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Deep Dives
Duncan Geere
Written By
Duncan Geere
Published
7/6/23

Taking Inventory: Brush

Brush up on your archaeology

In the Trails & Tales update, we introduced a new feature to Minecraft! Well, we introduced many features, but I’m thinking of Archeology. Archeology will let you dig into the history of the world around you, uncovering ancient traces of past civilizations to learn more about how they lived.

But here’s the thing about ancient traces of past civilizations – they’re kinda fragile. You can’t expect to preserve these treasures if you're smacking them around with a shovel. No, you’ll need to take a little more care with them, caressing the dust and dirt off with our item of the week: the brush.

A screenshot of the in-game UI, demonstrating how to craft a brush.

To make a brush, you’ll need a stick, a copper ingot, and a soft feather to do the actual brushing. Line them up in that order from bottom to top in a crafting grid, and you’re ready to go.

Next, you’ll need to find some suspicious sand or suspicious gravel. Try looking around desert wells, pyramids, ocean ruins, or trail ruins. Found some? Great – but don’t break it! Instead, whip out your brush and start brushing away with the use button. 

As you do, you’ll see an item start to emerge. It might be a pottery shard, which can be combined with other matching shards to make a full pot. Or it might be another random item, which will no doubt tell you a little more about the people that once lived there.

Like other tools, brushes have durability and will eventually break. You can combined two damaged brushes together into one to repair their durability, or apply the mending or unbreaking enchantments to avoid this.

A real-life example of an excavation with a brush tool.

Image credit: France3470 // CC BY 2.5

The word “archaeology” is a mix of two old Greek words – “archaia”, which means “ancient things”, and “logos” which means “knowledge” or “theory”, so it’s basically about getting knowledge or building theories about the past by looking at ancient things.

Funnily enough, archaeology itself is pretty old. Back in 550 BCE, King Nabonidus of Babylon excavated ruins from the Akkadian Kingdom from about 2200 BCE – about 1600 years before. That’s a similar timespan to us digging up Viking remains today. We know this because he wrote about it on a clay cylinder, which in turn was excavated in 1854, in the foundations of a ziggurat in Ur.

Unfortunately, King Nabonidus was so distracted by his archaeological hobby that he didn’t spend enough time on his day job – ruling the Babylonian empire. As a result, it was conquered about ten years later by the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great. So let that be a lesson to any Minecrafters getting too deep into their archaeology – keep an eye on your surroundings, or you might find yourself in the midst of an Illager raid, with nothing to fend them off except a brush.

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