Archaeology is the study of the entirety of our human past from the origins of humans several million years ago up to recent times within living memory. While historians are primarily concerned with oral, written and transcribed accounts of the past, archaeologists study surviving material or physical remains to reconstruct the lives, societies and cultures of past peoples. This programme covers current thinking on some of the best known and most spectacular archaeological sites, considers the most pressing questions in archaeological research, and provides an introduction to the tools and skills archaeologists require to reconstruct the past. Our teaching is multidisciplinary, reflecting the broad range of disciplines (drawn from the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences) that underpin archaeological method and theory. A broad range of time periods and different approaches to reconstructing the past can be studied, including human evolution, later hunter-gatherers, the first farmers and the later prehistoric societies of the Iron Age. Our geographical scope reaches from the north of Scotland over central and southern Europe, the western and eastern Mediterranean to Egypt and the Near East. We also specialise in osteology, the study of the skeletal remains of humans and animals. In Years 3 and 4 you can choose to specialise in a specific time period, geographic area or culture. We emphasise the importance of training in practical archaeological skills. There is an opportunity to gain hands-on experience of artefact identification and analysis in practical sessions using artefacts from our own Vere Gordon Childe collection. Our students will also complete three weeks of archaeological fieldwork at the end of Year 1 and have the option to undertake further fieldwork, as well as projects in heritage management and public engagement, and the lab-based analysis of archaeological remains, in later years of study.