Teacher's Guide for CALLIOPE: The Ancient Celts

Teacher guide prepared by: Karen E. Hong, who writes frequently for COBBLESTONE^®, FACES^®, and CALLIOPE^®.
VOCABULARY

archaeological	artifacts	looters	chieftain
torc	cauldron	historian	symposium
chiefdoms	excavations	fortified	hod
migrations	Neolithic	Kleinaspergle	tumuli
Kylikes	flagon	amulets	fibula
barbarians	whorls	whirligigs	motif
triskele	aura	sphinxes	griffins
ambiguous	oppidum	confederation	chamois
augury	Gauls	mercenaries	Galatians
acropolis	consul	Cisalpine Gaul	Transalpine Gaul
Dis pater	lintel

DISCOVERY AT HOCHDORF

The burial sites of ancient people provide clues about these people and their lives. These clues help us to draw conclusions about the time and culture in which they lived. Have your students construct their own burial sites similar to those of the ancient Celts. You may wish to have them answer the following questions to direct their efforts:

• What do you believe about an afterlife?
• What is important to you in this life?
• What will you need when you leave this life?

Constructing their burial sites can be accomplished in a number of ways. Students could:

• Create a poster
• Use a shoe box to create a 3-dimensional model
• Write a description of the site

Have the students analyze each other's burial sites by having them answer the following questions:

1. What does looking at this burial site tell you about what this person believes about an afterlife?
2. What does looking at this burial site tell you about what this person values? What is important to this person?
3. What does looking at this burial site tell you about what this person thinks they will need when they leave this life?

What conclusions can your students draw from analyzing the burial sites of their classmates? What similarities / dissimilarities do these sites show?

Because salt has always been essential to life, controlling salt mines was a means of great wealth. Salt has served as money in some times and places and has been the cause of war. In some cultures, slaves were traded for salt. In Ethiopia, discs of salt were "salted away" in the king's treasury. Rome's major highway was called the Via Salacia, the Salt Road. So important was salt that the word "salary" evolved from the Latin word "salarium" which meant "money given to Roman soldiers to buy salt."

You may wish to have students explore the nature and history of salt. The Salt Institute has developed a multidisciplinary curriculum for students. Although the curriculum is designed for high school students, it includes segments that may be used with younger students. The curriculum is available online at www.saltinstitute.org/42a.html.

Like all places and people, La Tene underwent different stages of development. By analyzing the excavations and grouping similarities together archaeologists have identified four stages.

Have your students explore the different stages of their family's lives. Have the students gather information from family photos, letters, and by interviewing family members. Students might find it helpful first to construct a timeline of their family's life. Then have the students analyze their family's life to look for different stages of development. Among the obvious ways these stages could be separated are by the number of family members (births and deaths of members creating different stages) or by the location of the family (where they lived, different cities, different houses). Other similarities creating a specific stage of development may appear as the students analyze their timelines. Students could display their information in a variety of ways:

• A written description of the stages of their family's life
• A scrapbook of pictures and artifacts of their family's life
• A poster displaying the various stages

If you would like to explore archaeology more fully with your students, you might find DIG, the archaeology magazine for kids, helpful. This magazine is published by Cobblestone Publishing with the Archaeology Institute of America. Information about DIG^TM is available online at www.digonsite.com.

You may wish to explore the art of the Ancient Celts by having students construct a Celtic knot. This can be accomplished by using graph paper, glue, and yarn or ribbon. Or you may wish to trace the design onto muslin or another fabric and have students sew or glue bias tape (available in fabric stores) or ribbon to create their design. Ideally, the yarn, ribbon, or bias tape should be long enough to complete the design with a single strand, by overlapping the turns in the design. Detailed instructions for creating a Celtic knot using graph paper are available online at www.wallace.net/knots/howto/. Samples of Celtic knots are available at . In addition, Celtic knotwork designs can be found at http://painting.about.com/library/blcelticknot.htm. You may wish to print out these designs and enlarge them on a photocopier to obtain the size you would like. If you wish, students can work directly on the printed or photocopied designs to create their Celtic knots. Designs for Celtic knots are also available in quilting books and magazines.

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Updated: 7/23/08 06:26 pm
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