ARCHAEOLOGY:The study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artefacts and other physical remains.
Dear 7B,
I love that description of archaeology up there. It makes the task sound so clean, so simple, so straightforward. It might be more honest to mention that archaeology is a slow, painstaking and supremely messy job, which is only undertaken by truly dedicated people in a quest for knowledge.
I hope you’ll show some of the same attention to detail in History, though I don’t expect you to get muddy.
Today you can learn more about the story of Ötzi, the man from theCopper Agewho, about 5000 years ago, climbed up a glacier and died. Naturally preserved in this frozen environment, he was found in 1991 and became the subject of intense archaeological study.
This is an example of natural mummification, like the kind that sometimes occurs in a peat bog, where the lack of oxygen and the low temperatures slow the decay of the body. In Cheshire, England, for instance, two well-preserved bodies were discovered in Lindow Moss in the 1980s, arousing great archaeological interest. At the time Lindow Woman was found, police suspected a criminal, Peter Reyn-Bardt, of the murder of his wife. Confronted with the discovery of Lindow Woman, Reyn-Bardt confessed to the murder; imagine his chagrin when radio-carbon dating later showed that in fact the body was almost 2000 years old. On the strength of his confession, however, he was later found guilty of his wife’s murder.
(The radiologists who studied Lindow Man nicknamed him “Pete Marsh”, a play on the phrase “peat marsh”. The British press took up the phrase.)
And now, back to Ötzi…
Read these sites to discover more…
♦DNA tests have been successful in producing Ötzi’s complete genome. Read the details at this site.
The "iceman" was wearing a grass cloak and shoes lined with grass.
♦Ötzi was wearing an intriguing collection of clothing, including a grass cloak, specially made shoes that allowed him to walk in the Alps and a knee-length garment made of tanned goat leather. The shoes are particularly interesting because they were made of bear leather (sole) and deer leather (upper) and were carefully lined to protect Ötzi’s feet from the cold. For precise details about Ötzi’s clothing, go to this link:
Ötzi’s shoes were partially made from bear leather.
♦Ötzi was carrying some beautifully crafted tools, including the only perfectly preserved prehistoric axeever found. While the axe was made of copper, the dagger was made of flint. This shows that even when people started using copper, flint was still a very important resource. Read about Ötzi’s equipment at this site:
Finally, a reminder that you should use some of the possibility words and phrases shown on the slide below:
Being able to use words that show you have reached conclusions from evidence, but cannot be completely certain that you are correct, is very important for a historian. The examples in the slide above will help you write like a historian.
This is an amateur mini-website called a blog. I created it for the use of my year 7 history class in 2008, so you can go several years back into the past and find pictures of other students and even their comments on tasks we have done.
You can visit this blog even when you are at home. In fact, some aspects of it will work better at home, because you will not be restricted there by the school’s blocking of sites such as Youtube.
The advantage of having a blog like this is that I can direct you towards good websites, give you tasks to do and ask you to leave comments on various topics.
Today, I want you to find out about the start of agriculture and the domestication of animals. After that, I want you to leave a comment about your first few days of high school.
Rules for commenting: No family names, no insults, no information leading to your identification by outsiders – just intelligent, thoughtful remarks that will amuse and educate others.
Welcome to high school, to history and to my class.
Kind regards from Ms Green
Work for Today:
A NEW WAY OF LIFE
When some people became farmers and herders, from about 10000BC, their lives changed dramatically.
Farming meant that people could settle in one place.
They could store food for the future.
Larger families were possible and in fact desirable. No longer did people have to carry their young children during long nomadic migrations. Instead, they needed all the labour they could get. Farming is intensive. This would have been the start of child labour! (We do our best to continue this trend at our school.)
People could eventually live in much larger groups, leading ultimately to more diverse societies, skills and occupations.
Farming could support a far larger population than hunting and gathering, so societies based on farming could grow quickly and become much more complex and varied.
Farming was not necessarily a better way to live; in some ways hunting and gathering in small bands would have been simpler, with fewer possessions, more sharing and less impact on the environment. But once the idea of farming began it spread; the societies that were based on this new way of living grew, prospered, diversified and often became powerful.
One of the changes in the New Stone Age was the domestication of animals. Go to this site for a timeline of animal domestication.
This photo was taken in Vietnam by my son Patrick and is used with his permission. It shows a domesticated cat. Cats are believed to have been domesticated first by the ancient Egyptians, whose huge grain stores needed protection from rodents.
1. List the first six animals to be domesticated and the approximate date. Then click on your favourite to find out the evidence about when, how and why they were domesticated by humans.
Plants were also domesticated. This means that humans bred the plants for the qualities they most wanted in them. Plants with larger wheat grains were chosen just as goats were chosen for smaller horns. Gradually the domesticated population varied significantly from the wild one.
ARCHAEOLOGY: The study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artefacts and other physical remains.
I love that description of archaeology up there. It makes the task sound so clean, so simple, so straightforward. It might be more honest to mention that archaeology is a slow, painstaking and supremely messy job, which is only undertaken by truly dedicated people in a quest for knowledge.
YOUR TASK: 
