Examining Artefacts
In History Class 5 are looking at the reliability of evidence and thinking about how, without enough evidence, archaeologists and historians can find it hard to make sound judgements about a time period.
We pretended we were archaeologists from 1000 years in the future, and examined some 2015 artefacts to see what we could discover about life in the early 21st Century. With very little evidence to go on we learnt how it is possible to make pretty inaccurate judgments about a whole time period; for example we decided that based on some of the artefacts we investigated, the people of 2015 wore only underpants, teachers wore multi-coloured glasses of wisdom, we all worshipped ducks, kept pet monkeys and thought football was the most important thing in the universe!
We then talked about how the phrase ‘history is written by the victors’ can remind us how we need to keep an open mind about the source of evidence whenever we look into the past.
