BA Archaeology and History

UCAS code: VV14
Course length: 3 years full time (part time also available)

The combined degree offers insights into the richness and variety of human experience covering a wide range of subjects and approaches. You will gain knowledge of a range of chronological periods, as well as develop their ability to analyse change over time and comparative, cross-cultural and abstract concepts. In History, you can choose from medieval, early-modern and modern periods and develop your historical and historiographical skills. In Archaeology, you can undertake research on material culture and scientific techniques, and have the opportunity to participate in the Field School at the Roman town of Silchester.

Course description

Our joint degrees involve an even split between the two subjects with the opportunity to specialise in one of your subjects, or use both, in your dissertation.

Year 1

Compulsory modules:

• Practising Archaeology: methods and approaches
  
• From Rome to Reformation: an introduction to historic archaeology
• Approaches to History
  
• Landmarks in History

Optional modules:

• From Primates to Pyramids: an introduction to world prehistory
  
• Bones, Bodies and Burial:  the archaeology of death
  
• Analysing Museum Displays
• Directed Study in History

Year 2

Compulsory modules:

• Contemporary Practice in British Archaeology

Optional modules, students choose from a list including:

• Silchester Field School (Joint Honours)
• The Middle Palaeolithic of Europe and SW Asia
• People and Societies of the Ancient Near East
• The Mesolithic of North-West Europe
• Later Prehistoric Europe
• Celts & Romans: Northern Europe & Britain
• Rome's Mediterranean Empire
• Post-Roman and Early Medieval Europe
• Later Medieval Europe
• Archaeological Thought
• Archaeological Science
• Techniques in Artefact Interpretation
• Techniques in Skeletal Interpretation
• Geophysics
• Introduction to Zooarchaeology
• Human Activity & Environmental Change
• Object Analysis & Museum Interpretation
• Study Abroad

Plus three 'Periods' optional History modules, students choose from a list including:

• End of the Middle Ages? England in the mid-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries
• Crusading in the High Middle Ages, 1095-1291
• Gender and Society in Medieval Europe
• Kingship and Crisis in England, c.1154-1330
• Women of the Medieval World
• British History 1640-c.1800
• The Making of Early Modern Britain, 1450-1640
• Population, Economy and Society in England, 1450-1750
• Modern British History: The Changing Role of the State since 1870
• Rural England 1800-2000: agriculture, countryside and nation 

Final Year

Compulsory modules:

• Dissertation

Optional Archaeology modules, students choose from a list which may include:

• Burial Archaeology 
• Palaeopathology
  
• Studies in the Lower Palaeolithic
  
• Ancient Aegean landscapes
• Emergence of Civilisation in Mesopotamia
  
• Age of Stonehenge
• Age of Hillforts
• Roman Material Culture
  
• Early Anglo-Saxon England
• The Archaeology of the Dark Ages
• The Archaeology of Crusades
• Vikings in the West
  
• England in the Later Middle Ages
  

Optional History modules, students choose from a list which may include:

• Medieval Magic & Origins of the Witch Craze
• Hundred Years War
• French Revolution
• Gothic: Architecture, Money and Cultural Identity
• England, c.1250-1327: A Land at War with Itself and Its neighbours
• Medieval Reading
• The English Countryside, Culture and Environment since the Industrial Revolution
• Science and Society in Victorian Britain