Taught courses

You will normally take six courses across two semesters of teaching, including a compulsory course and a range of optional courses.

Core course

The compulsory course provides a general introduction to graduate study in archaeology and give you the opportunity to develop your research skills.

The compulsory course for this programme is:

Course nameCredits
Research Sources and Strategies in Archaeology20

Optional courses

You will choose a further 100 credits from a wide selection of optional courses, subject to availability.  

Option Courses 2024-2025

* * Please note that the list of courses below is provisional and subject to change.  

Course nameCredits
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: The Basics and Beyond20
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs II: Texts and Contexts20
Archaeological Illustration20
Archaeology of 'Celtic' Europe: Communities and Interactions20
Archaeomaterials Analysis20
Biomolecular Archaeology: the appliance of science20
Bronze Age Civilisations of the Near East and Greece20
Conceptualising the Neolithic20
Conflict archaeology: materialities of violence20
Constantinople: The History of a Medieval Megalopolis from Constantine the Great to Suleyman the Magnificent20
Issues in Egyptian Archaeology: the Second Intermediate Period until the end of the Late Period (1650-332 BC)20
Marine Archaeology20
Mariners, Monks and Mobility: the archaeology of the early medieval Atlantic Archipelago20
Quantitative Methods and Reasoning in Archaeology20
Scottish Archaeology: Topics in recent research, analysis, and curation20
Social Bioarchaeology: Living Conditions, Lifestyles and the Impact of Disease in the Past20
The Archaeology of Children and Childhood20
The Hittites: The Archaeology of an Ancient Near Eastern Civilisation20
Themes in Egyptian archaeology: the foundations of the state to the end of the Middle Kingdom20
Egypt and its neighbours during the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BCE) (online)*20
Etruscan Italy, 1000-300 BC (online)*20
Homo migrans: The archaeology of migrations from prehistory to the present (online)*20

*A maximum of one online course can be chosen.

Courses for those studying from September 2025 will be available from April 2025.

 

Teaching and assessment

The core and option courses are taught by lectures and seminars and assessed by essays, short written reports, research reports, oral presentations and posters.

Further information

You can see more details about the 2024/25 programme structure and courses on the Degree Programme Table for the MSc in Archaeology. We expect the 2025/26 programme structure to be available from May 2025.

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