Community Archaeologist Becky was so happy to be invited to Kingsnorth Church of England Primary School and Chilmington Green School on Thursday 10th October. The staff and children gave her an amazingly warm welcome! She would like to say a huge ‘thank you’ to the children of Year 3 at Kingsnorth, and Years 5 and 6 at Chilmington Green for their excellent behavior and insightful questions!
Using a tape measure, and with lots of help from the children, Becky created a timeline (to scale!) that went all the way back from the present day to the start of the Middle Stone Age. This covered an incredible 12,000 years (or 12m on the tape measure). The children learnt that they had been alive for less than one centimeter, and discovered that we would need a tape measure that was almost 1km long (850m to be exact) to get back to the start of the Old Stone Age in Britain, 850,000 years ago! The children then learnt about environmental change in Ashford throughout prehistory, how hunter gatherer lifestyles changed after farmers arrived during the New Stone Age, and about some important Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements that have been excavated locally. They also got to handle some Stone Age and Iron Age artefacts…wow!!!
Thank you so much to the Year 4s of Kingsnorth School, who created some wonderful artwork for our website, depicting Chilmington at different times during the prehistoric period. These wonderful drawings show how the environment changed over time, and how people lived during different periods. Watch this space, because we can’t wait to showcase this beautiful work on our website! To begin with, here is a lovely drawing by Emily, which depicts Bronze Age tools, including a Bronze Age axe or ‘palstave’.
If you would like to see some Bronze Age axes like the one that Emily has illustrated, why not pay a visit to Ashford Museum? As well as axes, there are all sorts of interesting prehistoric artefacts, including an actual mammoth tooth from Ice Age Ashford! In fact, why not combine it with a visit to see our Chilmington pop-up in the Ashford Museum Annexe on Saturday October 26th? Hoping to see you there!