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This page is designed for history teachers and home educators who want to bring archaeology into their teaching in meaningful and manageable ways. Each post explores how material culture, archaeological evidence and investigative thinking can support history learning, helping pupils understand not just what happened in the past, but how we know about it. The focus is on practical ideas, clear examples and approaches that work across all stages, without requiring specialist equipment or prior archaeological knowledge.
Each month I post free downloadable resources that you can use to prepare your lessons.
Material culture means the objects people made and used in the past, such as pots, clothes, tools and buildings. In history lessons, these objects help children learn through evidence, not just stories or dates. Looking closely at objects helps pupils ask questions, spot details and think about how people lived long ago. It also helps them understand how we know about the past, not just what happened. We’ve prepared some resources that we hope you can use with your pupils to explore how material culture helps us understand the past.
When we teach the past, it can look as if societies were neatly separated: “Romans”, “Egyptians”, “Celts”, “Greeks”. Pupils quickly absorb the idea that cultures are like boxes, with clear edges and fixed labels. But archaeology tells a different story. It shows that people have always lived in worlds shaped by contact: through trade, travel, intermarriage, conquest, diplomacy, slavery, pilgrimage, seasonal movement and the everyday realities of living alongside neighbours who did things differently. Archaeology helps us see that identity is not simply inherited or biologically determined. It is shaped through choices, relationships, power, memory and circumstance.
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