Archaeology and Anthroplogy

Archaeology and anthropology together give you two complementary ways of understanding what it means to be human, one through the material remains of past societies and one through the study of living cultures in all their diversity. Archaeology recovers knowledge about the past from physical evidence, from the traces left behind in soil, stone, bone, and artefact, developing rigorous methods for excavation, analysis, and interpretation that allow us to reconstruct human life across deep time. Anthropology, in its social and cultural forms, examines the extraordinary variety of human social arrangements, belief systems, and practices across the contemporary world, insisting on the equal validity and internal logic of different cultural approaches to the universal human challenges of kinship, economy, religion, and meaning.

At the University of Manchester, this three-year full-time programme reflects the university's strong research traditions in both disciplines. Manchester has a distinguished archaeology department with particular strengths in European prehistory, environmental archaeology, and the archaeology of the medieval and post-medieval periods, alongside a social anthropology department with expertise spanning kinship, ritual, political economy, and medical anthropology. The programme is genuinely interdisciplinary, allowing you to develop depth in both subjects while also seeing the productive conversations they have with each other.

You will develop skills in archaeological field and laboratory methods alongside the ethnographic and analytical approaches of social anthropology, and you will engage with theoretical debates in both disciplines about how we can know the past and understand cultural difference. Manchester's large and research-active departments give you access to excellent academic supervision and a vibrant intellectual community.

Graduates of archaeology and anthropology programmes move into careers in heritage management, museum and gallery work, community archaeology, international development, human rights, NGOs, social research, and education, as well as into academic research at postgraduate level.