Crafting the Past

For several years, Dig It! has partnered with digital education specialists Immersive Minds to bring Scotland’s stories to life through Minecraft in a project called Crafting the Past. Often described as “virtual LEGO”, Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time with nearly 140 million monthly active users as of 2021.

In 2019, the Crafting the Past website was launched with nine Scottish sites meticulously recreated in Minecraft, including museums, a castle and a hillfort. Since then, these builds (known as ‘maps’) have been available to download for free to anyone who already has Minecraft installed on their device.

One of the most detailed maps (built on a 1:2 scale) is the entire island of Hirta in Hiort (St Kilda) off the west coast of Scotland, which includes Gaelic song, archaeology and tales from the island’s more recent past.

In 2021, the Crafting the Past team joined forces with a class of students from a school in Sweden to tell an older chapter of the Hiort story: the Norse presence on the islands over a thousand years ago. The Shared History project involved students digitally excavating and researching artefacts, meeting with experts from Scotland, and creating their own Norse Minecraft characters with a script explaining something about their life. The scripts were recorded by the students in Swedish and are now available through the Hiort map on the Crafting the Past website with a shortened English translation.

The project was such a success that it forms a case study for the Swedish Department of Education, and the Crafting the Past team are exploring how to run it again while expanding the scope and partnership.

Want to take a look at the map? Visit the Crafting the Past website to start exploring.

Hiort in Minecraft (Image Credit: Immersive Minds)