Fus Ro Dig !: The Skyrim Archaeological Survey

Fus Ro Dig !: The Skyrim Archaeological Survey is Archaeology Soup's semi-regular series of analytical playthroughs of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the fifth main installment in Bethesda Game Studios' long-running The Elder Scrolls series of fantasy roleplaying games.

The northern province of Skyrim, on the continent of Tamriel in The Elder Scrolls fantasy setting, is strewn with all manner of caves, ancient underground and above-ground ruins, and also plenty of inhabited vernacular architecture, rural, fortified and urban. Such a diverse fantasy land is just begging to be explored by the eyes of real world archaeologists, to enhance the exploration of the game's environments with modern archaeological and historiographical perspectives and methods.

The Skyrim Archaeological Survey series actually consists of two different documentation overviews. There is both a video series, the main part of the effort, but also an accompanying dedicated blog. See the following two sections for more details.

Skyrim Archaeological Survey blog
Yes, this archaeogaming project even has a whole blog dedicated to it ! You can read it here.

Skyrim Archaeological Survey video series
The video series is presented by Marc and Liv. You can find the whole playlist for this video series here, and the individual episodes of the series are listed in the table below.

Trivia
The Fus Ro Dig! of the title is an archaeologically themed play on the (in)famous Fus Ro Dah spell from the game, which provides the player character with the ability to throw people off their feet with their breath, accompanied by a mighty shout.

(The spell was so iconic to TES V: Skyrim that it achieved meme status in the early 2010s, with plenty of people making joke videos about people being blown away by gusts of air and similar, accompanied by the shout-spell.)

Hopefully the archaeological exploration of the province of Skyrim will knock you off your feet as well, albeit with less overwhelming force. ;-)