empire? And they're kind of lost, too, basically, through this time skip. And they remembered 30k. And they're like, holy shit, we can't even build new things anymore unless we have these basic 3D printers that will do it for us.
00:43:34
Speaker
our dads being worshipped as gods, we're being worshipped as demigods. And they remember the time where there was no religion, like they remember innovation, because that's what their dad was a super scientist. That was part of his thing. And they're trying to slowly bring that back. But in the context of like, if we piss off the church, they will get rid of us.
00:43:53
Speaker
if we piss off these other factions of humankind, they get rid of us. So they're trying to navigate it as well and work with the mechanic of like trying to bring, because at this point, the human empire is just receding. The Imperium man is not a great time. I think the average lifespan of a human, if you're not in the elite class is like 20 years.
00:44:11
Speaker
like something super short, it's not great. And we're being attacked by space bugs, space elves, space orcs, fucking space Buddhists or space communists.
Archaeological Challenges in 40k
00:44:25
Speaker
Like the whole Imperium is just like retracting because we're being assaulted from all ages. And then the Necrons are back from 40 years ago. 60 million years ago, the Necrons are back, they're hanging out, robots living the dream.
00:44:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's sort of not prime. Yeah. And with that, we'll go ahead and end section two and we're going to get how these races in 40K, like how this archaeology is actually occurring. What does that look like and how if everything is basically becomes heresy, if you touch it, how does you actually gain knowledge in this really fucked up dystopian future? Later.
00:45:04
Speaker
And welcome back with episode 152. So continuing on this conversation of archeology, like archeology that is existing within the Warhammer 40k universe, but then also, you know, talking conceptually, like how the fuck would we as modern day archeologists to do if we were like time warped into 40k and would not be branded heretics immediately? How would you actually do some of this and like excavate these sites? Cause like,
00:45:27
Speaker
how would you actually do it other than basically doing Indiana Jones style archeology, which is primarily what 40K is of like going into known places.
00:45:35
Speaker
and looting for technology. Mason mentioned earlier the Landites, who are also known as the Landis, and these are a subcult within the Adeptus Mechanicus. And they're disciples of the techno-archaeologist Arcan Land. So they're archaeologists, they're techno-archaeologists, specifically.
00:45:58
Speaker
And, and so he, he finds this STC, which Craig mentioned in the librarians, omnis, basically the whole language of what they call high gothic and 40 K is like English words with like fucking what is anti fit. What's the opposite of a suffix, like Latin suffixes you just add, you just like kind of Latinize it a little bit.
00:46:19
Speaker
Yeah. Us a lot. Us-ness. They find this Helios pattern and the Prometheus pattern, basically vehicles, but the land diets and 39,000, they basically get
00:46:36
Speaker
genocided because they take the knowledge from these, you know, Arceo vehicles to create a new vehicle. And that's heretical. As we mentioned before, the belief in this time is that the God Emperor mankind, everything he created was perfect and he shouldn't fuck with God's creations. And if you do your heretic, unless you're the guy that created the Primaris Marines in which you get a pass because the demigod gave you the thumbs up, that's a whole thing we don't need to go into.
00:47:02
Speaker
And part of that was Games Workshop needed new people to buy more models, and they created a whole fleet of new vehicles and a whole set line of new space marines. We need big boys that are easier to pay. Yeah, so much easier. But the Landite still exist. So these techno-archaeologists still exist, and they have to do it in secret.
00:47:29
Speaker
And so they're looking for missing patterns of vehicles though, and they're trying to create better vehicles. So they're under the, they, this part of the mechanicus, these cultists like understand like the emperor was still, even though he's a god, like we can improve upon it, especially with, with the Primaris Marines and their vehicles and stuff, like they recognize there's still improvement, right? That's how much knowledge has been lost in 10,000 years. It's like they've, we've basically take several steps back.
00:47:57
Speaker
As that's going on, the Necrons briefly, they're awakening and they're trying to find their old Necrons. Not all of them have awakened. So they're trying to awaken other Necron societies and they're just, it's basically like space Egyptians. Well, at the same time, there are some people in the Adeptus Mechanicus actively looking for Necron technology and trying to find, what is his name? The Betrayer, not the Betrayer, what the hell is his name? The guy that ended up killing the Catan.
00:48:23
Speaker
The Deceiver. The Deceiver, yeah. That whole thing. Or even the moon dragon that may or may not be the, oh, Messiah on Mars. The Dragon of Mars, yes. He's, yeah. Yeah. May or may not be a satan. Yeah. God damn it, there's a lot.
00:48:41
Speaker
There's so much nonsense. But if you like actually look at this, this world, like a lot of this lore sets up multi-component sites of like, what's happening? Like there's a blank period before 30,000. We'd, we had no idea what the technology, all the lore tells us, the books tells us it's like super advanced technology, the pinnacle of the human race. We don't know much about it. Terminator judgment day happens. And then we basically turn everything. Everything's a super cathedral. All the ships are cathedrals, just like Google Warhammer 40 K ships.
00:49:11
Speaker
It's basically the Notre Dame with engines and a lot of guns traveling along the stars. But like even just, yeah, shit, we were, we were talking in the interim about like, how would you excavate Mars? Like, like, how do you excavate, you know, places like God damn, who are the, oh, they're Astromilitarium, that one army from the world war one planet.
00:49:36
Speaker
Oh, um, or the Brax, the siege of Brax. So they, they fight at Brax, but it's a specific, they can't forget what planet they come from. The death Legion.
00:49:48
Speaker
the death legend. Oh gosh, it's in a bug. We got to look it up. 40 K world war one army, Krieg, the death core. Yeah. So how do you excavate a world that used to be a paradise and then went into a civil war and nuclear Holocaust? Right? Like if we were, if we were to actually do this work, similar to
00:50:11
Speaker
Cause we've lost, unlike the middle earth series, which we talked about where me and David basically did like a 40 minute segment where we realized, oh wait, elves exist and they're immortal and they could just tell you you don't need archeologists. In this world, the Eldar hate primarily humans, even though they're also mortal, they don't give a shit about humans anymore. And so we're not talking to them. They're not giving us our history in this universe. And if you're a poor lowly person in the 41st millennium,
00:50:36
Speaker
How do you try to uncover human history across the stars? You're talking about digging through some serious construction, Phil. Yeah. Yeah. I know. When he asked that question, my first thought was like, how do you find Hunter Gather yourself after all of this serious modification?
00:51:03
Speaker
Cause like the emperor's palace is literally Tibet. Like it is the size of Tibet, if not larger. Like there's nothing left. There's nothing left on Terra in terms of like trying to find like a hundred gather. There's no oceans on Terra. Like the world has been so fucked. There's not oceans. It is, it is Coruscant and
00:51:22
Speaker
absolute decay. Like there's Star Wars lore about the lower levels, of course, on our city. The hive cities is what they're called in 40 K are turned the entire mountain range into his fortress complex. Yeah. I mean, but yeah, the layers are his house and also the rest of the planet is just one city. There, there is nothing else.
00:51:49
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, it's not great if you're at the lower levels, like most people in, on a hive city, never see the light of day, their lifespan, they maybe make it to 30. They make it know their name. So I think Tara, in terms of like the archeology there is horrifying. I have,
00:52:07
Speaker
I don't know how to like excavate that. I mean, like you look at like crazy levels of like superposition and create some interesting hypotheses about how these like hypothesis were built, but at the same time, like how do you, there's so many layers to it. It's just the most stressful thing to think about.
00:52:27
Speaker
We know that from Nagasaki and Hiroshima how nuclear blasts impact urban areas and then how they're built back up and what does that look like in an archaeological context because a big part of the Warhammer 40k universe is that you have these massive nuclear wars occurring on on earth that kind of wipes it all clean and then the emperor rises out of these nuclear
00:52:53
Speaker
wars to take control of Terra. So I imagine we'd have to look at how do nuclear wars and nuclear warheads affect urban areas and the only two that I can think of are, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
00:53:13
Speaker
Yeah. So Hiroshima has been absolutely rebuilt and they've left a couple places. So like, yeah, the, uh, the A bomb dome was secured in the 1960s and it's a UNESCO world heritage site, but yeah, there has to be like, I imagine a layer of glass.
00:53:31
Speaker
I had no idea. Somewhere in the strata, there has to be some sort of like almost like a volcanic event where like there is pre-World War II material, a fucking crater at one point. Like there's definitely geologic, you could see the backfill and then they had to have cleaned it from the radioactive material.
00:53:50
Speaker
I mean, I think what happens, a million challenges, like, I don't know, for some reason, like the Columbia River Gorge is coming into my head right now in terms of like the sheer geology and confusion and what's happening there in terms of all these massive floods. So for listeners, Columbia River Gorge was subject to tons of like pretty much like place you'll ask would come down.
00:54:15
Speaker
build a big lake and then lake would burst through and then rip through this gorge and then create this really complex series of geology and the problem that hit there and I think what would happen to 40k is you have a series of like really complex
00:54:34
Speaker
events that would wipe out part of what was previously existing. So you only left with like minor little clues here and there about what happened before that would erode all the things that happened to be there that were constantly in set in one another. And so I think something like that would happen in 40k in terms of it's always war. There's always going to be nukes. These type cities are constantly building each other, ripping out what was there beforehand. And so you get urban archeology on steroids.
00:55:03
Speaker
Yeah. Like there's so many, like it's not even old wood, but like old tech problems, like even in the age of strife before the God Emperor mankind reunified Tara, it was run by like techno barbarians and crazy shit where they're, you know, for like 10,000 years, like, or 4,000 years, like constantly reusing old technology and to create these really fucked up fiefdoms.
00:55:27
Speaker
And so like you couldn't even, like even just trying to like identify, create like a seriation of artifacts would be like impossible in many contexts.
00:55:40
Speaker
Oh, especially when we're talking about between like, yeah, like 30 to 40 K, where they're still using a lot of the same technologies, like the primary thing for like the space Marines, the way to like figure out where you are in time is they're making model of like armor, but there's like, what, six different variations, sort of, for starting armor. 10 tops. Yeah, over 10,000 years.
00:56:05
Speaker
Yes. And then you get chaos and the warp into it where they're reusing stuff and time flows differently and just goes to a whole different thing.
00:56:15
Speaker
Yes. There's a Mark 10 power armor and that, that's it. Yeah. So 10 over 10,000 years. That's like fancy boy power armor before we get into primaras. Well, one armor is thunder power armor. So that's like the thunder warriors used even before 30 K model.
00:56:36
Speaker
Let's see. The other warriors were what, 28, 29 something? Yeah. 12,000 years. So basically over the course of, of human colonization of the Americas, they changed armor maybe 10 times. And then also one of those isn't really real. It's just because it was during the heresy and they just kept taking parts of other armor kits and like, well, I guess we'll call this one a number. Exactly.
00:57:04
Speaker
Yeah. It's a March six. Yeah. And then there's Terminator and then like all of them have their own special, like, you know, specializations, like each, you know, Legion does its own thing. And then like, and we didn't even fucking talk about like after the heresy, all the legions got broke up and he got chapters. And so now there's like hundreds of space marine chapters doing their own thing. It's just, we, we didn't even scratch the surface of 40 K more. Yeah. And we did a job explaining it.
00:57:35
Speaker
It's like you can't even with the technology because I guess you could see up until the age of Strife advances in technology where they've definitely done a certain way, but after that you have a 4,000 year period of just crazy, basically fallout weaponry and technology.
00:57:55
Speaker
Oh yeah, it's like the techno barbarians on Terra. And so, I mean, one thing I probably didn't chat too much about, but in terms of like, shouldn't they describe things were chill on Terra. And that's kind of why like that big daddy emperor said it to jump in and just try to help. But like, it took him longer to take over Terra than it did for most of the Great Crusade.
00:58:21
Speaker
Yeah, it took a while. And the entire time they referred to everyone else as like techno-barbarians, which is one, the coolest thing I've ever heard. And then two, their armor was just anything they could scramble on and all this kind of wild stuff. And so in terms of trying to identify that in terms of archaeology and try to develop a seriation,
00:58:43
Speaker
I have no idea where to begin. It's definitely like planet specific because if we think about Caliban, the home of the first Legion and like imagining to get blown up at the end of the heresy, not talking about it, but it goes from being colonized, being part of the age of technology. It gets cut off from the universe. They regress basically into like
00:59:04
Speaker
a knight-feudalistic society, but it doesn't get destroyed. They're technically basically have low-key power knight armor. They use pistols and swords, and then there's a definite when they get reconnected with the Imperium. You could seriate that, I think, pretty well, because that planet's heavily forested. But then what about Fenris and the space wolves, where absolutely nothing changed?
00:59:31
Speaker
And they were just like, no, we love our barbaric lifestyle. We love being space spikings. Yeah. So there's definitely points in time of like outside of Terra, initial colonization, seriation up until the eye of Terra opens with the birth of Slenash. And then some get, what's the word that they use?
00:59:54
Speaker
when they bring compliant, some, you know, planets go into compliance willingly. Some don't. So there's definitely like capital cities that, like, you know, depending on the Legion, if Angron and the world eaters show up, your planet is fucking done for. So there's a layer of just absolute destruction. And then, you know, the seriation of like, this is the Imperial buildings. Like they have that plan, but like, or is planets going up and rebuilding a new home or a new Athens.
01:00:24
Speaker
I'm also curious, they'll talk about, let's say the Night Lord showed up. A lot of times you're in the crusade. Night Lord's, their entire thing, shtick, is they're terrifying, horrifying, and horrible. They show up, people give up, go into compliance. They talk about destroying and rebuilding everything within the Imperial fashion. What does that destruction look like? Are they doing
01:00:50
Speaker
Actually just knocking stuff down, is there any kind of destruction debris? Is there any kind of ways to rebuild what it may have looked like in the past or are they straight up just like melting everything, glassing it, what's happening there? Are we talking syncretism or full replacement? Yeah, like what are we looking at?
01:01:10
Speaker
I think the ones that don't go compliant willingly get absolutely rebuilt the Imperial way. But like when the Emperor comes across Roboot Gilliamen in the 13th, and he has his own little empire already, they're largely left intact.
01:01:26
Speaker
you know, Sanguinius, when he's connected on ball, they really don't even rebuild that. Like some of those planets don't even really get rebuilt. They get kind of left alone and you know, ball becomes basically like a sand planet like Tatooine with like radioactive scorpions and they just kind of let the Primark do his thing and they don't really change it. So there's like definitely variants into how some worlds get brought back into
01:01:53
Speaker
the empire. And it's just like, like, you know, Tara is a fucking archeological nightmare. Some of the others might be able to do more stratified archeology and figure things out and have a seriation of cultures and artifacts.
01:02:06
Speaker
But there's like a holistic, I guess, like K2 layer in all the planets, for the most part, right? Where like the birth of Slynach is a major galactic event that is similar to like what wiped out the dinosaurs on earth. Like you can find that ash layer across the planet. I would imagine you would have that similar K2 boundary in human colonized worlds across the galaxy where there's very much one form of technology and then it changes.
01:02:41
Speaker
I would imagine just with, you know, natural deviation and technology that occurs over 10,000 years, and then all of a sudden a reestablishment of the, the mechanic owns relatively stick doctrines of what technology has to be. I imagine you would, you would see some sort of, you know, mountain of Zama type
01:03:07
Speaker
layer where there's one and then all of a sudden there's another. I imagine similar to a Roman layer. When Romans expand out, they're coexisting with the previous indigenous and then they bring the Roman package with them. I imagine it's the same in just like
01:03:23
Speaker
You know, the Romans had various levels of influence upon colonization. So I imagine similar to the Imperium, if we look at the Empire of Man, as you know, the space Romans, where you have that same sort. And I'm sure you'll see something similar, like I'm thinking of, you mentioned Calvan earlier. Calvan was the chaos planet, kind of a little bit, right? Yeah, it was a death world.
01:03:50
Speaker
And so I think I remember seeing art of the prom work that was there, all of this stuff in 30K. It was very spiky, very chaos-y, all this kind of stuff. But thinking about the seriation of how you would look at the artifacts from that assemblage, let's say you have something that was pre-chaos, chaos, post-grade crusade. And you look at it.
01:04:15
Speaker
in Caliban and then the line showing up and how that impacted Caliban's artifacts and the way that they created their weapons of war. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of, a lot of those, there's probably, yeah, that's a second layer. Cause like many Primarchs ended up unifying their home planet. Some, not so much. Yeah. Yeah. You probably like use that as some way of like,
01:04:39
Speaker
Artificially, in terms of what's changing in terms of manufacture, what's happening, like I was thinking of a Nostromo Night Lord's area, when do things become more efficient? When do you see like better tools and all this stuff, ignoring all the horrors of Conrad Kurz? But there'd be some level of change in terms of the assemblages you would see, right?
01:05:02
Speaker
Yeah. And it's all variant on which Primark because like, yeah, Conrad becomes like evil space Batman and rules his planet by just sheer fucking terror and terrorizing the mobs and gangs that run the planet into like chilling out. Yeah. And then of course there's planets that, you know, they get absolutely wiped out. Like spoiler, Caliban blows up at the end of the heresy and becomes, you know, space high charity from Halo. It's, you know, like
01:05:35
Speaker
So many dirty references coming out, you know, but it's it's like
01:05:39
Speaker
It would be, like, if there is one universe I'd like to be an archaeologist, it'd probably be the Star Wars universe. It wouldn't be 40k. 40k is a fucking nightmare. Like, even just from the archaeology, if it was legalized. Like, it's just, you know, like, I don't want to be excavating somewhere, and then these glowing green automatons from like 60 million years come out and start destroying the planet. I feel like the risk of death in the 40k universe is much higher than every other fictional universe.
01:06:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. Well, I hope this was informative. Some people, I know, like we do have 40 K I've talked about 40 K a couple of times on this podcast and I get people reached out and like, so I hope this was beneficial. Some people like we enjoy doing episodes like this. We're bringing on our friends to talk about something like archeology adjacent or just, you know, nerdy fandom. It's not dogs. So there's that, but before
01:06:41
Speaker
But before we end the show, Alex and Mason, what are a couple sources, articles, books, videos that you recommend for anyone interested wherever 40 K I'll go out and say like the, the first three novels of the horse heresy. Fantastic. I was going to say that. Yeah.
01:07:01
Speaker
I, I, I love reading about, you know, you basically like my fate, like the two favorite space Marine legions. I love reading or a couple. I love reading about the blood angels, the dark angels and alpha Legion, and then also thousand sons. So you just kind of pick out of the hundred, I think over 180 books. Now you basically kind of find your favorites and you look for those books.
The Warhammer 40k Hobby
01:07:22
Speaker
Anything written by Guy Haley is, is, is pretty good. And that's all Horace heresy. That's a whole different series. And
01:07:28
Speaker
Dan Abnett, it's going to be wonderful as well. Fantastic. If you want like a real nice like self introduction to like 40K, the Iceborn series, I think it's pretty good by Dan Abnett. It's kind of what got me starting to get interested in the lore. Titanicus is also a great, just like one-off great bug. It's a lot of fun. I highly recommend it.
01:07:53
Speaker
Yeah. I love NIDS and Blood Angels, so I like the 40k series about when the Blood Angels fought the Tyranids. The Devastation of Ball is one of my favorite. That's a good one. There's some amazing YouTubers out there. Games Library, which creates the Warhammer series. If you go to their website, we'll put that down below. Games Workshop. Black Library, which is their publishing house, has
01:08:17
Speaker
A bunch of those. Yes. So Crave just mentioned Major Kill. If you want basically an ADHD buffed out Australian telling you about Warhammer, I love him. Some people hate him, but I love his energy. He's good. So sexy. Yeah. If you guys are interested in like a good wiki, Lexicanim is a wonderful fan source outlet or reference for 40K.
01:08:44
Speaker
I also enjoy if you're a Reddit nerd and spend a lot of time on Reddit. 40k lore is a wonderful subreddit full of tremendous human beings that have a lot to say about this whole nerdum.
01:09:00
Speaker
Major Kill's a good one. I also like Baltimore. He's pretty good. There's one guy, I think it's Oculus Empyrea, where he talks to the lore like he's an Adeptus Librarian, telling you if he was the lore guy himself, like reiterating the lore of 40k from the perspective of a historian in that time. I fall asleep to him a lot because he has such a smoothing, chill voice. What do you guys got?
01:09:29
Speaker
Well, I was saying, uh, I tend to go to like 40 K lower on Reddit and just kind of hang out and read a bunch of random posts. And they also, if I can't sleep, that's kind of one of my go-to things started looking at 40 K lower on Reddit. Yeah. It's Jesus. There's, there's, there's a lot of really good content and like Warhammer blew up.
01:09:52
Speaker
I think a lot of people reconnected during the pandemic because you could just order it and paint and it, um, so like a lot of people, I only played the game like a couple times. Like I just enjoy painting. Like I was, especially as an archeologist or an academic, like the fact that I just have to sit there with a model and just think about painting like zens me out.
01:10:09
Speaker
I was always interested in 40k and like the Warhammer universe and all this kind of stuff but what really kind of spurred me to actually take the dive and start like nerding out about it was during the pandemic. I just really wanted to have a hobby and so I just started paying a bunch of 40k, reading a ton of like random 40k stuff on the internet and it's amazing. I had a lot of fun over the last couple years.
01:10:36
Speaker
Yeah. I have a couple models I haven't painted. So like the ones that I showed Craig earlier, like my, uh, devastation of ball captain, I actually, a body of mine from undergrad, he got his degree in art. His name is Ethan. And he is a professional Warhammer 40k painter. And like some of, I think one of my models is on the website. Like he gets featured. I kind of helped him a little bit with like how to do more Instagram stuff.
01:11:02
Speaker
But if you look him up, he's Handy's underscore hobbies, H-A-N-D-Y-S underscore H-O-B-B-I-E-S. His whole channel is stuff he paints and gets commissioned to. And like what I love about his posts is he does like a real quick piece of the lore about them. So like he's, his content has gotten fantastic. And I really love going to him right now. I think he has like over a dozen commissions of the lions model.
01:11:29
Speaker
And he does. He knows the shit. That model is really sexy. I'm going to have to text him because like this guy's a fan boy. I completely unbiased perspective on it. Just saying I was looking at it and trying to figure out how to like convert it to warriors. He has a bunch. So like it's it's kind of funny because like right now, of course, everything is. I heard without.
01:11:58
Speaker
I'm trying to remember mine around there, but he's like gotten Dorn. He's done 30K models. So like, if you're interested just to see like a variance of the different kinds of stuff. Cause like in the Warhammer community, there's God knows so many different
Complexity of Warhammer 40k's Lore
01:12:13
Speaker
armies. Every faction has sub armies and different units. Like the variance is crazy and they're really fun to paint. Like I'll never paint chaos. Like the chaos Marines like trying to play, like if I can't, I would commit suicide.
01:12:29
Speaker
trying to paint a plague marine, I think. It's so funny. You should be sloppy and do what you want. It might be Papa Nergal's second acolyte. Yeah. I mean, look at my dirty, like black templars. That's a dirty boy. That's a good looking black templar.
01:12:52
Speaker
How do they play? Cause I've always liked, cause I liked shooting still. And I was thinking about doing Imperial fists. Do they play well on the table? Like I guess, well, you've never played. I've never played. So I have no idea. I just like pain.
01:13:07
Speaker
Simple Orange has got to play more like Blood Angels. It's got to be more kind of close combat, faster in phase. Yeah, and they all have different play styles. I mean, with the Orcs, if you paint it yellow, it goes faster. That's in the rules. Legit. I don't know, paint it red, right? No, paint it yellow goes faster. Oh, I thought it red. I think it makes the explosions bigger. I thought red goes faster.
01:13:35
Speaker
Oh, no, red isn't necessary for the cold to speed. Yellow is the cold to speed, isn't it? Yellow is cold to speed. Yeah. Yeah.
Conclusion and Farewell
01:13:43
Speaker
Oh, well, no, there is also painting at red makes it go faster. There's a Jesus fuck. Yeah. Works get weird. Basically. Everything in 40 K is contradictory.
01:13:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's a whole thing. Anyways guys, so we gotta end this. Jesus, our producer's gonna kill me. Craig, where can our listeners find you on social media? Oh, you can find me on Instagram, at elcravo, that is Spanish for the Cravo. That's probably the easiest place to find me.
01:14:21
Speaker
And Mason, where can our followers find you? I don't have social media, but I don't know, just email me. I'll put their Instagram, I'll put credit for Instagram emails built down below. And you know, thank you for joining us today, Alex and Mason. If given the chance again, would you still choose to live a life in 40 K ruins?
01:14:57
Speaker
It's a fucking miserable existence. Well, everyone, we just interviewed Mason, the cat and Alex, Craig, both serum archeologists, not to just across the river for me. You can find their contact information down below, you know, please be sure to rate and review the podcast, write us with feedback on whichever podcasting platform you're listening to. So on Apple, you know, you can give us the reviews. We'd love listening to them.
01:15:05
Speaker
I mean, if I can be like a duck and back and back, uh, all yellow or that I'm going to go with. Yes. Sure.
01:15:17
Speaker
And if you're listening on the all shows feed, please consider not and subscribing directly to our show. It helps us build subscribers one and then two, it allows us to get advertisers and sponsors. I do want to let everyone know that for a long time, the podcast was hovering around five or 6,000 downloads a month. And I'm really happy and excited to mention like we've for the past two, three months now, we've routinely gotten over 15,000 downloads a month.
01:15:47
Speaker
So we've actually, we had talked about this before, we've always wanted to supersede the dirt even before they left, and we've actually done that based on their numbers. We're really glad all of you have stood by our side as we've gone through this. It's about to be summertime again, which you know means that it's gonna be a shit show again. So yeah, please remember, if you review the podcast, we'll send you a sticker one day. So with that, we are out.
01:16:24
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. Hey, why was the book again lights the meeting?
01:16:46
Speaker
because he was like, hey, thank you, Mason. No, we'll just keep that. That's good. The joke this time because I was taking too long. I don't know.
01:17:10
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.