Facilities

Postgraduate students have access to a wide range of resources and facilities both within the William Robertson Wing of the historic Old Medical School, and nearby in the vibrant heart of the city of Edinburgh. 

Our location, right in the heart of Edinburgh, means you will be based close to the city’s cultural attractions and facilities, including a wealth of libraries, archives, museums and galleries, which provide uniquely rich support for the disciplines we teach.

A tour of our postgraduate spaces:

PhD room - Room 3.06

Room 3.06 has been allocated as a working space for the entire HCA PhD community. This space is intended to provide research students with a quiet working environment. New first year students may apply for allocated desk space at the beginning of year 2.

Scottish History Collection - Room 3.07

This small library houses the Scottish History Collection.  While the library itself is  available for use by all students, the desk space within the room is reserved for the use of  PhD students.

Postgraduate Study Room – Room 2.35

This room is available to all postgraduate students and is intended to provide students with a quiet working environment. It is a dedicated study and computing lab with printing, copying and scanning facilities, overlooking the Meadows, one of the city’s best-loved green spaces.

Computer Teaching Lab (2.36)

Room 2.36 is a 24-seater computer lab on the second floor which is available to HCA students at postgraduate and undergraduate Honours level when it isn't booked for teaching.  The computers in this room are of a high specification and are particularly suitable for work requiring intensive computation or graphical manipulation. They also have some specialist software and may be particularly useful to students who have lab sessions in the room, using specific pieces of software.

Student Research Room - Room 2M.25

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The Student Reading Room (2M.25) is for quiet study facility and house some of the School's book collections. The room also contains a small number of PCs  and printing facilities are available. Please note that these rooms are not exclusively postgraduate resources, and access is shared with with our Undergraduate student community. The Student Research Room contains nine collections of books from previous class libraries and special collections donated to the School over many years.

Postgraduate archaeology students can access a range of laboratories:

Finds processing and thin section laboratory

This dedicated space is for initial post excavation processing and cleaning of artefacts, osteological material, and environmental remains such as soils and sediments. The laboratory is equipped with deep sinks and sediment traps for wet sieving as well as drying ovens and benches for laying out material. It is also equipped with a fume cupboard and cutting, mounting and grinding equipment for the preparation of thin-sections for microscopy.

Chemical laboratory

This room is equipped for pre-treatment and collagen extraction of samples for stable isotope analysis; this area is also used for the preparation of environmental samples involving wet chemistry. The facilities and instruments available include a large programmable furnace, fume cupboards, drying ovens, autoclave, centrifuges, a freeze drier, precision electronic balances, a Millipore water purification system, as well as Endecott sieves and pH meters.

Microscopy laboratory

The microscopy lab is equipped with a suite of microscopes including stereo microscopes, compound incident, transmitted and polarized light microscopes, and USB dinolites. These instruments have a wide range of research applications and are used in the analysis of artefacts, environmental remains (e.g. palynological samples) and ceramic and histological thin-sections.

Archaeology teaching laboratory

This large, well-equipped teaching laboratory houses extensive and comprehensive human and animal bone reference collections as well as hominin and primate casts. It is equipped with microscopes, identification atlases, calipers and osteometric boards.

Osteology laboratory

Located adjacent to the human and animal reference collections, this laboratory is a facility designed for osteological research. Archaeology has facilities for 3D scanning of artefacts and osteological remains.

Additional facilities

Additional facilities and services for materials analysis are available within the University of Edinburgh, including XRD/XRF, scanning electron and confocal microscopy,  and also CT and μCT scans and specialised imaging software. Archaeology also benefits from strong links to National Museums Scotland and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre at East Kilbride.

The School has a number of teaching collections of historical artefacts.

Gordon Childe Archaeology Collection

The School's Gordon Childe Archaeology Collection was begun by Vere Gordon Childe in 1927, when he became the first Abercromby professor of prehistoric archaeology. Additions were made by his successors, Stuart Piggott (1946-1977) and Dennis Harding (1977-2007), as well as by outside donations. Today, the collection houses c. 5000 archaeological artefacts from various periods and regions across Europe, the Mediterranean, Egypt, the Near East and India, including textile fragments from Neolithic Swiss Lake villages, in addition to ethnographic items. You can browse the collection at the link below.

Childe Collection

Classics Teaching Collection

The Classics Teaching Collection of ancient objects — mostly terracotta vases — covers Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, and the Roman world, spanning from the prehistoric period to the Roman era. Although it has not been possible to trace the donor or original provenance of our collection, the complete state of the vases suggests that they come from a funerary context. Much of the collection is on public display on the first floor of the William Robertson Wing. 

The School also has a substantial collection of plaster casts of ancient works of sculpture also displayed throughout the William Roberston Wing particularly in the Student Resource Room. 

Classics Teaching Collection

Osteology Teaching Collection

The collection curator is Dr Linda Fibiger.

Dr Fibiger's staff profile

Document collections

The School hold several collections of documents, many of which have been digitised and which can be browsed and viewed at the links below.

Sir William Fraser Collection

Sir William Fraser (1816-1898) was a genealogist, archivist, and Scottish historian who trained as a solicitor.

A series of 288 facsimiles of charters and letters, spanning from the eleventh to the early nineteenth century was published by the Trustees of Sir William Fraser in 1903 and is held by the School. Another is held by CRC Special Collections in the Edinburgh University Library.

Sir William Fraser Facsimilies of Scottish Charters and Letters Collection 

In the course of the digitisation of the Sir William Fraser facsimiles, a considerable quantity of facsimiles came to light which did not belong to the series published by his Trustees in 1903. A number of these were contained in packets marked as containing 'Residue of Lithographs of Letters' belonging to Sir William Fraser's histories of the Wemyss, Annandale, Douglas, Menteith and Haddington families. 

Residue Facsimilies attributed to Sir William Fraser

Falconer Madan Facsimiles

Falconer Madan (1851–1935) was the librarian of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford from 1912 to 1919. He was the principal author of the first four volumes of 'A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts' in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Thirty-eight plates from Madan’s series of facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, produced as a teaching aid and published in 1907, are currently held by the School, and a complete set is held by the CRC Special Collections, Edinburgh University Library

Falconer Madan Facsimiles

Kennedy Papers

During the course of the Sir William Fraser digitisation project a packet containing fourteen very fragile eighteenth-century documents was found, including a marriage contract from 1751, giving fragmented snapshots of the everyday lives of ordinary men and women in eighteenth-century Scotland. Apart from one accompanying note dated 1910 very little is known about this collection. The Kennedy Papers are now held by the CRC Special Collections in the University Library.

Kennedy Papers

Edinburgh offers students a number of resources all within a short walking distance of the University, including:

• The National Library of Scotland, one of six legal deposit libraries with a legislative right to acquire a copy of any book published in the UK. The library also  has a world-class collection of rare books and manuscripts.
• The National Records of Scotland, the main repository for the records of Scotland’s institutional past. Its extensive collection, based on legal, political and ecclesiastic records, is supplemented by gifts and deposits relating to Scottish landed estates, the correspondence of leading political figures and the records of Scottish businesses.
• The National Museum of Scotland, which, following an extensive renovation, reopened in 2011,  and has since been ranked one of  the UK’s top 10 visitor attractions (Association of Leading Visitor Attractions).
• The National Galleries of Scotland, home to one of the best collections of Scottish and international art, across three Edinburgh galleries.
• The medical museum at the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, which has an outstanding medical archive and historical library.

The McMillan room is our graduate student and staff common room. It is airy and bright, overlooking Middle Meadow Walk - which leads to one of Edinburgh's largest green spaces - and provides a comfortable but well equipped space for lunch or other breaks. The room is named after the late Professor Jim McMillan, the Richard Pares Professor of History and founding head of the School of History and Classics. You can get a 360-degree view of the McMillan Room below.

See inside the Jim McMillan room