1st year review questions and answers

1. What do the letters B.C. and A.D. mean?
Before Christ and Anno Domini

2. Explain what a Secondary source is.
A source such as a history book written by someone who has not had first-hand experience of the material in question. An example would be a book written in the year 2001 about the First World War

3. What is a Primary source?
A piece of evidence that comes directly from the people we are studying.

4. List two examples of pictorial sources.
Old photos and cave paintings

5. Give some examples of written sources.
Old census returns and old newspapers

6. What exactly is an artefact?
Artefacts are the things left behind by people in the past e.g. houses, boats, knives, cloth, tools etc

7. What is an Archaeologist?
Archaeologists are the people who search for and then study artefacts to help build up a picture of the lives of people long ago.

8. What happens during an excavation?
A large plan drawn, area divided into grids, top soil removed, digs begins using trowels and brushes
9. How do archaeologists find places to excavate?
Sometimes with aerial photos but often by accident – e.g. when new motorways are being built as for example in the case of the M50 at Carrickmines in Dublin.

10. Name a famous archaeological site.
Wood Quay on the banks of the river Liffey – Dublin Corporation HQ was then built on the site

11. What method is used to find the age of a bone fragment?
Carbon 14 dating measures the age by finding out how much carbon is left in bones etc.

12. Describe the life of a hunter-gatherer.
Travelled from place to place in search of food – hunted wild animals – gathered wild berries – lived in temporary houses made of animal skin.

13. What does the term Neolithic mean?
New stone age

14. How do we know about the very first Neolithic people in Ireland
Because of the excavations that have taken place at Ceide fields in Co. Mayo

15. What types of houses did they have?
Wooden houses with wattle and daub walls.

16. What tools did they use?
Stone axes and stone ploughs.

17. How did Neolithic people make pottery?
Made rolls of clay, which were then put into a large fire.

18. What does the word megalithic mean?
Large stone
19. What was a court cairn?
Court cairns are megalithic monuments which were built as burial places

20. What was a dolmen?.
Dolmens marked burial sites and comprised of three large stones with a large capstone on top.

21. Where in Ireland would you find the most famous passage-graves?
In Co. Meath at Newgrange and Knowth.

22. What can we say about these people who built the great passage-graves?
Many of them were skilled craftsmen and excellent builders. They must have studied the movement of the sun and stars and they certainly must have believed in an after-life.