During all my workshops I try to help the children understand not just what we know about the past but how we know about the past. I feel very strongly that children and other learners should not take what specialists say on trust but should be confident to ask the question “How do you know that?”
Sometimes this can backfire, and I spend the next ten minutes being challenged on every utterance that comes out of my mouth. One memorable occasion a child asked me how I knew so much about the Romans and another child answered, “because he was there!” But I bear the humiliation because to empower children to appropriately challenge authority is a fundamental part of what I do.
The Paradox of the Past
Historians say and write some pretty wild things which is part of the appeal of history. From the comfort of our sitting rooms, we learn about people very much like us and at the same time startlingly different. As the saying goes “…the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” which opens us up to a wider world where the familiar can become unfamiliar. But how do we know so much about it?
Historians use sources to learn about the past. Primary and secondary sources enable us to create history. Primary sources are sources that are not modern. I hesitate to say from the time because most ancient sources are written decades, sometimes hundreds of years, after the life of the subject for example Alexander. Secondary sources tend to be modern in the form of biographical material. Written sources are complicated to deal with but can shed real light onto the lives of men and women living in the past. The biographies of the Caesars, the letters of Offa to Charlemagne, even text like Beowulf, can give us a taste of societies and their values long ago. Obviously there are limits, particularly for periods of history that are literally prehistoric. Prehistory is the longest time period in history, and nothing was written down, so we have to use different sources to reconstruct the lives of our ancient ancestors.
Written Words vs. Unearthed Lives
Archaeology is a vital tool to historians as it sheds light on the actual lives of our ancestors and explodes myths created at the time and by historians. Who can bear to call the Anglo-Saxon period a “Dark Age” when faced with the treasures of Sutton Hoo or the Staffordshire Horde? I think it’s worth pointing out that written history tends towards the elite whereas archaeological research, particularly in Jorvic (Viking-age York), shows us the lives of ordinary people. Ovid spoke of the Roman elite and showed us their dining rooms, but archaeology shows us real houses in Pompeii where we see the dining room, the slaves’ quarters and the kitchens that they laboured in. With regards to prehistory, we are indebted to archaeology for all our knowledge. Without finds such as Cheddar man, Star Carr or the preserved megafauna of Siberia my Stone Age to Iron Age Workshop would be as authoritative as HG Wells. Another useful source of information is anthropology. Anthropology, the study of people, involves studying the lives of men and women who still live a prehistoric lifestyle – hunting, gathering in a nomadic fashion. The work of anthropologists has exploded many myths about Stone Age people who for decades have been portrayed as stupid, brutish and crude. This myth dissolves in the face of beautiful cave art, preserved skeletons that show the signs of trauma healed and intricate Stone Age tools. Modern interpretations of our ancestors tend to be humane and sympathetic. As I say to the children “we don’t make this stuff up like some kind of Victorian.”
The Ultimate Question: Justifying Our Understanding of the Past
History is a reconstruction of the past which must be prepared for the question “How do you know that?” It’s morally wrong for us to depend on our authority as professionals but rather we should rely on the warrant of our sources to produce interesting, authoritative and entertaining workshops.
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