Historical enquiry

Getting Started With Historical Enquiry

To help you get started, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide for students to explain the process behind successfully completing an historical enquiry.

For ideas on how to incorporate the competition into your teaching, see our inspiration for primary teachers and secondary teachers.

You can download the guide as a PDF.

The Teaching history with 100 objects website is also packed with information and ideas to help get you started.

The following guide will give you some ideas for investigating museum objects and using them for an historical enquiry.

It will help you think like historians and archaeologists, who use clues to find out about people in the past. It is a step-by-step guide, but you do not have to answer all the questions or even follow all the steps in order. You might have your own ideas about how to find clues and use them to find out about the past.

Historians and archaeologists are interested in human beings throughout time. So for your enquiry you can choose any object that has been made or used by people. Here are some tips to help you choose:

• If you can, find an object you can get a good look at in real life. An object you can touch and hold is even better (but if it is not yours, ask before you touch). It might be something from home, at school or in a museum.
• You can use an object that you have found online. Make sure you can get large, clear, detailed pictures of it. Ideally, find pictures that show different sides of the object.
• Choose an object that is interesting to you. It might be completely mysterious, or something you might know a bit about already.

Observation is about discovering information through your senses. Look carefully at the object from as many angles as possible – from the side, the top, the bottom, inside and outside. Smell it if you can. If you are allowed to, touch it to feel its texture. Hold it to feel its weight, find out if it has moving parts or makes any sounds.

Observe as much detail as you can about the object, for example: size, shape, colours, textures, decoration. Pay attention to the condition of the object. This means whether the object is whole or parts are missing; if it is damaged, worn or dirty.

Think about how to record and organise all this information, perhaps by writing, making charts, drawing, taking photos, noting down measurements, making voice recordings.

Now it is time to start asking questions and suggesting ideas about the object. It’s not about making wild guesses, use the details you have observed as clues to help you think about the object. Here are some questions to get you started:

• Why is the object in this condition? What might have happened to it?
• How did it get here?
• What was it used for?
• When was it made?
• What sort of person may have owned it and why?
• Does the decoration mean anything?
• What could help us find out more?

Investigation will help you find out more. Archaeologists and historians investigate objects in lots of different ways. One way is by making comparisons, another is by using background information.

There are lots of ways you can find background information, for example:

• Your own knowledge about the people, place or time the object comes from.
• Interview people who owned or used it.
• If you know when or where the object was made, find other objects made around the same time, by the same people or in the same place.
• Look at the place the object was found (if you can’t make a visit, use a map or Google street view).
• Trying to make your own version of the object, and trying to use it (when archaeologists do this it is called experimental archaeology).

You can make comparisons by:

• Comparing the object to similar objects that you use in your own life.
• Comparing the object to other objects made at the same time or in the same place.
• If you know when or where the object was made, find other objects made around the same time, by the same people or in the same place.
• Think about the similarities and what this might tell you; if there are differences think about why this might be.
• Think about how you will collect and record the information you discover in your investigation.

By now, you have probably begun to form your own interpretation of the object. Your interpretation is your idea of what the object tells us. Good historians and archaeologists back their interpretations up with the evidence they have observed or collected through their investigation. Here are some questions to help you interpret your object:

• What does it tell us about people in the past?
• What does the object tell us about its owner?
• What does the object tell us about these people’s connections to the rest of the world?
• Who made it?
• How would it have been used?
• Why might someone need an object like this?<
• Where might someone have used the object?
• What does the object tell us about how people spent their time?
• What does the object tell us about what people believed?
• What does the object tell us about what their homes were like?
• Was this object important to someone? Why or why not?

Can you answer any of these questions using the details your observed, or the results of your investigation to back up your answer?

This might be a good time in your enquiry to pause and think about what you have done and what you have discovered:

• How did you do? Were you able to answer all of the questions you came up with in step 3?
• What can’t your object tell us about the past? What can we never know?
• What have you found out about how archaeologists and historians work?
• Has the object changed what you thought about people in the past?

Your enquiry is complete! How are you going to share your discoveries and interpretations with other people? Think about:

• Helping your audience to understand how and why you did your enquiry, and what it was about.
• How you will show your object and share your interpretations.
• Making it convincing – always back up your interpretation with evidence.
• What to include. Choose information and ideas that are useful.
• Making it interesting and exciting.