This Year in Roman Technology: Celebrating the End of the Semester with Food Technology

When I told my students that we would be studying Roman food processing and technology, they were super excited. Teenagers like to eat! It all started way back a the beginning of the semester, and nothing went as planned.

Way back in August, after we painted, crashed, and then reconstructed little gardening pots to learn about potsherds in archaeology, we decided to recycle our pots for growing seeds. We had a plan in place to grow Roman herbs that we could use for our food unit in December. It all started with a book I had picked up in England when I visited in 2023 to do a self-directed tour of Roman Britain (see my Website here). Ryley's Roman Gardens and Their Plants intrigued me because not only were the illustrations beautiful, but they also contained information about the uses of each plant and their origins. I've also long been a fan of archaeologist Wilhelmina Jashemski's plant root casting in Pompeii. If you haven't heard of her work, look here for fascinating information about how archaeologists identified plants long gone from the gardens of ancient Roman cities. Before we ate Roman food, I wanted the students to have a little bit of information about how the Romans grew that food. What better way to learn than to do!

After a short presentation on Roman gardening (in which I told the students that to remain authentic to Roman methodology, I had saved my poop to use as fertilizer for our project - don't worry, they only believed me for a few seconds until I couldn't hold back a smile), the students used their pots to plant celery, parsley, fennel, oregano, thyme, sage, basil, etc. Here's where the plan went awry. A certain woodworking volunteer (who may or may not have been my dad) was supposed to deliver some raised gardening beds to our school. Unfortunately, he didn't get them to us in time before our little sprouting seeds died. Luckily, at this time in the year, my students were caught up in catapult design so they weren't too disappointed.

Seeds sprouting into Roman herbs

We picked back up with our food unit in late November in a lesson on wine production and tasting. Now...before you think I actually serve wine to middle school kids, just know that I tell them to tell their parents that. Just for a laugh. We use grape juice. I make mulsum (honeyed wine) by boiling the grape juice and dissolving the honey into it. Which reminds me...have you ever read Apicius' recipe for mulsum? The amount of honey needed boggles the mind and has to be wrong, but I digress. Recipes are a great way to introduce the students to the Apicius tradition.

After a lesson on wine production technology, the students taste the "wine," to which we add different seasonings found in Apicius: pepper, coriander, and toasted barley. The students really enjoy this experience because they think peppered wine will taste terrible. (It doesn't!) I grind the ingredients fresh in my classroom mortar and see if they can guess what they are by the smell. How many lessons do we teach where the nose and the tongue do the learning? Not enough!

Next up, it's Roman bread - so many archaeological sources for bread and grain grinding technology! And I can't write this post without thinking of the amazing Farrell Monaco, experimental food archaeologist, who has covered panis quadratus and many other ancient bread recipes and techniques. You should read her blog regularly if you're interested in exarc. For our lesson, we followed her recipe for Cato's grape must biscuits.

A ball of Cato's grape must biscuit dough

Since I wanted to have the kids create their own food as much as possible, I had to divide up the recipe into 25 parts per class. I'm glad I enjoyed math as much as I did in high school and college - I needed it! It was around this time that my classroom sink decided to be clogged which required us to take not one but two trips to the hall bathroom for hand-washing sessions. It's times like these that I'm grateful for our custodian, Mr. Chris, who is the G.O.A.T. anticipating what we need to make our classes work. Before mixing our ingredients, we studied the harsh conditions that enslaved people and animals endured in the grain mills. To see what grinding grain was like, the students ground different grains in mortars with pestles - not exactly like the ancient method, but the hardness of the grain was a surprise to them. We used a little of the ground-up grain in our biscuit recipe.

Grinding grain is hard work.

Our next lesson was all about Roman bread ovens and how they worked. We studied the Tomb of the Baker and ovens that were excavated in Pompeii. It was then time for the most exciting lesson of the unit: baking our biscuits in hand-made ovens. I learned to make these surprisingly effective cardboard ovens in Girl Scouts - they work SO well. The kids lined the inside of large copy-paper boxes with foil to protect the cardboard from heat. Then, we placed metal pie pans filled with charcoal underneath them. Over the charcoal, we rested the biscuit pans on recycled soda cans filled with water (for weight). If you've never seen one, take a look at this video. The simple technology in these ovens simulates the Roman ones easily. Parents helped to get the charcoal lit and ready to go while the students prepared their biscuits for baking. We had SUCH a good time! But we weren't done learning.

Baking Cato's grape must biscuits in our cardboard ovens.

Our last lesson was one I adapted from a participant in last summer's nerd camp: The Ancient Olympics and Daily Life in Ancient Olympia: A Hands-On History. I co-directed this K-12 Summer Institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities last July, and one of the best things about it was inspiring and guiding the teacher participants in developing their own hands-on history lessons. One of those participants, Catherine Daun of Cicero Preparatory Academy in Scottsdale, Arizona, did a wonderful lesson on Roman cheesemaking. I enjoyed it so much that I promised myself I'd use aspects of it in my Roman Tech class this year. It was a perfect addition to our food unit! Making the cheese was so much easier than I expected - basically, boil some milk and then add vinegar as a coagulant at the end. The curds appear as if by magic, floating to the top of the whey. After learning about Roman cheese-pressing technology, the students pressed their own cheese right in class before seasoning it and eating it on their biscuits. 

Squeezing some cheese

Now, I'm sitting here watching them take a short test on our food unit. They had to write about what foods and drinks they would serve at their own Roman dinner banquet. It was a scene! We now transition to our big experimental archaeology unit on ancient Roman leather shoes, starting in January. I'm almost too tired. Almost.

Can You Dig It? An Evening of Hands-On History and Archaeology

As a kid, I was obsessed with paleontology and archaeology. I kept a human femur in my bedroom and dug up the dental tools discarded by an ancestor behind my grandparents' hundred-year-old house. I collected road kill skeletons of animals whose lives ended along the busy road in front of my childhood home. I read the Childcraft dinosaur volume over and over again. After my dream of becoming an archaeologist was killed by my mother at the age of 10 (a famous story in our family), I became a teacher. And it's always been an unspoken goal of mine to get students interested in archaeology. Every August when I teach Roman Technology, I begin the year with a unit on archaeology. You can read more about that in this blog post.

When I became a Grosvenor Teacher Fellow with National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions, I knew I would have a unique opportunity to bump up this effort even more. Thus, this year we are doing a book study of Mark Aronson's If Stones Could Speak: Unlocking the Secrets of Stonehenge, the story of an unlikely pair of archaeologists who make a ground-breaking discovery about this famous UNESCO World Heritage Site. Each time we read a chapter together, the students reflect on what they've learned in their National Geographic Explorer Mindset journal, that I created so that my students can document their learning about travel.

We are also planning a trip to Poverty Point, Louisiana's only UNESCO World Heritage Site. I wanted my students, many of whom have never traveled outside of Louisiana, to explore the world through national parks and UNESCO World Heritage sites. I've also been holding training meetings to get my students ready for travel - how to visit a museum, how to use your phone appropriately, how to travel on a boat or plane, etc. If you've never done these things, you need to learn. I didn't fly on a plane (not counting returning from my dad's military service in Hawaii as a 2-year-old) until I was 22. I want to be sure that my students have the most successful travel experiences so that they will want to continue traveling after this year. Our trips will be happening in March and April so expect more information on our preparation and experiences in a future blog post.

When my students learn new things, they get excited, and I like to harness that excitement by challenging them to act as "presenters" at outreach fairs. These fairs serve two purposes: 1. they validate the knowledge that my students have acquired as they practice sharing it, and 2. they work as outreach initiatives to younger children (and adults) - who wouldn't want to study archaeology or classics when learning how to play an ancient game or excavate a tiny archaeological site? I've done big outreach fairs for the past three years by partnering with our local Louisiana Art and Science Museum in downtown Baton Rouge for All STEM Leads to Rome. My students act as presenters at learning stations that center STEM activities from the ancient Roman world: mini-catapults, ancient ink, Roman tic-tac-toe, bridge designing and arch building, and arranging stone mosaics. The kids really enjoy it, and many use it to add service hours in organizations like Beta Club.

My fellowship with National Geographic asks that we sponsor a student-led outreach event so I thought that adapting this already popular and fun fair into an archaeology outreach one would be a perfect way for my students to show off their knowledge and get the community involved. Planning started in August when I asked our state Division of Archaeology to partner with us. If you're a classics teacher who hasn't already called your local division to visit your classroom, WHY NOT? Sometimes, they even have an archaeologist who is also a classicist. Classics has so much to learn from archaeology. Ask me for more info if you need it.

I also applied for an archaeology outreach grant from the Archaeological Institute of America. We received $500 from this organization which will pay for all our expenses. We'll also be able to reuse many of these items for our next event coming up in April. I thank them MIGHTILY for their support!

After getting our local archaeologists on board, my students requested what they wanted to showcase at the event. I wanted the activities to reflect the skills and jobs of archaeologists. So, In addition to tried and true hands-on history activities such as arch building, mosaics, oak gall ink and papyrus, and rota game boards, they added the following:

1. WHAT IS THIS THING? One of my students has a 3-D printer and printed dodecahedrons for visitors to handle. After giving them a little archaeological information about these mysterious objects, visitors were asked to guess what they were used for, write down their answer and phone number on a card, and put them in a box. We drew from the box for prize winners during the event. Visitors LOVED this activity.

2. POTTERY RECONSTRUCTION The students decorated little terracotta flower pots with black sharpie markers to mimic ancient pottery. We then broke them into sherds. The students helped visitors put them back together using tape.

3. UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE MATCH The students picked famous sites that most visitors would recognize. We created a board for them to match up the pictures to the countries where the sites were located. Anyone who matched them up correctly got their names put in a box for a prize pick. Simple but effective!

4. ZEUS PHOTO BOOTH We had planned to have just a photo booth with National Geographic yellow rectangles to use for frames, but my students went harder. I had crocheted a Zeus beard last year to make the kids laugh, but one student asked if he could BE Zeus and pose with visitors. I thought this was a FANTASTIC idea and approved it. He wore an old toga I had made years ago. We combined the photo booth with a vintage National Geographic magazine giveaway station where visitors could peruse donated magazines and take one home with them to read.

Add to these activities the amazing booth that the Divison of Archaeology arranged. The education outreach director, Mrs. Josetta LeBoeuf, and her assistant developed two activities for this event. One invited visitors to create sand art to learn about archaeological stratigraphy - BRILLIANT, and very popular with the kids. In the other, they adapted the tried and true "dig box" excavation by using tiny boxes preloaded with "artifacts" (tiny objects) hidden in dirt and mulch. They spread plastic tablecloths on the floor so that messes were easily cleaned up afterward. It was AMAZING! They also brought along lots of free archaeology merch like pins that said "Future Archaeologist," coloring books, and fold-up meter sticks.

We held the event in our school gym from 5 to 7 PM, and we hosted about 150 people (excluding the 55 kids that participated). Our librarian also hosted a night of shopping at the annual book fair in the nearby library. Many families brought younger siblings and other random children. The prize giveaway really rocked everyone's world too. We gave a prize about every 15 to 20 minutes. I stood in the middle of the gym with my mic on and announced the winner. Everyone would clap and scream. The child would run over and give me a hug before proceeding to the prize box.

The final prize, an arch block-building kit, was given to a child who had completed our passport system. The students helped me design and fold special little book passports which you can see a video of here. This system incentivized attending all the stations. Each station had a spot in the passport book to get stamped. These also gave us a way to contact families who attended so we could get feedback from them about the event.

On the day after the event, my students and I spent time talking about how to improve it, whether we wanted to do it again, and what other themes we might incorporate in the future. They immediately seized on the idea of having a mythology outreach fair with a table for each Greek god and an activity related to that god. Students really do enjoy sharing what they learn. I was so touched to have a parent reach out and say that she was proud of her son for being Zeus and that this meant she was a queen now. LOL. A school board member attended with her children and raved about how impressed she was by the students. Feedback was very positive - all attendees gave us 5 stars. One said, "The stations all appealed to a wide age range of kids. There were lots of activities and the presenters were engaging and informative." Another said, "I feel like this is exactly the kind of event schools should be offering to the community: a variety of activities, accessible to all ages, learning while having fun, all of it hands-on and interactive. The presenters took their roles so seriously and were so impressive! The enthusiasm for the subject was palpable, and everyone seemed to have a great time." Here's to many more!  

Kids love putting together a Roman arch!

Writing on papyrus with oak gall ink.

Putting together a Solomon's Knot mosaic.

The merch table!

The magazine giveaway table

This Year in Roman Technology: Invisible Ink and Other Delights

Got your attention? Haha. Who wouldn't want to know how to make invisible ink? And we finally figured it out this month!

This month, my Roman Technologists learned about writing, not literature, but the physical practice of writing. Different tools, different inks, different surfaces.  

We started by writing on papyrus. And I know you're thinking, "But that's not very Roman." My definition of Roman Technology in the context of this class is anything used, invented, or adapted by the ancient Romans. And they used papyrus quite a bit. We didn't make our own this time around. If you're interested in doing so, you should check out Dr. Dan Leon at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who grows his own papyrus plants and harvests for this purpose. I got to try it out with him this past summer at my NEH-sponsored K-12 teacher institute. It was FUN and smellier than I imagined. (If we can get our little RoTech garden rolling - more on this in a later post - we will definitely be trying out some native species to use in class projects.) 

We tried out three different inks that the Romans may have used.

1. SEPIA: Pliny the Elder mentions squid sac ink although not entirely related to writing, more for dyeing. Although smelly, it's easy to purchase since it's used in fancy dishes like pasta Nero, and it's easy to thin out with water and use with a reed pen. The kids enjoy this smelly activity.

2. ATRAMENTUM: The Romans used this ink, made from lamp black and gum arabic, most heavily. It's easy to replicate with a little carbon powder and water. Caligraphers still use this ink today, and I was amazed (and horrified) to see how it's made - surely the Romans would have used a similar method to produce this ink?

3. OAK GALL INK: This ink is endlessly entertaining to teach students about especially when the galls needed to produce the ink can be found by the students themselves on our school's campus. The students had so much fun foraging for these tree growths, caused by a tiny, harmless wasp, under the shady oak trees that populate our lunch picnic area. Sidenote: I'm really proud of an article I wrote about oak galls that was recently published by Science Friday. You can read it here. When one of my students found out about this article, he told me that he would go home and tell his parents he knew someone famous! LOL

In addition to different ink types, my students also tried writing on wax tablets, and for the first time ever, we tried out ink tablets, tiny wooden tablets written on with atramentum and bound by leather cord, like the ones found at Vindolanda. 

Last, I made tiny plaster walls for each of my students to try scratching graffiti into. I poured plaster into small disposable plastic saucers and then I painted them with colors common in Roman times: black and blue. After learning about Roman graffiti, the students assumed a Roman persona and then used Roman cursive letters to scratch some graffiti into their tiny walls. Partner students then interpreted the message as best they could. The kids mentioned this as their favorite writing surface!

My personal favorite was making invisible ink. I knew that it could be done. Philo of Byzantium, an ancient Greek engineer of the 3rd century BCE, used the chemical process behind producing oak gall ink to write secret messages. In his Compendium of Mechanics, he describes how when at war, “Letters are written on a felt hat on the skin after smashing gallnuts and steeping them in water. When they dry, letters become invisible, but if ‘flower of copper’ (or iron) is ground in water like black (ink) and a sponge is filled with water, when (the letters) are moistened with the sponge, they turn visible.” This kinda sounds like gobbledygook, but I know what he means. Step 1 - My students wrote on papyrus with a weak oak gall ink solution. Step 2 - They added ferrous sulfate (crushed iron) to water and mixed. Step 3 - After the invisible oak gall ink had dried on the papyrus, they dipped their fingers into the iron solution and rubbed it over the dried invisible ink. Step 4 - They were amazed when the chemical reaction between the tannic acid in the oak gall ink and the iron combined to turn the invisible ink a dark black color. Fun times!! You can see the magic in this YouTube video we made.

We'll be showcasing our invisible ink in a couple of upcoming outreach events. And I've been asked to appear at a Shakespeare Festival coming up in the spring. Oak gall ink was widely used across Europe and early America into the 1800s. In fact, it was the ink favored by Leonardo Da Vinci and the founders of our country who used it to write the Declaration of Independence.

Here are a few of the oak galls we harvested during our foraging session under the oaks at school. There were SO many different types. Jim Bentley, a teacher friend I met through the Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship (with National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions) is cataloging and photographing the galls that his students find in the oaks at their school in California. He shoots multiple images over time, and he realized that the larva his students found was alive. As I was telling me students this story, one of my students said that he thought a wasp was emerging from a gall in was holding in his hand. He was right!!! We put the gall on my desk and let her slowly emerge. She was soooo tiny and cute. 

Our adventures continue as we head into a unit on ancient Roman food production. We'll be making ancient Roman bread, cheese, and trying out some herbs we've grown in our newly-built garden. More on that later. We've been super busy this month preparing for our outreach event centered on archaeology, Can You Dig It? More on that coming soon!

This Year in Roman Technology: Catapults

I never really thought much about ancient Roman catapults, to be honest. Even with 7 years of college, two classics degrees, and archaeological study abroad in Italy and Greece. Catapults were never on my radar. That all changed when, on Friday, May 5, 2000 (I remember the exact date), I saw the Ridley Scott movie Gladiator. And if you've seen it too, you already know what I'm going to say. That first scene, right? OMG. If you haven't seen it, stop what you're doing and go watch it right now. It depicts the highly-organized, brute strength of the Roman legions attacking the "German horde" painted as an unsophisticated mass of dirty barbarians. A bit cliched, yes, but the weapons were unlike anything I had ever seen...or heard: the thump of the exploding pots of burning oil hurled by the giant onagers, the whiz of the huge ballista arrows, and the whoosh of the fiery arrows shot by the archers. The whole spectacle made me re-think the experience of war. Who considers the SOUND of war? Maybe I'm in the minority amongst Latin teachers, but I loved the movie, warts and all. 

Many years later, I read Vitruvius' description of a Roman scorpion in Book X of his De Architectura. I was fascinated, and cursory searches on the internet found numerous replicas based on his writing, the most descriptive being this one by Wade Hutchison and Steve Godfrey. As I was contemplating projects for the first iteration of my Roman Technology class, I very much wanted to work on catapults, but unlike Hutchison and Godfrey, I had none of the wood-working skills that are absolutely essential for such a project. I turned my attention elsewhere that year and forgot about catapults.

A year later, I was working in EBR Schools at the #BestMiddleSchoolInTheParish teaching Roman Technology, and I was selected for a STEM fellowship. Fellows got mentorship with a STEM teacher who helped us to develop projects for our programs. I was so fortunate to meet Heather Howle, a STEM teacher who had written her own curriculum and valued the idea of integrating history and engineering. Through her guidance as my STEM mentor, I learned that STEM teachers use catapults frequently to teach force and motion in physics. The aerospace industry uses them to launch and land fighter jets off aircraft carriers through a system called CATOBAR, an acronym for "catapult-assisted take-off barrier arrested recovery." (Watch here for an explanation of how this system works.) Thus, catapults are particularly relevant in today's real world, not just as a tool for learning.

As I learned more about catapults, I picked up some great ideas about how to teach them. One of the best catapult teaching units I've seen is by Vivify STEM, a two-woman team of Texas-based aerospace engineers turned educators. Here's a free one by Engineering with Paper (all you need is paper, scissors, and tape!) With these plans, I particularly liked that I didn't have to know wood-working to create devices that could be built by students and tested like ancient Roman ones. Unlike the real ones, these are safe to shoot with projectiles like q-tips, ping-pong balls, pencil erasers, and cotton balls. I always teach them in September because they teach students the basic concepts of the engineering design process. If kids have not taken a STEM class and/or were never encouraged to build with blocks as youngsters, they sometimes struggle with designing and building their own devices. Catapults are a low-stakes way to learn. 

This year's students are no exception. They have LOVED learning about catapults. We began the unit with an overview of the Roman war machine. Of course, I add lots of history and textual evidence. We read excerpts from Vitruvius and Josephus, for example. The students learned about different siege weapons of the Romans including onagers, ballistas, scorpions, siege towers, battering rams, naval rams, etc. This past month, I got stuck in a research rut learning about the Balearic slingers and the bullets of lead and clay that they used. Fascinating stuff, and of course, I'm trying to come up with a safe way to teach them about slinging!

During our STEM labs, we learned how to build two models (an ONAGER and a SCORPION) with my assistance, and then they tested them with different projectiles for accuracy and then for distance. The students practiced using tape measures, recorded data, and then reviewed how to figure averages. (Math teachers love me around this time of year.) Then, we took it to the next level, and they designed their own catapults to fire and test.

If you're interested in learning more, see my catapult lesson here. Let the fun and learning begin!

This Year in Roman Technology: How We Know about the Roman World

I hate to say this out loud, but this August has been the smoothest start to a new school year that I have ever had. (Run go knock on wood real quick - I just did!) Every year that I get to teach Roman technology is a great year though, and this year is going to be FANTASTIC! We just received a $2400 grant to help us with our big experimental archaeology project: building our own Roman leather sandals. And we got some grant money to take two big field trips to Poverty Point, Louisiana's only UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Getty Villa, one of the best places in the US to see classical antiquities. It's all part of my big plan to bring the National Geographic Explorer Mindset to my students.

So this year, I'd like to focus my blog on my monthly RoTech curriculum. It's what most everyone asks me about when I mention that I teach this class. "What exactly do you teach them?" In October, I'll be traveling to the Hopkins School in New Haven, CT, to offer a teacher workshop on my Roman technology curriculum. I can't wait to meet the teachers and help them envision a hands-on history approach to teaching the Roman world.

Every year, I focus the month of August on the big question of "How do we know what we know about classical antiquity?" (By the way, has anyone ever read the old plastic-bound booklet from the American Classical League called "How We Know About Antiquity" by William J. King? Sadly, it's no longer available from the ACL store or on Amazon.) It certainly was an inspiration to me in my early teaching. I often wondered the same question myself. The problem was that I didn't have much class time to truly explore some of the answers to that question: archaeology, epigraphy, pottery analysis, numismatics, paleography, ostraca, etc. When I started teaching Roman technology to students who didn't take Latin, I realized that most didn't have a strong foundation of understanding about the classical world. Thus, my unit on "How We Know" got started.

Our first lesson involved a Fact or Fiction game that asked students to pair up and answer FACT or FICTION on tiny whiteboards as I made statements about the ancient Roman world such as "These two items were used as toilet paper by the Romans: pottery sherds, sponges on sticks, or leaves." The hilarity and genuine surprise that ensued after the true answer was revealed...perfection! You can see the set here and use it if you want to!

Next, the students, grouped into sets of three, got an ancient mystery artifact to analyze. They had to weigh it, measure it (in centimeters to get into that archaeology frame of mind), and then interpret its context. I used replicas of a FIBULA (metal pin), parts of a key and lock, sherds of a broken oil lamp, a wax tablet, warp weights from a loom, a piece of tree bark with writing on it, etc. Most students are not familiar with these objects so they did find this activity challenging, but it teaches the mindset of archaeology and how to interpret an object through comparison and context. You can see some of that lesson here.

Investigating an artifact

 

The next lesson immersed the students in ancient pottery identification and analysis. The students watched a short presentation on pottery terminology (SHERDS not SHARDS), how it was made by ancient Romans (thanks Graham Taylor at Potted History), how it can be used to date archaeological sites, and then sketched a design inspired by ancient red or black-figure pottery. Each student then drew their design onto a small terracotta pot with a sharpie marker. They recorded an event of importance in their lives and wrote about that event very briefly in these notes. 

Before the big crack

I then took a moment to carefully explain that their pots would soon be broken by me and turned into analysis tools. After breaking each pot and carefully removing a piece or two from each to deposit in a sherd box, I returned the pots to different students. Their job was to reconstruct the pot using painter's tape and write an interpretation of the design. 

Putting it back together

The students visited the sherd box to help with reconstruction. Then, they met with their pot partners to discuss interpretations. This activity gets kids thinking about archaeological context and the detective work that comes with archaeology. They really, really enjoy this project that takes only two class periods to complete.

The sherd box

For another activity, I reached out to the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, inviting one of their archaeologists to visit with my students. This year, the archaeologist chose to talk about physical anthropology, and what archaeologists learn from human bones. Before she visited, I had the students watch Nova's In the Shadow of Vesuvius documentary, about the work of Dr. Sara Bisel, the anthropologist who analyzed the skeletons of Herculaneum's beachfront. The bit with her discussing the wear and tear on the bones of a young enslaved girl always touches my students.

Trying to determine gender

The archaeologist, Josetta Leboeuf, presented "Written in Bone: What Archaeologists Can Discover from Human Remains." She brought replica skulls, femurs, and pelvises for the students to examine, and then she guided them in using an archaeological calculator to determine their height. Anthropologists frequently use the femur and humerus to calculate a person's height. The students LOVED this activity.

Measuring a femur

As the month was ending, I wanted my students to explore numismatics so I took out my ancient coins for them to analyze. I had acquired these from Ancient Coins for Education, a group of volunteers who got old coins in the hands of classics teachers. (I can't find evidence that this group is still functioning. I hope someone can prove me wrong.) After learning some coin terminology: OBVERSE, REVERSE, FIELD, LEGEND, BUST, etc., the students got to handle real coins. After talking about the proper handling of coins, each pair of students picked up some archival gloves, a magnifying glass, and these notes. They are nearly always unsuccessful at deciphering anything on the coins. These things are SO hard to read, but the activity gives them a real sense of awe at holding something so old in their hands. They also think that ancient coins are TINY compared with our modern quarters and nickels.

A real, ancient Roman coin

Today, we finished up this unit by recycling our reconstructed pots. We used them to plant seeds from Roman herbs like parsley, coriander, and sage. We'll grow these to coincide with a later unit on Roman food.

We move on to catapults today and spend the month of September building two models that we'll test for distance, accuracy, and force before designing and building our own models. I'll be back to talk about that unit later this month!

NEH Olympics: Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter

Happy Opening Day of the 2024 Summer Olympics!!

When the Olympics got started up again in 1894 by the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, he adopted as a motto a phrase he'd heard from his friend Henri Didon, the headmaster at Arcueil College in Paris: CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS, a string of Latin comparative adverbs meaning "Faster, higher, stronger." In 2021, the International Olympic Committee decided to add to it: CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS - COMMUNITER.

"Faster, higher, stronger - together...recognizes the unifying power of sport and the importance of solidarity," they said. I just saw these things in action, but not at the actual Olympics. I spent the last few weeks of July co-teaching a K-12 Institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities: the Ancient Olympics and Daily Life in Ancient Olympia: A Hands-on History.

Before I get into the great fun and learning we had, let me back up a couple of years to when my colleague Robert Holschuh Simmons of Monmouth College and I conceived of the project. Bob and I had met at the 2020 summer conference of the American Classical League in New York City. After attending my session on STEM in classics, he approached me to chat. I mentioned that I had read his article discussing his classics day activities. Thus, we forged a professional friendship based on shared interests of approaching classics from a hands-on history perspective. Later, Bob invited me to Monmouth to deliver the 2022 annual Bernice L. Fox classics lecture. Shortly afterward, Bob asked if I had ever thought about sharing my knowledge with teachers in a more substantial way: a summer institute of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I was very familiar with NEH institutes having done a couple of these intense summer workshops myself. I had indeed thought that my Roman technology lessons would make a good summer institute, but I knew I didn't really have a local university to partner with. Bob too had thought about how he could expand the activities he did at his classics day Since the summer Olympics would be starting right before our proposed workshop would happen, we decided that it would be an apt frame for our combined work: Bob would teach participants how to recreate the original Olympic contests, and I would focus on the goings-on around the small religious sanctuary town of Olympia.

As we started looking into the grant process, we realized that we had a MASSIVE project on our hands. We downloaded the application and got started! We had to answer a long series of questions, write a budget, develop a plan of work, and collect letters of support from speakers, all the while as we planned our two-week residential program - the process took about 8 months to complete. Some days, we worked via Zoom or Google Meet, other days we worked alone. By February of 2023, it was all due. We were asking for $175,000!! Then, we waited...for nearly 6 months to see if we got the grant. Our odds were not good. We had heard that fewer than 50% of applications get approved. But when August 15 came around, we learned via email that we had won! Then, the real work started.

First, we needed to promote our institute to teachers whom we thought would want to come. One of my first jobs was to create a Website for the program. Then, Bob and I had a series of meetings with the NEH administrators and other grantees to talk about what we needed to do for the next 8 months to prepare for the arrival of our participants to Bob's school, Monmouth College.

Everyone at Monmouth College, nay the entire town, is a nice human being! Maybe that's part of the town's legacy. Founded by Presbyterians in the 1800s, the school twice focused on women's education when the male students went off to wars. In the early 1870s, two young female students decided that they wanted to have their own fraternity so they founded it. The original Kappa Kappa Gamma House sits right near campus, proving that they succeeded. I had a fantastic time exploring the history of the town and campus.

Bob and I were excited and nervous to welcome our teachers to the school! Bowers Dormitory served as our home away from home - like going back to college. The campus is so, so beautiful. My favorite time of day was 6 PM because that's when the bell tower played a song for us. I spent many an early morning walking around the campus taking pictures of lovely things like stag beetles hanging onto brick walls, the meditative labyrinth, the front columns of Wallace Hall, and the bronze motto plate near the fountain commemorating the school's motto: LUX (Latin for "light"). Participants enjoyed walking all over town the size of which made that practice possible. In addition to being famous for its college, the town also hosted speeches of both 1858 Illinois senate seat candidates, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.

As promised, Bob taught the Olympic contests, and it was so fun to watch our adventurous teachers try them out. Using images from ancient Greek pottery and careful readings of ancient Greek writers, they recreated the methodology of discus and javelin throws, foot positions for running, rein ties for chariot racing, and even pankration-style wrestling. One of the most interesting contests to watch was the long jump. Done in ancient times with special hand weights called halteres, the long jump seemed impossible! The ancient record was 55 feet, an absolute impossibility especially using these hand weights, but that didn't keep our participants from trying. Near the end of our time, Bob led our teachers in recreating the Olympic Games on a large soccer field near Monmouth. (We had to share the Monmouth sports fields with a practicing football team who looked askance at me while playing my home-made AULOS, or double pipes.)

Mornings were for competing in Olympic contests, but afternoons were spent working on hands-on history activities such as weaving, foraging for and using oak galls to mix ink, making and decorating pottery, and talking about how to bring the ancient world to life for students. My favorite activity was an old one from Project Archaeology that has students reflect on how pottery sherds are used to reconstruct the context of an archaeological site. After learning some basics of ancient Greek and Roman pottery identification, our teachers decorated their own tiny terracotta pots with iconography that was meaningful to them. After they turned them in to us, my trusty assistants Megan Dailey and Olivia Matlock (both current classics students) helped me to crack them and remove a couple of sherds. The pots were given back to different participants to reconstruct and make sense of. 

All the while during the two weeks, our teachers were researching and developing their own lessons about the content they were learning. Our K-12 liaison and project specialist Micheal Posey was instrumental in helping them forge these amazing ideas into full-fledged units of study for their students. The culminating projects of our participants were FANTASTIC - Olympic recreations, classics day activities, original Latin stories, and all kinds of wonderful things. You can see all the projects here. By the end of our time together, the COMMUNITER part of the Olympic motto was the most important. Together, we spent two weeks learning about an ancient world with such important influence on our modern world.  As I watch the Olympics during these next two weeks, I'll be thinking about a special group of NEH Olympians that took learning CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS!

#NathGeo - The Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship - Day 3

Today, Deb Holcomb-Freitag and I left no bus, train, subway, or taxi unridden. 

First stop...the University of Glasgow!! I knew next to nothing about the University so I was pleasantly surprised to see this 1451-founded campus with its green grass and sandstone-colored buildings. Deb and I walked around just taking pictures in awe. 

We also budgeted time to peruse the gift shop. Since my own school is named Glasgow Middle, I couldn't resist the urge to get some merch to show my students and colleagues. It was super hard to make a decision too. Deb, in her infinite wisdom, encouraged me to get this one particular sweatshirt. The "Changing the World" was perfect, but the fact that it had the Latin motto on it too ("the way, the truth, the life")!!! I think I did the right thing. I can't wait to show my students.  

But back to my original plan - we traveled to Glasgow to visit the Hunterian Museum's Roman collection, purportedly, the best in Scotland. The museum itself has that old antiquarium feel to it, and the Roman gallery was indeed awesome. The collection contains the distance slabs that celebrate the soldier builders of the Antonine Wall. These stone plaques are unique in the Roman world!

Next up was the Falkirk Wheel, a massive boat switcher near the Roman Antonine Wall. I had DREAMED of getting here so that I could sneak off the Roman fort located nearby. The modern Wheel was an added bonus, and I have to say, one of the best things I've seen on this trip. Used to lift and lower boats between canals at different levels, it replaced a complicated and slow system of locks. What a joyful thing to see in action! You can watch my video of it here.

I had tried to come up with a way for us to get to Rough Castle Roman Fort via public transportation, but it was tricky. A train, a bus, a long walk, but we made it! This fort is one of very few in existence (another along Hadrian's Wall) that shows the usage of LILIA pits to sabotage enemy attacks. I was surprised to see the depth of the ditch in front of the wall. Somehow, pictures just don't do size justice.

We finished the day with the Kelpies, giant metal sculptures of horse heads that celebrate the historical contribution of horses in Scotland as well as nod toward their mythological significance. I did not expect to like them so much. The metal work, by artist Andy Scott, is superb, and the effect is one of creepy awe. They light up at night for different occasions and events. I'm so glad I got to see these icons of Scotland!