Identities
Identities
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When we teach the past, it can look as if societies were neatly separated: “Romans”, “Egyptians”, “Celts”, “Greeks”, “people from the Near East”. 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.
And when people meet, identity becomes visible — not as a tidy label, but as something made and remade. Archaeology helps us see that identity is not simply inherited or biologically determined. It is shaped through choices, relationships, power, memory and circumstance. In other words, identity is something people do, not just something people are
That is why archaeology can be such a powerful resource for teaching. It does not rely only on written sources or the viewpoints of elites. It brings in ordinary lives: how people ate, dressed, built houses, buried their dead, cared for children, worshipped, worked and moved across landscapes. A cooking pot, a brooch, a burial, a house layout, a shift in diet, a reused monument — these are not just “artefacts”. They are evidence for how people expressed belonging, navigated difference and created a sense of self in changing worlds.
Cultural mixing is not a modern anomaly and having layered identities is not a contradiction. People in the past could live between cultures and belong in more than one place. They could be shaped by migration and still feel rooted. They could be insiders in one setting and outsiders in another. These resources give you stories and evidence you can lift directly into lessons, whether you are teaching ancient empires, prehistoric communities, migration, everyday life, or the local past. Each artefact will include small classroom-friendly prompts — quick questions pupils can answer by looking closely, debating interpretations and thinking about how identity is expressed.
We’ve prepared a carefully designed resource that you can use alongside the information in this blog to help KS2 pupils explore how material culture helps us study and understand the past (download here). If you are a teacher, think of this series as a toolkit. You can use it to challenge “one culture replaces another” narratives, to open conversations about belonging and difference without turning history into slogans, and to show pupils how evidence-based interpretation works. Most importantly, you can use archaeology to help students see that the past was full of people like them: people living through change, making sense of where they fit, and building identities that were complex, negotiated and deeply human.
If you would like to explore this approach further, you can book one of our in-person or online workshops, where our archaeologists help children learn how to look closely at objects, ask questions, and use evidence to understand past societies.
Click on the objects below and begin asking questions!
1. A tomb of a Greek family
Three statues inside the niche represent a family: the father in a himation, the son posed as a nude athlete, and a household slave. Metics were free, non-citizen residents in ancient Greece who played an important economic and military role but lacked political rights, including the right to vote.
2. A funerary stele from Northern Italy
This Roman stele shows a man and a woman. While the man is dressed in Roman style, wearing a toga, the woman is shown wearing local clothing and jewellery. The monument highlights how dress reveals how identities could be negotiated rather than fixed.
3. Mummy of Artemidorus from Egypt
This mummy reflects traditional Egyptian mummification practices still in use during the Roman period. The deceased had a Greek name and was buried following Egyptian customs, while adopting a Roman-style painted portrait to represent his identity in death.
4. Christ as Orpheus
Christ as Orpheus, depicted in a Roman burial, shows how early Christians reused a familiar pagan image to express new beliefs about salvation and life after death. It reveals a moment when Christian identity was shaped through older cultural traditions rather than replacing them outright.
5. A Bell Beaker vessel from Britain
A Bell Beaker vessel found in a prehistoric burial. Similar pots appear across much of Europe, but they were used by different communities in different ways. Rather than showing a single “people”, Bell Beakers reveal how identity in prehistory could be shared, adapted and expressed through common practices.
6. An Anglo-Saxon helmet funerary stele from Britain
The Sutton Hoo helmet shows how identity in Anglo-Saxon Britain was shaped through contact and shared symbols. Drawing on styles from Scandinavia and beyond, it reveals a world that was connected rather than isolated — and an identity that was chosen and displayed, not inherited.
7. A Greek wine vessel from France
Celtic elites drank Greek and Roman wine at banquets. Wine was not just a drink: it was a way of expressing status, power and connection to the wider world. By adopting foreign practices within local feasting traditions, Celtic communities used wine to negotiate identity, remaining local while engaging with Mediterranean culture.
9. A Roman goddess
At Bath, a local Celtic goddess, Sulis, was worshipped alongside the Roman goddess Minerva in the same temple. The architecture, inscriptions and offerings follow Roman forms, but the deity remained rooted in local belief. The temple shows how people in Roman Britain expressed identity by combining Roman practices with local traditions, rather than replacing one with the other.
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