Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Hutchinson.

And welcome to our history lesson.

We've been learning all about prehistoric Britain, and this is our last lesson today.

Our last lesson together.

I've enjoyed learning about prehistoric Britain with you so much, I'm so impressed with how much you've learned, but we've got a little bit more to learn about.

And it's a really exciting lesson because today we're going to be learning all about prehistoric monuments.

I'm going to talk a bit more about what a monument is in just a moment.

So this is what our lesson today is going to look like.

First of all, we're going to just recap the prehistoric age.

We've been learning about it in each part of our lesson.

Then we'll learn about what monuments are and we'll look at perhaps the most famous prehistoric monument in England.

And one of the most famous prehistoric monuments in the world it's called Stonehenge.

We'll then look at some other prehistoric monuments, including the Ring of Brodgar.

And finally, we'll learn about some people called Druids and Druidism, and see if we can make a connection between these monuments and Druids.

So let's get started.

First of all, can we recap our Prehistoric age? By now, you should know these dates really well, the order that they came in, and have an idea of the sort of timescale that we are talking about.

So, first of all, let's just zoom in to the last 3 million years.

And we know that the first humans arrived about how long ago? Well done, two and a half million years ago.

You should know these by now.

You should know these so quickly.

These dates just really off the top of your head, be able to say them out nice and quickly.

The first Homo sapiens, our species of human.

How old are the first Homo sapiens, our species of human? Well done if you said 300,000 years ago.

And for most of this period, it's the Palaeolithic era.

It's the stone age.

The first humans or Homo habilis start using stone tools and Homo sapiens come along a little bit later.

We then get the Mesolithic age, and the Neolithic age, which are right at the end of the Stone age.

So let's zoom into those.

So we're going to just zoom in, so each chunk is a thousand years now and I've put 0 CE there.

That's when we start counting the years from.

And so we just got the end of the Palaeolithic era here, though it goes off the screen so it goes back millions of years.

And I zoomed in so you can just see the Mesolithic era and then Neolithic era.

Nice and clearly, so the Neolithic era, when was the Neolithic era? can you remember when the Neolithic was? Say it out loud.

Well done, if you said 4,000 BCE.

4,000 years before the common era before the years zero.

So there's a few more thousand years that have happened since, but we didn't start counting until about 2000 years ago.

So you might have said 6,000 years ago and that's okay as well.

It's 4,000 BCE or 6,000 years ago.

What about when the Mesolithic era started? When was that? Can you remember, say it out loud? Well done if you said 10,500 BC or 12,500 years ago.

And we know that after the Neolithic era humans discovered metal, they discovered bronze.

That was the end of the stone age.

It's not the stone age anymore because we're using metal.

We discovered how to do that with the help of the beaker culture.

And that was about 2,500 BCE, about four and a half thousand years ago.

After the bronze age came the iron age, when we learned how to make iron, which was a little bit tricky to make, but we had way more materials, way more materials to make iron.

And so the Iron age came and lasted until about when the Romans came to Britain.

That was from about 800 BCE to about 43 CE about 2000 years ago.

So in this lesson, we're going to be talking all about monuments.

So my first question is, well, what is a monument? A monument is any statue or building or site sort of like area, which has been built by humans and which is of historical importance.

Okay.

So it was built at some point in history and people still look at it today and visit it today because it's important.

It marks something, it represents something it's something that was built by people.

So let's see some examples of some monuments.

There's this monument here.

This is in Rome.

And this is of Hercules, the mythical Hercules.

There's this monument here, which is in London.

And this is of Lord Nelson, who was an Admiral in the Navy and that's called Nelson's Column that was built.

And then there's this monument here, which is the Washington Monument.

And that's in Washington, DC in the United States of America.

And that was to commemorate the first president of the United States of America, George Washington.

So the Washington monument was finished about a hundred years ago.

Lord Nelson's monument about 150 years ago.

And that statue from Hercules was made over a thousand years ago, I think.

So it's not just monuments from a few hundred years ago, that exist though.

We do some major monuments from the Neolithic era.

We have major monuments from over 4,000 years ago in the Neolithic era in Britain.

So here's my question.

What material do you think those monuments are made out of? Do you think they've made a wood, iron, stone, or bronze? So there are monuments that are still there today from the Neolithic era.

What materials do you think they made out of? Choose now which material you think it is.

And well done if you said stone, it was of course the stone age.

So the material is stone.

Of course, there might've been some monuments made out of wood, but wood rots away.

And so if there were big monuments made out of wood, by now thousands and thousands of years later, they would have rotted away and become damaged.

So we have no evidence of any monuments that are made out of wood.

Iron and bronze we're from the bronze age and iron age.

So although there are monuments made out of iron and bronze, they're not from the stone-age, they're not from the Neolithic age because they're made out of metal.

So our Neolithic monuments or made out of stone.

And one of the most famous is called Stonehenge.

Here's a picture of it.

I'll let you look closely there.

You can see these huge stones that have been put together by humans into a circle.

And there even sort of archways have been created here.

And Stonehenge can be found here.

It's in a place called Salisbury.

That's where it is.

I'm just going to zoom in there so you can see closely where it is.

So just near, in between Southampton and Swindon, we can see that there's Stonehenge that's where you would find it in England, if you wanted to go and visit it.

And Stonehenge was, construction was started on it over 5,000 years ago.

So people first started to make Stonehenge over 5,000 years ago, but it took over a thousand years to build.

So it would have developed over time.

It would have changed slightly extra bits would have been added, extra circles and stones would have been added and it built up over a thousand years.

In the middle, there are all these arches made of bluestone.

The stone is called bluestone.

And on the outside, there are these very, very big stones, and they're called Sarsens.

Now those stones, some of them are 22 tonnes.

That's about the weight of three or four elephants.

That's how heavy they are.

And they've been dragged and put upright, lifted upright to create this Stonehenge, even though it was the stone age, people didn't have the sorts of tools and devices that we have now.

And the stone age marks the summer and winter solstice.

So the summer solstice is the longest day of the year.

In the middle of summer, the longest day of the summer, is called the summer solstice.

And in the winter, the shortest day of the year, and by short, I mean, in terms of daylight, of course, a day is always 24 hours, Isn't it? It's still 24 hours.

But the day where there's the least amount of daylight, we call that the winter solstice and the day where there's the most amount of sunlight, we call it the summer solstice.

And something amazing happens with Stonehenge.

If you go to Stonehenge on the summer solstice then, and look at one of the stones called the Hillstone, you can see the sun rising perfectly above the Hillstone.

So it's deliberately put there so that on the summer solstice, the sun would rise above it.

And if you go there on the winter solstice at the end of the day, the sun sets over the same stone, the Hillstone.

So this was put together in a precise location.

They didn't just get these stones and dump them anywhere.

They put them in a precise location so that it marked the longest day of the year and the shortest day of the year.

Even though it was 5,000 years ago.

Here's the most amazing thing like I haven't talked to this mysterious baffling thing.

People are still confused about this today because some of those stones, some of those bluestones especially actually come from Wales, over 200 kilometres away.

Now we're in Neolithic Britain.

Have cars been invented? Of course not.

Has metal been invented? No.

We haven't even discovered metal.

All we have is stone and wooden tools.

They've only just began to domesticate animals.

And they've got these huge stones that are about the same weight as an elephant.

And they've managed to get them from Wales to Salisbury over 200 kilometres.

How did they do that? How did they get those stones? The answer is nobody really knows.

There are a few different stories.

I'll tell you some of the stories now.

One of the stories, one of the myths is that the stones were actually put together, the Stonehenge was constructed by giants in Ireland, and then a wizard called Merlin zapped all of the stones to that current location.

Do you think that that's how Stonehenge was created? Oh, I am not sure that magic was involved.

I don't know if there's any evidence of magic, but it's a nice story, isn't it? That's one of the stories.

Other historians who are perhaps trying to be a bit more sensible and realistic, think that maybe what people did in the Neolithic age is they got big logs, so they chopped down big trees and they put a log on the ground and then they use ropes and they pulled the stones down.

So they collected the big stones, they pulled them down, but so then landed on the logs and then you can sort of roll them.

And if you keep getting a log and putting it to the front, you can roll it forward.

And then as a log comes out of the back, you can put it to the front again so that your stone is always rolling on the logs and they might have rolled it to over 200 kilometres.

Other people think that maybe they used a kind of sledge.

So you might take a sledge out when it's snowy and go sledging.

And maybe they use a similar thing so maybe they got these sorts of sledges.

They built these sledges with wood and they got the stones onto the sledges, and then lots of people put rope and, lots of people grabbed a bit of the rope and they pulled it all together using sledges.

So those are some different theories of how Stonehenge was constructed, but we don't really know, there's no writing.

And so we don't really know how Stonehenge was put together.

It still confuses archaeologists and historians even today.

Let's write down some of the different theories to see if we can remember.

So I'd like you now to write a paragraph and I'd like you to complete this paragraph with how Stonehenge could have been constructed.

And you can give the three different theories that I talked about.

So you can write a sentence about Merlin, the myth of Merlin and the giants.

You can write a sentence about how they use logs to roll the stones or about how they use sledges to drag the stones from Wales to Salisbury to construct the Stonehenge.

So pause the video and write a sentence for each of the different ideas or theories around how Stonehenge could have been constructed.

Pause the video now.

Super.

I'm sure that you did a really good job there.

I'm going to show you what I wrote and you can compare your answer to my answer.

And if you want to just pause the video again and improve it based on what I've written, then you can do that.

If you notice that I wrote anything and you wrote it as well, give yourself a big tick.

'Cause that means that you did some great work.

So these are my sentences.

I wrote and myth about Stonehenge is that giants built it in Ireland and then Merlin the wizard used magic to zap it to Salisbury.

My second sentence was another theory, is that the stones were put on logs and rolled to Salisbury.

And my last one is some people believe that wooden sledges were used.

Give yourself a tick, if you wrote a nice, full sentences about the different ideas of how Stonehenge was constructed.

It's not just Stonehenge, Stonehenge isn't the only Neolithic monument from Prehistoric times.

There's also another stone circle.

So each of them there are these stone circles called the Ring of Brodgar.

This is the Ring of Brodgar.

It's a huge stone circle with these large sort of like almost quite like, they're knife-like stones that have been inserted into the ground to create a huge circle, hundreds of metres around.

And you find the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands.

Now we've seen the Orkney Islands before.

What else was it, the Orkney islands, can you remember? Well done if you said Skara Brae that Neolithic settlement.

I wonder if the people that were at Skara Brae built the Ring of Brodgar.

So if we zoom in to the Orkney Islands, then, remember the Skara Brae was here in scale and the Ring of Brodgar is here just by this lock here.

It's not the only stone circle that you can find on the Orkney Islands.

There's also the Standing Stones of Stenness and these stones are huge.

These stones, some of them are six metres.

Now that would be like, I think I'm under two metres.

So it'd be like me.

And then another me and then another me and then a bit more on top.

That's how large those stones are.

And again, they've been inserted into the ground.

Nobody knows quite how, maybe they dug a bit of a ditch and then they used some ropes and pulled it up and put the.

amazing that they're able to do that without the sort of technology that we have today.

So another little task for you, because I think that these stones are stunning.

I'd love to go and visit them.

I want to, when I can go on holiday.

Maybe I'll see if I can go to the Orkney Islands.

I'd love to see these stone circles in real life and see how big they are, but for now, why don't we sketch out these different stone Stones of Stenness.

So pause the video and see if you can sketch this picture with the Stones of Stenness Awesome work, well done.

I'm sure that you've done a brilliant picture there.

So we've looked at some different stone circles and you might be wondering why we're Neolithic people building these stone circles? One of the clues might be to do with some people called Druids.

Druids were some of the first priests, so Druidism is a kind of religion, Druidism.

It's a kind of ancient religion.

There are some modern Druids.

So here are some modern Druids, some people that are members of the religion of Druidism and you can see them here dressed in cloaks, and they've got staffs and they've got sort of leaves in their hair showing that they really love nature.

And here are some more modern Druids.

And where are they? Can you spot where they are? Well done, there at Stonehenge.

And Stonehenge is very important for Druids, for modern Druids because they think it was important to Druids right back in Neolithic times.

And you can see again, they're wearing these robes.

So Druids, some of the first priests and the first religion, they really worshipped nature.

So in fact, Druids sounds a little bit like a Celtic word drury which means oak, means oak tree, like Oak Academy.

And so perhaps that's where the name comes from.

But Druids worship all sorts of things in nature, including trees, the sun, the moon, different sorts of natural things.

They worship them like they were gods.

So that means that Druids were polytheists and poly means lots and then theism means God.

So they believe that there are lots of gods and they can be found in nature.

We only really know about Druids from Roman records.

When the Romans came to Britain, they saw these Druids and they talked about them.

They were often quite old and it seemed like the older you got, the more respected you were as a Druid.

They wore these long robes.

They really talked about nature a lot.

And they were found around these stone circles.

Now it's thought that Druids arrived into Britain from Europe.

So stone circles seemed to be really important for Druids.

They worshipped the sun, like it's a God.

And these stone circles, mark where the sun is rising and setting in the different seasons.

And those seasons of course are what give us different crops for us to eat.

So you can see why back in Neolithic times people wanted to worship nature and things like the sun, lots of early civilizations worshipped the sun like a God, because the sun is what made crops grow and gave warmth and life.

And the seasons marked when the crops would be ready to eat.

And so early humans would worship these natural events like they were gods.

So let's see if we can write together in a nice big answer now.

It's your final task for today, so work hard at it.

How could Stonehenge have been used? And I've got some key words therefore, you might like to talk about Druids and about how the stone circles were like temples.

You might like to talk out how they mark the seasons and where the sun rose and set.

And with Druids, you might like to talk about them worshipping nature.

So see if you can use as many of those keywords as you can.

Pause the video and write your answer now.

Let's see how you did.

I'm going to show you my answer.

You can compare and give yourself a tick or you can improve as usual.

So this is my answer.

I wrote, Stonehenge is one example of a stone circle, which helped to mark the seasons.

Druids may have used these stone circles as temples to worship their gods.

Since they were polytheists Druids worshipped many gods, most of which were to do with nature.

Stonehenge marks the winter solstice and the summer solstice.

As the sun rises and sets over one of the big stones called the Hillstone.

Well done if you remembered some of the things that I put into that answer.

If you think, oh yeah, I forgot about the Hillstone.

You can pause the video and improve your answer so its really fantastic.

That brings us to the end of our lesson for today and the end of our unit.

There's still so much to learn.

We've only scratched the surface and I'm sure that you would like to go and research even more about prehistoric Britain, about the iron age and the stone age about the Neolithic age, about early humans, and about how different things that we find artefacts in the ground can teach us about what life was like thousands and thousands of years ago.

Well done for working so hard.

It's been a pleasure to teach you this unit and I'll see you next time.