The easiest way to find the age of an object is to look to see if it has the date it was made marked on it somewhere.

Lots of man-made objects do – have a look at the things in your pocket or in your bag and see how many of them have a date on them. All around us things have dates on them – newspapers, coins, CD cases, chocolate bars and this has been true for hundreds of years.

In the past it may not have been the actual date, but other markings can give us clues to the age of the objects. Souvenirs of historical events like a royal wedding or jubilee or the Olympics can tell us when that object was made. Roman coins don’t have dates on them like we see today, but had the name of the emperor of the time – so if we know when the emperor reigned we can narrow down the age of the coin.

Finding the age of things in this way is very easy, but it is very limited. It can only be used on objects that are man-made. So it’s no good for finding the ages of fossils or animal bones, or even all those man-made objects that have no markings on them. If we can’t find their ages this way, we need to find some other clues.