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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
