Teacher Commentary
One concept that is usually pretty fuzzy for students is: How do historians know the things they make claims about? For example, if students read, “Ancient Egyptians wore makeup,” I sometimes ask them, “How did the author know that?” They struggle with that and say things like, “Ancient Egyptians passed the knowledge down from one generation to the next until today,” without any evidence to back up the statement. It can be difficult for students to develop a reasonable sense of how historians construct knowledge of the past, because the texts they read don’t usually talk about the process of developing evidence-based claims.

That’s why this text is so useful, because in the interview, Janet Johnson (the historian) makes claims about Ancient Egypt, but she also talks about the things that she does as a historian, and it’s easy to see the connection between her actions and her claims. For example, she says that she uncovered some ancient artifacts that were shards of pottery with writing on them. She translated the writing and found that Ancient Egyptians had written notes to themselves, like reminders or grocery lists, on broken shards of pottery, almost like scrap paper. Her actions (finding the artifacts, translating the language) naturally lead to her claim: Ancient Egyptians wrote notes on shards of broken pottery.