Pupils speculate as to what holes in the ground shown in an aerial photograph might be, before annotating an artist’s reconstruction of Danebury Hill Fort. Using the zones of inference technique, pupils work out what they know confidently, what they can infer, and what they need to enquire further in order to fully understand. They then help the Hopeless Curator to work out what the objects found at Danebury might be. The lesson ends with pupils designing an interactive App for an iPad to help people work out from a picture what life was like in the Iron Age.
Learning objectives
- Pupils can speculate as to significance of scenes shown in an artist’s impression;
- they can make inferences and deductions about possible use of a range of artefacts;
- they can raise and answer valid historical questions;
- they can work out how archaeologists are able to make statements about the past when no written records exist;
- the most able learn about the types of evidence available to a historian studying the Iron Age.
If you think some your pupils might benefit from seeing a simple animated explanation of an Iron Age Hill fort first, then it might be worth showing them
