Guess the Artefact | OpenSTEM Pty Ltd

Guess the Artefact #3

This week’s Guess the Artefact challenge centres around an artefact used by generations of school children. There are some adults who may even have used these themselves when they were at school. It is interesting to see if modern students can recognise this object and work out how it was used. The picture below comes from the Victorian Collections website, managed by Museums Australia (Victoria). This website is a great source of images and texts from bygone days.

This object is rectangular and made of a relatively thin piece of black stone,measuring 25 x 17.5 cm, surrounded by 4 pieces of wood, which are a couple of centimetres wide. The corners of the wooden pieces have been rounded. There are several sets of faint parallel lines from left to right across the front of the stone, each pair of lines separated by a small gap. The back is plain, without parallel lines. The surface of the stone is slightly scratched. The letters “O.F” have been written and slightly incised into the topmost strip of wood. There is a small hole in between these two letters.

The dark stone is a fine-grained argillaceous (clayey) rock, called slate, which breaks naturally into thin slabs. In Australia, this rock was mined in South Australia, NSW and Tasmania in the 19th century. The dark surface of the stone reminds one of an object which was common in classrooms until fairly recently. Can you guess which one? They have been mostly replaced by whiteboards in modern classrooms. Yes, it does look similar to a blackboard, but much smaller.

The spacing of the lines is also important and might look familiar. Can you think of a familiar object, also used in classrooms, that has similar lines? Especially the ones used by younger students have similar lines. Yes, pre-ruled exercise books, with spacing for upper and lower case letters have very similar lines.

So it seems that we have a small blackboard-type object marked with lines for learning to write letters. In fact, that is exactly what this is! These objects were called “slates” (I’m sure you can work out why) and were used in place of exercise books by students in schools from the time that Australia was first settled by Europeans, throughout the colonial period in the 19th century and even into the 20th century. Some schools in Queensland continued to use them into the 1960s, but in most places exercise books were used from the 1920s or 1930s.

Children with slates in classroom, Queensland, 1940.

The slates marked with parallel lines were used by younger students learning to write and form their letters correctly, but they were also used for all lessons in many classes. In fact, younger children often struggled to manage the correct use of a slate pencil. The reverse side (with no lines) was used for writing Maths sums and drawing. Until the 1930s, when the bulk manufacture of paper from pulp made from eucalypt trees made paper more readily available, paper was relatively expensive. Thus, where books were provided to students, they were only given to older students, whom, it was hoped, would make less mistakes and would therefore waste less paper. Students used a pencil made from a softer kind of slate, which made white marks on the dark slate, or chalk, to write on the slate. The slate pencil was tied onto the slate using string or ribbon, tied through the hole in the top of the frame. A damp sponge was used to erase the work. Sometimes ‘books’ of 2 or 3 slates were tied together, but usually students would have to write down their lesson, have it checked by the teacher, memorise it and then erase what they had written. This would have meant that they had no notes and had to rely entirely on what they could remember when they wrote their exams!

In practise, sponges would get lost or dirty and students would spit on the slate and rub it out with their sleeves. The wear and tear on clothes led to complaints from parents. Students would also suck on the pencils, as they worked better when damp. Concerns were made about hygiene when using slates. In 1909, a School Medical Officer in the UK managed to culture the bacteria that causes diphtheria off the slate pencils in one particular class, and there were calls for the use of school slates to be discontinued. However, it was also noted that slates were easier to disinfect than paper.

Slates were also used in homes – for writing shopping lists and the like. Archaeological excavations of houses and schools from the 19th century have shown that slate pencils and writing slates were common. However, slate was also used for roofing tiles, which does confuse the evidence sometimes. Writing slates could be used over and over, unlike paper, which could only be written on once. This made slates significantly cheaper than paper for a long time.

Can you make a list of the Pros and Cons of using slates in classrooms? What would be different if you used slates today? How do you think using slates influenced the way lessons were taught in schools? Think about what could be taught and what could not…

Guess the Artefact! – #2

Today’s Guess the Artefact! covers one of a set of artefacts which are often found confusing to recognise. We often get questions about these artefacts, from students and teachers alike, so here’s a chance to test your skills of observation. Remember – all heritage and archaeological material is covered by State or Federal legislation and should never be removed from its context. If possible, photograph the find in its context and then report it to your local museum or State Heritage body (the Dept of Environment and Heritage Protection in Qld; the Office of Environment and Heritage in NSW; the Dept of Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development in ACT; Heritage Victoria; the Dept of Environment, Water and Natural Resources in South Australia; the State Heritage Office in WA and the Heritage Council – Dept of Tourism and Culture in NT).

This artefact is made of stone. It measures about 12 x 8 x 3 cm. It fits easily and comfortably into an adult’s hand. The surface of the stone is mostly smooth and rounded, it looks a little like a river cobble. However, one side – the right-hand side in the photo above – is shaped so that 2 smooth sides meet in a straight, sharpish edge. Such formations do not occur on naturally rounded stones, which tells us that this was shaped by people and not just rounded in a river. The smoothed edges meeting in a sharp edge tell us that this is ground-stone technology. Ground stone technology is a technique used by people to create smooth, sharp edges on stones. People grind the stone against other rocks, occasionally using sand and water to facilitate the process, usually in a single direction. This forms a smooth surface which ends in a sharp edge.

Ground stone technology is usually associated with the Neolithic period in Europe and Asia. In the northern hemisphere, this technology was primarily used by people who were learning to domesticate plants and animals. These early farmers learned to grind grains, such as wheat and barley, between two stones to make flour – thus breaking down the structure of the plant and making it easier to digest. Our modern mortar and pestle is a descendant of this process. Early farmers would have noticed that these actions produced smooth and sharp edges on the stones. These observations would have led them to apply this technique to other tools which they used and thus develop the ground-stone technology. Here (picture on right) we can see an Egyptian ground stone axe from the Neolithic period. The toolmaker has chosen an attractive red and white stone to make this axe-head.

In Japan this technology is much older than elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, and ground-stone axes have been found dating to 30,000 years ago during the Japanese Palaeolithic period. Until recently these were thought to be the oldest examples of ground-stone technology in the world. However, in 2016, Australian archaeologists Peter Hiscock, Sue O’Connor, Jane Balme and Tim Maloney reported in an article in the journal Australian Archaeology, the finding of a tiny flake of stone (just over 1 cm long and 1/2 cm wide) from a ground stone axe in layers dated to 44,000 to 49,000 years ago at the site of Carpenter’s Gap in the Kimberley region of north-west Australia. This tiny flake of stone – easily missed by anyone not paying close attention – is an excellent example of the extreme importance of ‘archaeological context’. Archaeological material that remains in its original context (known as in situ) can be dated accurately and associated with other material from the same layers, thus allowing us to understand more about the material. Anything removed from the context usually can not be dated and only very limited information can be learnt.

The find from the Kimberley makes Australia the oldest place in the world to have ground-stone technology. The tiny chip of stone, broken off a larger ground-stone artefact, probably an axe, was made by the ancestors of Aboriginal people in the millennia after they arrived on this continent. These early Australians did not practise agriculture, but they did eat various grains, which they leaned to grind between stones to make flour. It is possible that whilst processing these grains they learned to grind stone tools as well. Our artefact, shown above, is undated. It was found, totally removed from its original context, stored under an old house in Brisbane. The artefact is useful as a teaching aid, allowing students to touch and hold a ground-stone axe made by Aboriginal people in Australia’s past. However, since it was removed from its original context at some point, we do not know how old it is, or even where it came from exactly.

Our artefact is a stone tool. Specifically, it is a ground stone axe, made using technology that dates back almost 50,000 years in Australia! These axes were usually made by rubbing a hard stone cobble against rocks by the side of a creek. Water from the creek was used as a lubricant, and often sand was added as an extra abrasive. The making of ground-stone axes often left long grooves in these rocks. These are called ‘grinding grooves’ and can still be found near some creeks in the landscape today, such as in Kuringai Chase National Park in Sydney. The ground-stone axes were usually hafted using sticks and lashings of plant fibre, to produce a tool that could be used for cutting vegetation or other uses. Other stone tools look different to the one shown above, especially those made by flaking stone; however, smooth stones should always be carefully examined in case they are also ground-stone artefacts and not just simple stones!

Guess the Artefact!

Today we are announcing a new challenge for our readers – Guess the Artefact! We post pictures of an artefact and you can guess what it is. The text will slowly reveal the answer, through a process of examination and deduction – see if you can guess what it is, before the end. We are starting this challenge with an item from our year 6 Archaeological Dig workshop. Year 6 (unit 6.3) students concentrate on Federation in their Australian History segment – so that’s your first clue! Study the image and then start reading the text below.

Our first question is what is it? Study the image and see if you can work out what it might be – it’s an dirty, damaged piece of paper. It seems to be old. Does it have a date? Ah yes, there are 3 dates – 23, 24 and 25 October, 1889, so we deduce that it must be old, dating to the end of the 19th century. We will file the exact date for later consideration. We also note references to railways. The layout of the information suggests a train ticket. So we have a late 19th century train ticket!

Now why do we have this train ticket and whose train ticket might it have been? The ticket is First Class, so this is someone who could afford to travel in style. Where were they going? The railways mentioned are Queensland Railways, Great Northern Railway, New South Wales Railways and the stops are Brisbane, Wallangara, Tenterfield and Sydney. Now we need to do some research. Queensland Railways and New South Wales Railways seem self-evident, but what is Great Northern Railway? A brief hunt reveals several possible candidates: 1) a contemporary rail operator in Victoria; 2) a line in Queensland connecting Mt Isa and Townsville and 3) an old, now unused railway in New South Wales. We can reject option 1) immediately. Option 2) is the right state, but the towns seem unrelated. That leaves option 3), which seems most likely. Looking into the NSW option in more detail we note that it ran between Sydney and Brisbane, with a stop at Wallangara to change gauge – Bingo!

More research reveals that the line reached Wallangara in 1888, the year before this ticket was issued. Only after 1888 was it possible to travel from Brisbane to Sydney by rail, albeit with a compulsory stop at Wallangara. We note also that the ticket contains a meal voucher for dinner at the Railway Refreshment Rooms in Wallangara. Presumably passengers overnighted in Wallangara before continuing on to Sydney on a different train and rail gauge. Checking the dates on the ticket, we can see evidence of an overnight stop, as the next leg continues from Wallangara on the next day (24 Oct 1889). However, next we come to some important information. From Wallangara, the next leg of the journey represented by this ticket was only as far as Tenterfield. Looking on a map, we note that Tenterfield is only about 25 km away – hardly a day’s train ride, more like an hour or two at the most (steam trains averaged about 24 km/hr at the time). From this we deduce that the ticket holder wanted to stop at Tenterfield and continue their journey on the next day.

We know that we’re studying Australian Federation history, so the name Tenterfield should start to a ring a bell – what happened in Tenterfield in 1889 that was relevant to Australian Federation history? The answer, of course, is that Henry Parkes delivered his Tenterfield Oration there, and the date? 24 October, 1889! If we look into the background, we quickly discover that Henry Parkes was on his way from Brisbane back to Sydney, when he stopped in Tenterfield. He had been seeking support for Federation from the government of the colony of Queensland. He broke his journey in Tenterfield, a town representative of those towns closer to the capital of another colony than their own, which would benefit from the free trade arrangements flowing from Federation. Parkes even discussed the issue of different rail gauges as something that would be solved by Federation! We can therefore surmise that this ticket may well be the ticket of Henry Parkes, documenting his journey from Brisbane to Sydney in October, 1889, during which he stopped and delivered the Tenterfield Oration!

This artefact is therefore relevant as a source for anyone studying Federation history – as well as giving us a more personal insight into the travels of Henry Parkes in 1889, it allows us to consider aspects of life at the time:

the building of railway connections across Australia, in a time before motor cars were in regular use;
the issue of different size railway gauges in the different colonies and what practical challenges that posed for a long distance rail network;
the ways in which people travelled and the speed with which they could cross large distances;
what rail connections would have meant for small, rural towns, to mention just a few.
Why might the railway companies have provided meal vouchers?

These are all sidelines of inquiry, which students may be interested to pursue, and which might help them to engage with the subject matter in more detail.

In our Archaeological Dig Workshops, we not only engage students in the processes and physical activities of the dig, but we provide opportunities for them to use the artefacts to practise deduction, reasoning and research – true inquiry-based learning, imitating real-world processes and far more engaging and empowering than more traditional bookwork.