Promoting awareness of the archaeology and history of north Devon
Promoting awareness of the archaeology and history of north Devon
Catching them Young - Terry Green (Newsletter No 12 2006)
In June I was asked to talk to children at Northam Primary School about archaeology. I assumed at first that the children would be in Year 6 or at least Year 5 and therefore old enough to tackle a few abstract concepts: I didn’t want to implant any idea that archaeology was about treasure seeking, but rather was a way of learning about people and life in the distant past. I was surprised to find therefore, that I was being asked to address five and six year olds. Clearly I hadn’t read up Key Stage 1 of the National Curriculum!
It was explained to me by the teacher, Ann Joyce, that the class had been talking about dinosaurs and fossils - they had even learnt the word palaeontologist! They had also talked about early humans living in caves and had made their own cave in a corner of the classroom. In line with the current teaching of history, they had discussed how we can know anything about the past and had come up with the concept of archaeologist. They wanted to meet one!
So on 8th June I turned up at Northam and, after tea and biscuits and a little orientation from Mrs Joyce, I was introduced to the class. I’m over 6 feet tall and they were very small. With them seated on the floor in a semi-circle, the size difference was even greater, so to avoid them straining to look up at me, I spent most of the time down on one knee.
The idea I wanted to get across was that basically archaeologists take dead people’s rubbish and try to work out how they lived. So I took in a Tesco’s bag of Coke cans, crisp packets, chocolate wrappers, old light bulbs, etc. and, producing them one by one, asked the children what we could know about the people who left this rubbish behind them. They had no problem with this, and once we’d got through a barrage of contributions about favourite crisps and the need not to eat too much chocolate, we moved on to the next stage where I dropped a plate on the floor and produced sherds of late 20th century pottery. This brought further contributions about domestic incidents, but led quite nicely into discussing what might happen to broken pottery and how it might end up in the ground.
We moved on to the class sand tray which had been salted with a selection of ceramic bits and pieces from Iron Age (NOT from North Devon!) to Roman to medieval to post-medieval to modern plus a few bones, teeth and buttons. Trowels were handed out to volunteers and time was now spent on a somewhat haphazard dig (no stratigraphy) during which one child after another gained the limelight by holding up a find for inspection. At each discovery I announced an approximate age for the find and gathered from the exclamations that someone had made a good job of developing a sense of historical time in the young minds (or they just enjoyed going ooooh!)
I don’t know whether I succeeded in developing an understanding of archaeaology, whether there might be any future Phil Hardings or even Barry Cunliffes in Northam, but we all enjoyed it.