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!