Starting with the Stone Age CPD session for teachers: What you need to know and how you can apply it in the classroom Part 1 – Introduction & The Palaeolithic Catherine McHarg – Archive Education Manager

What was life like in the Stone Age?  A bit about archaeology  First dates!  For each part of the Stone Age we’ll look at – Changing Technology, Life and Death.  Stonehenge: Stand or Fall – play the game

All prehistory is archaeology Prehistory means anything before written history – so the only way we can find out about it is through archaeology. It's an archaeologists job to look at evidence, such as artefacts and buildings, from the past and to try and interpret them! Ask your pupils if they think they could be an archaeologist?

Learn to speak 'archaeologist‘ To be an archaeologist pupils need to learn some new words Archaeology: The study of the lives of people in the past Evidence: Information to support an idea/interpretation Artefact: Any object made or changed by people Interpret: To try and explain what something means Excavation: To dig up and record archaeological remains

The ‘Rubbish Bag Game’/Rot or Not? All archaeologists are detectives – for the Rubbish Bag Game select clean, safe pieces of ‘rubbish’ and place them in a black bin bag. Pupils take it in turns to pick out a piece of ‘rubbish’, then the whole class have to work out what it is and who might have used it/thrown it away. Deliberately choose bits of ‘rubbish’ so that pupils can build up a picture of the person/family that threw them away.

The ‘Rubbish Bag Game’/Rot or Not? Once the rubbish bag is empty ask pupils to think about which items would survive being buried in the ground for 1000s of years – would it Rot or Not? Any items that they don’t think would survive get taken away, so you now have a much smaller pile of ‘rubbish’. Pupils then reassess the evidence and start to understand that archaeologists can only work with what they’ve got – there’s a lot that they don’t know, but have to make ‘educated guesses’ about.

Pottery Bones Metal Leather Fabric Glass Food Wood What would survive for 1000 years? Rot or Not?

RotNot Rot or Not? Pottery Bones Metal Leather Fabric Glass Food Wood

First Dates!

Myth busting – No Flintstone’s  People and dinosaurs never lived together. Dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago – using the same scale as the slide before I’d need another 163 slides to get back to the dinosaurs! © United Archives GmbH/Alamy

Palaeolithic Greek: παλαιός (palaios) "old" + λίθος (lithos) "stone" = "old age of the stone" or "Old Stone Age”

 The people who lived during the Palaeolithic were nomadic hunter-gatherers who used stone tools  They have left behind no large buildings or permanent settlements. Remains from this period are very hard to find and often in caves

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) Modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens)  Several different species of human existed at different times during the Palaeolithic, sometimes overlapping  Our own species (Homo sapiens sapiens) arrived in Europe just before another human species, the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), became extinct

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) Modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens)

Stone tools: handaxes

Stone tools: flint blades

Happisburgh Boxgrove Beeches Pit Swanscombe Lynford Kent’s Caver n Paviland Hengistbury Head CreswellCrags Gough’s Cave

Boxgrove, Sussex Back to map

Lynford, Norfolk Back to map

Creswell Crags, Derbyshire Back to map