Making a Good Impression with Roman Inscriptions

Just got back exhausted but exhilarated from a really successful teaching session about Roman inscriptions with a class of children from both Manchester Grammar School and a Blue Coat School studying Latin and/or Classical Civilisation. The session was led by Dr Andrew Fear from University of Manchester Department of Classics. The idea was to engage schoolchildren with Roman material to help them with their studies and to encourage them to maintain an interest in things Classical.

Earlier this afternoon we divided the class into two groups and one half looked at making impressions from Roman inscriptions using the cliche mould or ‘wet squeeze’ method and the other studied some Roman coins that our Numismatist Keith Sugden had got out in advance for them.

sestertius of Trajan (AD 98-117 ) obverse

The cliche mould technique involves placing a sheet of blotting paper over an inscription and using a stiff brush to push the softened paper into the incised surface of the piece of stone. This is a very old way of making accurate copies of Greek, Latin and other inscriptions in the field. The practical aspect of making a cliche mould from an inscription really engaged the students, whereas talking to them about epigraphy  would almost certainly have left them cold. Fortunately no damage was done to a Roman inscription because we used a piece of marble with an inscription that is a fake. That wasn’t a problem because the whole point of the exercise was getting the students involved in doing something practical.

It’s all in the brush work

 

Finished cliche mould of Roman inscription

The other exercise was looking at and understanding Roman coins. We got out a denarius and a sestertius of the emperor Trajan (AD 98-117) and a denarius and a sestertius of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138). Armed with a crib sheet from their earlier session with Andy and a magnifying glass and an angle-poise lamp, the students studied each coin, transcribed the inscriptions or legends and translated them. In this way they were able to consolidate what they had learnt earlier about the use of abbreviations such as COS – Consul, or AVG – Augustus, or PP – Pater Patriae for ‘father of his country’. We swapped the coins over half way so they could look at different coins.

Looking at Roman coins

The students picked this up remarkably quickly, further evidence, if any were needed, that there really is nothing like the real thing for inspiring and engaging young (and old) minds. The thought of teaching Classics without supporting objects seems to me to do students an injustice, and, of course, we are well-placed at the Museum in being able to draw upon some amazing collections and provide invaluable hands-on  experience. If that doesn’t enhance the learning experience, then nothing will. We hear a great deal about digital interpretation and augmented reality, and new technology certainly has a place but I don’t think anything beats tactile interaction with the real thing. My observations of this afternoon suggest that it was a successful session and that the children enjoyed it and were stimulated by it. It’ll be interesting to see the evaluation sheets from the school.

Of course we have to declare an interest. Fewer and fewer students study this type of material. This is hardly surprising given that it used to be government policy to  marginalise Classics. Charles Clarke, back in 2003, said he was little concerned were the study of classics ‘to go the way of all flesh’. The number of pupils taking Latin GCSE in the state sector plummeted from about 8500 in 1988 to less than 3500 in 2004. Yet the benefits of teaching Classics have long been known. An Indianapolis survey on the effects of teaching Latin to 6^th grade children (1973) showed that after 5 months of Latin, the children had advanced 7 months in maths, 8 months in word knowledge, 9 months in problem solving, one year in reading, AND 13 months in language.

denarius of Hadrian (AD 117-138)

The session was supported by the University’s Widening Participation Department. Thanks to to Cat Lumb, Andy Fear and Irit Narkiss for organising and running the session.

Prehistory Makes a Come Back

Twilight session on Prehistory with teachers

One of the surprises in the  National Curriculum has been the inclusion of Prehistory. For the first time teachers find themselves in the position of being asked to teach a subject they have not had to teach for many years but one which presents certain challenges. For me this was summed up at a recent meeting at the Natural History Museum in connection with a proposal to tour elements from its Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) exhibition to partner museums. One of the representatives from Creswell Crags said that the Visitor Centre there had received an enquiry from a worried teacher who said she knew that Creswell was an Ice Age site but she had to teach the Stone Age and could they offer any advice and recommend a site to visit with school pupils…

Jack talking to teachers

So when Debbie Doran from Manchester Museum’s Education team asked me to support what is sometimes called a ‘twilight session’ on Prehistory  for Manchester teachers I was more than happy. Manchester Museum is very well-placed in this respect to offer this kind of support because the first curator, William Boyd Dawkins (1837-1929) was an expert on the identification of prehistoric animal remains and wrote the text-book about cave archaeology Cave Hunting which was published in 1876. Dawkins’ successor in this field, J.Wilfrid Jackson (1880-1978) too was fascinated by the subject. As a result the archaeology collection is stuffed with flint and other stone implements, not to mention prehistoric metal objects, pottery, bone and antler. The intellectual focus may have shifted in the latter part of the 20th century in favour of the Classical world but the prehistoric collections remained, quietly waiting for their moment again in the sun. And maybe this is it.

A selection from the prehistoric archaeology collection at Manchester Museum.

I brought out a selection of material from the Museum’s prehistoric lithics collection  including some Palaeolithic hand-axes from southern England from several hundred thousand years ago, some Mesolithic microliths, some Neolithic stone axe rough-outs from Cumbria, replicas of the beautiful early Bronze Age gold armillae or armlets from Malpas in Cheshire and an Iron Age bridle bit from Bigbury Camp in Kent. One of the difficulties the teachers face is that when they have to teach the Stone Age there is almost an expectation that they can take a box off the shelf and teach the subject in the same way they would with a box of ancient Egyptian or Roman objects. But prehistory lasts (in Britain – as the wonderful temporary exhibition at the Natural History Museum makes clear) for the greater part of a million years. And which bit of the Stone Age should you concentrate on? It’s sobering to think that when the Dutch arrived off Easter island in 1722, the inhabitants were using stone implements. In fact the Stone Age in the New Guinea Highlands ended at 10am on 8th March 1933 when gold prospectors landed there in a plane.

One Million Years

Even if we just look at the Stone Age in Britain, the timescale is incredibly long and within that million years all sorts of changes have taken place. Ice Ages have come and gone with ice-sheets over a kilometre thick in places. Sea levels have fallen about 100 metres lower than they are today before re-establishing themselves. Britain has at times been linked to the European continent by a land bridge across what is now the North Sea and then cut off from it. Many exotic animal species have lived in Britain at times when the climate was much warmer: hippopotamus and hyena are known from their bones and teeth to have lived at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire, only an hour away from Manchester.

Creswell Crags

Over such a long period of time it is not surprising that the kinds of human beings living in Britain have changed too. In the dim and distant past human beings lived here who, we cannot be absolutely sure of this, were of the species Homo erectus or  perhaps ancestors of Homo heidelbergenis. Later Neanderthals lived here. They were like us but different with stocky frames, short limbs and prominent brows, apparently adapted to living in a cold climate. It is mind-boggling to think that civilisation in the Middle East started around 3000 BC but that Neanderthals colonised Britain many times between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago. The subject is explored in the Natural History Museum’s Britain One Million years of the Human Story. There’s a piece on this in the NHM’s magazine ‘evolve’ (issue 18, winter 2014 – now that’s planning ahead!) featuring interviews with lead scientist Prof.Christopher Stringer and lead exhibition designer Elin Simonsson (pp.6-11).

Neanderthals from the AHOB exhibition

As Christopher Gosden points out in his little book called  Prehistory A Very Short Introduction (2003) ‘part of learning about the past is an unlearning of the present’ (p.26).  So it was not entirely surprising to hear one teacher say that Stone Age people used flint until they realised it didn’t work for them and they invented something better like bronze and then iron. The relationship between technological development and ideas of what constitutes progress, influenced as it so often is by Darwinian evolution, is so pervasive that we really need a course along the lines of the seminar Stephen Welsh, Curator of Living Cultures, and I regularly offer to university students which explores this question. That’s no fault of the teachers of course but it does mean confronting some rather deep philosophical questions before we reach for the box of teaching objects labelled ‘Prehistory’.

 

 

Ancient Worlds Education Sessions

Ancient Worlds Education session with pupils from Barlow School

Just been to the Staff Forum where members of the Education Team talked about the brilliant work they do with schools and other groups. Some 29,000 schoolchildren visit the Museum every year and 80% of the classes have a taught session. The evaluation feedback is invariably ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ and the vast majority say they would visit the Museum again.

Debbie Doran who is Primary Learning Coordinator talked about her work using the ideas developed in the Ancient Worlds displays. Debbie develops teaching sessions for Key Stage 2 children (7-11 year olds). She recently sent me some comments from some of the pupils who had attended pilot Ancient Worlds teaching sessions in the museums.

The sessions are designed to stimulate learning by allowing the children to handle the various objects.  Katy from Vernon Park Primary School said, “I couldn’t believe we could touch the very old things!”  Samir from Oswald Road Primary School said “It’s better to look at the broken pot because you can see inside it!”  Amir from Birchfields Primary School commented “It was great fun to write our own museum labels, just like a museum curator.”

Working with objects in the Ancient Worlds session

A new member of staff seeing the handling objects for the first time couldn’t believe that he was allowed to touch the objects. “Oh I thought you had to be special to touch the objects” he said.  We assured him that he was special and that when children handled the objects it made them feel special too. This provides the best possible environment to support learning.

Only yesterday an undergraduate student at a seminar about stone tools from the archaeology and anthropology collections commented that being able to see and touch the objects had really helped her to engage what can be quite challenging concepts like social Darwinism, imperialism and race. She was surprised that more wasn’t made of the opportunity to use the collections in this way. As a university museum it’s really what we are here for and one of the challenges this year is to raise the profile of the collection so that more academics are aware of what we have and how it might be used to support their own teaching.

Children looking at samian pottery in the new Ancient Worlds education session