Author(s): Stephen Clarke; Martin Garner

Education

Pompeii and Herculaneum: Investigating and Interpreting the Sources explores the remains of two of the most intact cities of the Ancient Roman world. Preserved as living cities, the two sites reveal evidence of everyday life, including leisure activities, religion and housing, politics, and social organisation at the moment, in AD 79, when both centres were subsumed in volcanic debris. The authors have approached these topics in a manner that combines the practice of historians with the needs of senior secondary students. Like historians and archaeologists, students engage with secondary literature as a prelude and as part of the process of investigation and interpretation the sources. The use of sources embeds the historical concepts and skills of analysis and use sources, interpretation, investigation, and research, to cultivate the ability to explain and communicate the results of the students' learning. Through this approach students, like historians, actively use the historical concepts of continuity and change, perspectives, significance, causation, and contestability. By applying the historical skills and concepts, students become more than simple observers of the past. They are empowered to understand and interpret evidence of the ancient world and implications for the 21st century as active citizens.The book has been written specifically for students of Ancient History in New South Wales.