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Stone Age to Iron Age

History · Year 3–Year 4

Three scenes in order: Skara Brae, a Bronze Age farm, a hill fort.

About the stone to iron

Three scenes on a track across the board, in the order they happened: Skara Brae in the late Stone Age, a Bronze Age farm, and an Iron Age hill fort. Step along the track, tap a part to name it, and Next carries on into the next age once this one is finished.

The Skara Brae house is CUT OPEN, because every word a class has to learn there is inside it: the hearth in the middle, the stone dresser facing the door and a box bed made of slabs. The houses have no roofs left anyway, so the cut is close to what the site looks like today. Outside, the passage runs to the next house and the whole village is set into the midden, the heap of old rubbish that held the walls up and kept them warm.

The Bronze Age board is a farm: a round house with a thatched roof, a beaker pot, an axe and a sickle made of the new metal, a round barrow on the skyline and a boat on the water, because metal was carried along the coast and traded.

The Iron Age board is a hill fort: the rampart with its fence of split posts, the ditch the bank came out of, the one gateway, a round house inside and, down in the field, an iron-tipped plough and a quern for grinding grain.

The dates are ranges and they say so. Nothing here is dated to a year, because the evidence does not support one, and there are no names: nothing written survives from any of this. The timeline tool is where the dated events start, with the Romans.

How to use it on your whiteboard

  1. 1Tap a part of the picture to name it and see what it is.
  2. 2Step along the track, or use Earlier and Later, to change age.
  3. 3Tap Next to work round a scene in order, and on into the next age.
  4. 4Tap Show all to put every label up at once, and Hide to ask the class again.

Questions

What was Skara Brae?
A village of stone houses on Orkney, lived in from about 3,100 BC for six hundred years or so. It was buried in sand and forgotten until a storm uncovered it in 1850, which is why the stone furniture is still there: the beds, the dresser and the hearth are all built of slabs, because there is very little wood on Orkney.
What is a midden?
A rubbish heap. At Skara Brae the houses were built into one, and it was doing a job: the packed waste held the walls steady and kept the wind and the cold out. It is also where most of what we know about what people ate comes from.
Why is it called the Bronze Age?
Because people learned to melt copper and tin together to make bronze, which is harder than either on its own and holds an edge far better than stone. Getting the two metals meant trading a long way, which is why there is a boat on that board.
What is a hill fort for?
It is a defended settlement rather than a castle: banks and ditches in rings round the top of a hill, with one gateway, and round houses, stores and workshops inside. Maiden Castle in Dorset is the biggest in Britain, and there are more than a thousand of them.
Are the dates exact?
No, and the board says about. Prehistory is dated from the things that survive rather than from anything written, so the honest answer is a range of centuries. A date like 3180 BC would look more precise and be less true.