As expansive as the collections housed at the British Musuem, both online and in house, finding much information about the Vale of York Hoard on the British Musuem website wasn’t as fruitful as I thought that it might be.  It has LOTS of metadata for each of the 54 photographed items from the hoard and the 634 items yet to be photographed.  However, a larger body of content explaining how the hoard was found and processed or what history can be uncovered in examining each object is largely missing from the museum website.

Previously, I have relied on Neil MacGregor’s BBC Radio 4 broadcast about the hoard when I shared its story with my class, but that gives away too much of the narrative that I want students to try to create on their own.  However, I had a EUREKA moment when I remembered that I might have purchased a small book about the hoard from the Musuem’s gift shop on a trip to London three years ago.  I went digging on the shelves above my desk, I found it – The Vale of York Hoard by Gareth Williams and Barry Ager.

The book has been very helpful in fleshing out some of the specifics about what is known about each object, and I will use this information to scaffold some activities or learning opportunities in the lesson to make that historical thinking visible.  But, the most helpful part of the book is the conclusion at the end.  In three fairly succinct paragraphs, the book answers my guiding question:  “What sense can we make of the raw materials of the past?”  It reminded me of the importance of “backward design” in Wiggins’ and McTighe’s Understanding by Design framework.  In thinking about these very specific conclusions, I am hoping that I can design a lesson that will lead students to find their own meaningful conclusions without getting too lost in the weeds.

I also liked that the book spoke a bit more to the procedures employed by archaeologists, curators and historians as they actually collected the hoard.  I may include a short bit on the “forensics” of collecting artifacts in ways that doesn’t destroy the evidence of the past left by these raw materials.

I am working to design a lesson that I will use in my own classroom this year to teach students about the role of the Vikings as raiders and traders across Europe and Asia.  I enjoy working with the “stuff” of history and have tried to implement more and more opportunities in my classroom where students learn by being hands on in order to grapple with historical thinking skills.

Teaching the skill of object analysis is a key feature in my classroom.  I find that students are more successful in grappling with visual evidence in primary sources than slogging though archaic texts.  And, since I teach World History, objects are often in far greater abundance than written texts.

While I am designing my main lesson around the Vale of York Hoard, I did set up the Omeka site in a way that will invite more than one exhibit.  The larger site is called Uncovering History, but the idea is that I will have different directories that could house different collections for specific lessons. Students do some work with Roman coins around the time of Caesar, and I can see how I could use this digital space to build a small collection that would make the current iteration of my lesson more streamlined. I can also see how I might eventually add other collections as well.

The other advantage of building an online collection is that it would be more easily shared with other teachers. Instead of poking around in a PDF of a lesson plan, teachers would have access to the lesson resources directly.

While my main audience remains my own classroom use, I am open to the ways in which digital media and publication might be shared with a larger audience.

The driving question for my project comes from one Lévesque’s five essential questions about practicing history:  “How do we make sense of the raw materials of the past?” (37).

I am accessing the British Museum’s vast collection of digitized resources available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license in order to build a “history mystery” project around the Vale of York hoard.  My plan is to develop a small archive of items in Omeka for students to explore as “virtual interns” for a museum.  Students will note the individual aspects of their assigned piece, recording its distinct features and comparing it to other objects in the collection in order write a description of the item and to draw out possible theories for how the collection came together.

Once they’ve done the exploration, I will direct students to the British Museum site where they can round out the background of their specific piece, writing an exhibit tag and short description.  Each student will be able to use Maker technology to create a full size model of their item using the Glow Forge 3D laser printer. Students can use the replicated hoard as an instructional aid for teaching younger students about the Vikings.  It will also serve as vehicle for discussing the liberties and limits of digital technology in history. While one can take in so much of the world through digitized images or computer generated replicas, nothing can ever really replace the artifact itself.

I will also employ Story Maps to help students create a digital exhibit that they can share with younger students or their parents.  This vehicle will allow students to present their learning in a non-traditional format that allows for a greater narrative voice in historical writing.  It will also capitalize on digital mapping technology to help students explain how geography played a role in how the objects likely came together in England from places as far away as Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.

The digital environment gives me access to materials and multiple tools for students to engage with the historical narrative on tacticle, digital, and spatial levels.

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Lévesque, Stéphane. Thinking Historically. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Several years ago, the BBC produced a series called A History of the World in 100 Objects based on a collection of items housed at the British Musuem.  One of the items highlighted is a thousand year old Viking hoard that had been recently discovered by two amateur detectorists in England near York.  The Vale of York Hoard, as it now known, was a history mystery, and it stood out to me as something that might hook my students in developing their historical thinking skills.

As a new discovery, the artifact had no narrative, and it was up to scientists and historians to uncover a possible narrative for the hoard based on critically thinking about the evidence contained in the hoard.  First of all, what is it?  How could one understand what the artifact was since it didn’t come with a museum tag.  What did it contain?  How could sourcing the contents reveal it object’s purpose or significance?  How did all these items come together? Are they similar or different?  What technology might be involved that brought these diverse objects together?  To whom did these objects belong?  What might their lives have been like? And, finally, why was it buried?  Who might have done so?

Over the years, I have tried to incorporate these skills into my classroom by coming up with a very rudimentary “hoard” simulation.  It’s a fun story, but I am not sure that my students have really fully understood the point of the lesson.  While it’s clearly evident to me that historians had to figure all this out, the lesson was rushed, and frankly, a little incomplete using paper coin replicas.  I’m not sure that I gave students an opportunity to cross the threshold by making my thinking visible to them.

My idea is to build a small archive using items from the hoard made available by the British Museum using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.  Then I would create a PBL (Project Based Learning) unit around the items in the archive.  Drawing upon the concept of being a “virtual intern,” students might each be assigned an object and investigate the item by asking some of the historical thinking questions listed above.  I can pull from this archive to create scaffolded resources in Scalar, Omeka, or some other forum, that will guide each student on the journey.  Pulling from the idea of the importance of narrative, students might each write a short piece imagining to whom each individual object might have belonged.  Finally, students could work in small groups to examine individual findings and work to develop a larger narrative about how the object came together.  Perhaps there could be a history prize for the group whose best demonstrates historical thinking skills or one for the narrative that comes closest to that developed by the British Museum.

One pitfall that I see is that clever students might “Google” the name of the coin and accidentally (or on purpose) stumble on to the real story of the Vale of York hoard, thereby ruining the game.  However, it’s something that I’m willing to take the risk of trying in order to help my students that the written history they read in textbooks has to be uncovered by real historians using the skills of historical thinking.