Dr. Smiti Nathan

Transcript

Smiti: Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past, a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. My name is Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist and your host.

In this episode, I’m speaking with archeologist and filmmaker, Marc Barkman-Astles.

Marc has been creating videos on his YouTube channel called Archaeosoup for over 15 years, but you can also find him across the UK teaching history workshops in a diversity of classroom settings.

In this episode, he shares what archaeology can contribute to classrooms, and we talk about the type of workshops he does, the challenges he’s encountered, and some of the delightful moments along the way.

He starts us off with one of the most meaningful moments he’s had in the classroom and how that impacts his public work to this day.

Marc B-A: The most important moment I remember from being an archeologist in a classroom of primary school kids–so, we’re talking in this instance, they would’ve been, uh, seven and eight years old–was when doing a prehistory workshop. It’s called Stone Age to Iron Age in the curriculum. That we were talking about, uh, the Paleolithic, the old, oldest of the Stone ages. And, towards the end of that section of the workshop, I sort of said, any questions, anyone? And a little girl put up her hand and, and said: yeah, do we know anyone’s names from the Paleolithic? And my, my initial response was. No, I’m sorry. We don’t have any written evidence for the language. But if we did, you know, that would be amazing, wouldn’t it? And, and then I sort of asked, asked the class, what sort of names would you come up with? And, and that, that’s where we went. But then on the way home, I realized that there’d recently been, and it’s speculative research in that sense, but there’d recently been research that was pointing out, uh, from memory, I think it was 56, possibly 56, hyper conserved words, so-called, from up to 15,000 years ago. And, so words like, I think “black” and “ash”, I think “worm” was one of them. I ended up making a, a wee video on my YouTube channel, then sending it to the class so they could sort of hear that they’d inspired this answer to their question. But also it was an invitation to then play with those words and come up with little stories and things like that.

And, what was wonderful about it was that, yeah, okay, I was still a working archeologist in that sense. I still had, I had one toe in the journals or whatever, but I hadn’t made the connection until this, this lovely little girl asked me if, if we knew anyone’s names.

Smiti: That’s amazing and it’s just so sweet and also so powerful, and I can see how that made an impact on you. And just to orient everyone here. You’ve worked across a lot of classroom settings across England and Wales, and you’ve worked with a range of students. Can you give us a quick background or overview of your classroom teaching history?

Marc B-A: 15 years ago there was a big change in the national curriculum. The national curriculum in the UK is broken up into different jurisdictions, and the one that I tend to work within is England and Wales. But, they made a shift, which was interesting, and that was towards, for example, including things like prehistory and, and more depth on things like, uh, Tudor medicine, as opposed to just King Henry VIII, that kind of thing. And, and therefore, actually the interaction between archaeology specifically and classroom settings for the most part has been a primary school in my experience.

Smiti: So, you mentioned national curriculum, and in the US we also often have curricular goals as well in public education systems. And so I’m wondering how do you keep in mind these curricular goals, or in some cases, requirements as you’re designing lectures or workshops that intertwine public archeology into the classroom?

Marc B-A: Basically it’s, it’s, about education outcome.

So, Outcome A will be, you know, that they will understand that, uh, Stonehenge was built around about this time and this kind of this. I think the most important distinctions has just been to explain why it is that we know this stuff based on essentially rubbish that’s left behind. And the curriculum doesn’t really say that.

And also, I remember as a kid, but then again, clearly I was a nerdy kid, but in my experience, kids love words. They love weird words. And I’ve never known a child who, for example, plays with dinosaurs or monsters or, or gets a book about butterflies, not to completely soak up the specifics. I once saw a dad say: “look at this, look here, here, here’s here’s a brontosaurus.” This was in a toy shop. “Here’s a brontosaurus eating a, a triceratops.” And uh, and they go: “no, dad, no, they’re, they, you know, they’re vegetarians.

They, they’re the herbivores.” But also “dad, it’s a diplodocus or diplodocus.” They go and, um, and dad goes: oh, sorry. I mean and it, it actually empowers them as well. It gives them a little bit of, of a sense of, I know something that, that my grownups don’t know. And so, I have been involved in situations when I’ve been consulting on curriculum workshops via third party. So, for example, some local universities, I won’t name them, but local universities. And in those conversations, at one in particular, they were very anxious to use words like Mesolithic, Neolithic, Paleolithic. They didn’t want to, they didn’t even want to use the word lithic. They just said, stone tools, stone age, keep it simple. And I was like, no, no. And, and they didn’t listen, but they did get the feedback that actually, that it was all a bit confusing because, because they weren’t given the tools to, as I say, stretch out that timeline. It just makes sense of what they were looking at.

So yeah, my, my consideration has always been to over provide, but in doing so, ironically enough, simplify and aid understanding, I think.

Smiti: Gotcha. And it seems that in simplifying we don’t have to take away from specificity. And I can attest that my oldest who’s in first grade now loves that specificity, but there needs to a be a simplification in terms of entry when it comes to concepts. So, I totally hear and get what you’re saying. And I love that example you provided of the toy store.

Marc B-A: Yeah.

Smiti: I was wondering if you could provide some examples of the things you do. The lessons or just, you know, an activity, that you do in classrooms, specifically in a primary setting.

Marc B-A: Thinking about, about pre-history workshops, one of the things that you cannot do, is you, you, you cannot take flint into school and start bashing it. Uh, yeah. And also, you can’t set up a fire, for example, in the classroom. And, one of the things that, that I was determined to do was to, to use some of the same concepts that I found so useful as a university student, to communicate these ideas effectively, to, to kids.

The flint stuff though, in, in connection with the fireplace, I actually landed on, something which is essentially a, a, a block that can be broken down safely. And I landed on, gray florists’ foam, so the stuff that, that florists stick the flowers into, and that holds water quite effectively in a, flower display, and a blunt butter knife.

And so I pass it around and I talk about how obviously what, what you would be doing is hitting a, using a hammer stone and hitting flint, and it shatters like glass. You get these sharp edges. Everyone gets one cut so they all get to go: “shuuk”. And it’s cheating a bit. If one person had control over it, they’d be able to do this very easily. But because, it’s being passed around, everyone’s got an opinion and they’re all sharing their idea. “Okay, now cut here, turn it, cut there.” And, and you’re just saying: “okay, you’re just trying to make one spearhead. And if the spearhead is made by the time we get halfway through, that’s fine.

Don’t worry. The rest of you’ll get to get a chance to do something else. But you know, we’re not just, we’re not just reducing the size of the foam.” So, it gets all the way round because everyone wants to have a go and they end up with this, basically this scatter this. And I, I even point that out. I say this, this is like debitage, this is the stuff that actually we do find as archeologists. Where’s your spearhead? And they’ll go, um, there. And so I’ll try and stick it on the end of a piece of bamboo. And, and what’s beautiful about it is it demonstrates the difficulty of finding the flint tool in the block of flint. It demonstrates that people making stone tools, were talking to each other. And, it also demonstrates that they had tremendous skill.

Smiti: Gotcha. And I love how hands-on and engaging it is, and the fact that you’re mixing tactile engagement with also social interaction to really, for lack of better word, hammer in that concept. I’m wondering, what do you think archaeology’s superpower is in the classroom?

Marc B-A: So I think, I think archaeology’s superpower is the fact that it is by definition, touchable, for the most part, or certainly it’s rooted in touchable things. Those touchable things can be anything from your classroom bin at the end of the day, all the way back to, uh, people, deep prehistory.

Smiti: We’ve talked about certain concepts like specificity, but then, you know, something we also talk a lot about on this channel is nuance.

And I think it’s absolutely essential to not just the interpretation of the archeological record, but how we present it.

So I’m wondering how do you approach nuance in the archeological record across different classroom settings?

Marc B-A: Again, I’m gonna go back to, to the pre-history workshops. I think, uh, because, because often you’re invited into settings which are explicitly touched by religion. So, uh, church of England schools, for example, Catholic schools. And to their credit, this is actually often misunderstood. They are not hyper religious schools where you only get taught that one religion. Uh, in fact, church of England schools, pride themselves on their education, as much as possible, about other cultures and faith. So, that’s not the issue. The issue is sometimes when you’re talking about a time that’s so far in the past, and people’s frame of reference for words like “tomb” are only words, are only people like Lazarus and Jesus. That’s when, when nuance really has to come in. I certainly don’t advocate any particular faith perspective in my teaching. But I certainly also as well, I’m, I’m aware that I’m a guest in that school and also they’re there to learn about something that’s new to them. And so they’re using the frames of reference that they, that they have. And, when those sorts of moments turn up. And there’s a point when I’m talking about the neolithic and, and we’ve, we’ve laid out this neolithic village, and one of the people in the classroom has just died so they, they take it up to a table, and the wind and the rain gets at them. It’s an excarnation platform, and there’s just a skeleton left behind. Again, the kids love the idea of that, that their classmates rotted away. They’re often like: “Rot! Yes.” Um, and, um, and then bits of those bones, bits of those bodies are sorted and they end up in the, in the, in the, essentially a communal tomb. And I sort of say: “well, if this happens over and over again in this community to you and to you, and maybe it’s your nose and your elbow and your, teeth.” Obviously they’re being a bit silly there. “But all of that happens over and over again, who’s in the tomb?”

And, and more often than not, the first answer is, “Jesus”. And I, I’ll be: “oh no, this is long time before that.” But it feels like one of the more nuanced moments for me is having to not feel the need to be right or to be accurate about everything in order to be accurate about something, I guess. And so you don’t have to say, we don’t even know what was going on with that story, you know, that kinda thing. Just say, we can just say no, no, a long time before that. But who’s in the tomb? And then you get back to the concept and, and when they eventually go: “everyone?” And I go: “yeah, but that’s the same as no one, because no one individual can be reconstructed from those bones.”

And they’re like, whoa. It’s, it’s just getting over that and getting through it without, I guess hurting anyone’s, anyone’s sense of self. ’cause also as well, you know, they’re not wrong to associate those words. They’re very strongly linked in their mind, you know?

Smiti: Yeah, I, I totally hear you. And you know, we’ve had previous guests on this podcast talk about, you know, approaching nuanced conversations, or I should say challenging conversations sometimes. And sometimes these are with adults, but also, you know, with children who have been, you know, taught a certain worldview or have a certain worldview and just kind of containing that conversation in some way or redirecting. But also maybe approaching it with different questions that aren’t belittling.

And in terms of questions, you mentioned this earlier about a great question that you’ve got that made you think. Is there another example of a question that you’ve gotten from a student that you found especially surprising?

Marc B-A: Well, actually, funnily enough, the Bible Belt in the US. I’ve actually had, a student doing anthropology as part of their degree, at a university in the US. And that they were really having trouble going back to their community. And they were, they were struggling because they wanted to share all these cool new ideas. And they just said, can, can you help me to talk and not get angry with people about, for example, evolution? You know, how can I, how can I talk to my, my granddad? How can I talk to my, my pastor? How can I talk to my family in a way that doesn’t sound as though I’m gonna be con confrontational with them?

And, and I know this is, this is touching a little bit on what I’ve already said about nuance, but what was interesting here though, in terms of question, was that this was one that sometimes there isn’t necessarily an answer to. Because, because in this instance, what I, what I recommended and I thought I was being quite, you know, well, I’ve got, I’ve got the answer.

I know what the answer is. Talk about, uh, farming, talk about selective breeding. Talk about the fact that farmers change the attributes of their, of their livestock by choosing how, where, and when, uh, they get to, to reproduce. And how they select for maybe body mass, or they select for milk production, this kind of thing. Well, they came back and said they did try this. And what they thought was a good idea ended up actually becoming a horrible experience for them. If anyone’s watching this and they’re particularly interested in, in, in why I do what I do and how I’m doing what I do, and, and, and also frankly the, the outcomes that you are aiming for as well with your work. You’ve got to be able to prepare for, for those moments when you can’t push any further really. And, and it’s probably more harmful, if nothing else for you, than it is for them to continue. And so, what we ended up doing was we, we just ended up talking about how, he hadn’t lost respect for his friends and family.

He didn’t feel as though he’d been rejected by them. He just felt as though now he had a little, a little space that, that had to be kept private, or had to be kept just a little bit separate from that home community because he still had friends back at uni. He still intended to do, do field work, you know, abroad and all this sort of stuff. I learned a lesson there. Even if you think you’ve got this smooth, you know, ooh, won’t be able to dodge this one, you know, answer. It’s not, not always the case, you know.

Smiti: First, thank you so much for sharing that example and being extremely vulnerable about the outcomes and what happened there. What kind of advice would you give to that person now?

Marc B-A: I think I would encourage, now, that person, just to reflect upon the fact that there’s more–and that’s just, there’s more to existence than being right and wrong. And that it’s the full, uh, it’s the full–well it’s Archaeosoup, isn’t it? It’s the full soup.

It doesn’t have to be a logic gate, A or B, choose, select. You know. It can simply be, actually, I love the soup that’s led you to this point. I love the complicated cultural, historical, personal, familial, psychological, trauma bound, who knows all this stuff that feeds into the complicated nature of, of this person’s perspective. And, and because of that love for that soup, as it were, I don’t need to be right in this moment. I think that that’s probably what I would say. And I, I, I say that now, but obviously there are moments when I’m, I am interacting with people online. I’ll just be like, this person’s such a-. Yeah. Why can’t they just accept that

I know what I’m talking about? But at, at its best, at its most ideal, I would encourage someone to try that.

Smiti: Well, thank you for for sharing that. And, I’m sure there are listeners here who are approaching these tough conversations that appreciate hearing your words.

To wrap us up here, what do you hope listeners take away from our conversation about public archeology and what it can bring to the classroom and even beyond?

Marc B-A: I think that in a word, empowerment and, and, uh, an example of that would be a, high school walk that I did a few years ago now, going around, Wallsend.

So Wallsend is an industrial town. It was though, uh, originally a Roman settlement at the end of Hadrian’s Wall, hence Wallsend. And, it’s an interesting place because it’s very much post-industrial, very much its heyday was like a hundred years ago. And, walking around, and you sort of, you talking to these guys and girls, they’re shrugging, they’ve got their hoods up, and you just start pointing out little things.

And giving, them a sense of the stuff that they walk past every day being

nuanced and interesting and, and telling a story. And at the, end of this workshop, we’d been through, or this walk, and it was on the way back to the high school. That one of the lads who I thought really didn’t like me, he comes over and he says, do you know what sir, I’m, I’m not gonna look at my, my walk to school the same way ever again.

And um, and that was amazing. And he, he said, I’m not saying I wanna study history, like. It’s okay. You don’t have to study history, it’s fine. But, uh, but he, he, he said, he said, yeah, I’m definitely gonna remember this, that, and that. And that, that, that’s what I mean by empowerment is the fact that just in the small everyday way, that wherever he goes, he’ll have a sense that actually Wallsend isn’t just a forgotten town past its heyday he will know that it was carefully laid out.

He’ll know that it had a place in that industrial story and it was connected to the ancient Roman wall and so on, so forth. That empowerment, that place, that sense of place and self, I think is crucial.

And also it sets you up to be welcoming, and sets you up to be, to be a good person, I think.

Smiti: One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is that archaeology can be a powerful tool to foster connection with the past, the places we live, and each other.

If you’d like to follow Marc, you can check out his website, which includes links to his YouTube channel and TikTok. You’ll find those links in the show notes along with the link to a full transcript of this episode. And if you’re curious to dig deeper and hear Marc’s perspective about the relationship between the media, public, and archeology, he shares that in more in a Patreon exclusive video.

Our Patreon is completely free to join and gives you access to all of our bonus content. If you’d like to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that too. Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon.

Credits

Marc Barkman-Astles: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Brooke Norton: Production Support

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

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