History Quest

In April, a group of Y9 History students visited Birmingham University to take part in History Quest. This event aims to give students an introduction to History and Archaeology at university for those studying it at GCSE. We began with a lecture from an Archaeology professor on the relevance of History to the world around us and how important it is to us in our lives today to understand how people in the past have lived, thought and behaved.

We then took part in a workshop that got us thinking about how to analyse a group of objects that had been ‘excavated’ at an archaeological site. We were asked to draw a picture of the people who made up the family who used these things based on the objects that were found. Some things were quite old-fashioned and hard to identify but others were easy to allocate to a person. Sometimes, it was easy to jump to conclusions and so we had to be careful not to assume that a washing up liquid bottle meant that a woman was part of the family!

Our teacher then asked us to consider if we had everything we needed in order to know all about the family. This led onto a discussion about what type of objects survive in the ground over time and which rot away, making it hard to get a complete picture of life in the past. Often, archaeologists have to cross reference what they have found in one site with finds from another location or, like we did, make assumptions about what the objects were probably used for and who might have used them.

After a campus tour, we did well in the quiz at the end of the day, with one of our teams coming second!

Mrs Hartt and Y9.