Archaeology and History of Art BA

Archaeological knowledge is built through analysing material remains. We then use theory to create research questions, building interpretations of those remains. Together, these two elements act as evidence for societies in the past and present.

In this module, you will focus on the relationship between concepts, interpretive approaches and analytical frameworks in the design and implementation of archaeological research projects.

We introduce the development of archaeological theory and interpretation. Special attention is given to the paradigms put forward over the last 30 years, and the resulting debates.

Topics include:

• uniformitarianism
• ethnography
• typology
• ‘New Archaeology’
• processualism and post-processualism
• economic archaeology
• neo-Marxist paradigms

You will develop your knowledge further through in-depth studies of key issues and themes. You will also explore archaeological research in a wide range of different areas and projects.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This is a discipline-bridging cross-campus module, involving colleagues from across the School of Humanities.

The Silk Road will be presented as a range of archaeological, historical and scientific themes. Broad cultural themes will be balanced with the presentation of specific case studies, such as:

• The definitions of the Silk Roads
• Byzantine, Islamic and later medieval Silk Roads
• Luxury production
• Trade and exchange from the Roman and later periods
• Ming Dynasty links with the West

Scientific techniques for the analysis of materials, and their role in the interpretation of trade and exchange along the Silk Roads, will also be considered. This could be between, for example, China, central Asia, Scandinavia and the Middle East.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Explore archaeological evidence from a time of significant social, political, economic and climate change, which laid the foundations of the modern world. 

We'll focus on the development of European societies around the Mediterranean, Africa and across Eurasia in the medieval period. You will study the:

• Transformation of European and Mediterranean landscapes and settlement patterns, from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance
• Towns of western Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic world
• Impact of climate change, epidemic disease and population growth
• Rise of kingdoms, states and empires
• Development of nearly global trade networks in Europe, Africa and Asia, resulting in permanent European settlement in the Americas

Your lectures and seminars consider interdisciplinary approaches to these topics. They will also consider what they can tell us about social and economic change, ideologies and social identities over 1000 years of human history.

The teaching on climate, societal and economic change, is driven from the module tutor's European ice-core research, which gained national media coverage. You can also benefit from hands-on learning, using the Medieval European collections at our on-site Archaeology Museum.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module is designed to develop your skills of research, analysis and written presentation as preparation for a third year dissertation in classical civilisation. You will write a 5,000 word essay chosen from a range of topics, each focusing on a single piece of ancient source material. You will be provided with a topic for investigation, starter bibliography and tips on how to approach the question. The questions will suggest a range of possible approaches, from evaluation of historical source material to exploration of literary effects, relationships with other material, discussion of context or reception. For this module you will have a mixture of lectures and four 2-hour seminars over a period of 10 weeks.

Get creative and build your knowledge on an aspect of Classics or Archaeology which interests you.

Your aim in this module is to communicate your chosen topic to the general public. How you choose to do that is entirely up to you. You might explore different types of writing, perhaps for children or in the style of a magazine, or you might experiment with a different medium of communication, such as video, website or phone app.

For example, past students have:

• Created a museum exhibition
• Reconstructed an ancient artefact
• Designed a new public engagement strategy for a historic site
• Developed a board game
• Created a marketing campaign

The module convenor will support you to design an appropriate topic and format for your project.

You will develop vital research, project design and communication skills, which are excellent preparation for a range of careers, as well as your third-year dissertation.

This module is worth 20 credits.

“I designed several T-shirts and hoodies which conveyed information about the site’s art and architecture, history, and its eventual ruination by ISIL in 2015. I wanted to combine my interest of fashion with my love for the classical world, and this project gave me the opportunity to do so.”

- Alexander Gadd, Created a clothing brand based on Palmyra 

Read more student experiences about this module

Ancient glass is a unique and beautiful translucent material. Since it was invented some 5000 years ago, it has been used for everything from luxurious and decorative objects, to vessels and containers for traded liquids, to coloured windows used in medieval churches and cathedrals.

On this module, you will explore how glass:

• is made from raw materials
• was coloured and decorated
• was used in a variety of functional and ritual contexts, from the Bronze Age to the medieval period

We bring together socio-cultural and scientific perspectives, to show how scientific analysis sheds light on glass technology, trade and provenance. During practical sessions, you will handle ancient glass and try out some of the techniques for yourself.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module introduces the archaeology of the Mycenaean world. It will familiarise you with the achievements and material culture of one of the greatest European Bronze Age civilizations of the second millennium BC. This will be through discussing the historical, social, cultural and economic context of the period.

You will explore:

• The world of the Mycenaean palaces and citadels, their towns and trading ports
• Warfare
• Religion and cult activities
• Mortuary practices and ancestor worship

We also consider their wider connections across the Mediterranean world.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module will provide an introduction to visual art at the Tudor courts, from the accession of Henry VII in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. In doing so, it takes account of a wide range of art forms, from portraiture to pageantry, jewellery to the book. Key issues dealt with in lectures and seminars include contemporary theories of visuality and monarchy, the particular context of court culture, and the use of visual material in the service of self -fashioning. It considers the impact of major historical developments including the reformation and the advent of print. As such, the relationship of the arts to politics is a key theme. Through exploring the highly sophisticated uses of visual art at the Tudor courts, the course seeks to re-evaluate the common idea that English art at the time was isolationist and inferior to that of continental Europe.

You will explore the works and practices of Black artists that have been displayed or produced in Europe and America from the nineteenth century to the present day. This includes how methods of display, tactics of critique and attitudes towards the 'Other' have defined and influenced how Black art is viewed and produced in the Western world.

Moving through time we'll:

• examine nineteenth-century attitudes towards African objects
• explore the influences of ethnography and African material culture on artists working in the early to mid-twentieth century, such as the Surrealists
• consider artworks produced in the Harlem Renaissance by painters like Aaron Douglas and photographers like James Van Der Zee
• discover how artists like Jeff Donaldson and Faith Ringgold sought to recover African history, culture, and forms of memory in the context of the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and how their work responded to the political and social pressures of this period
• look at the practices of more recent artists like Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, and Kara Walker, and explore how artists have critically re-presented history’s narratives in ‘the present’ before focusing on the curatorial works of Fred Wilson

To finish we'll consider the rise of contemporary African art within European and American art markets, and the related economic and political shifts that have occurred since the colonial era. 

This module is worth 20 credits.

Digital communication and media are significantly transforming the ways our societies operate. In this module you will critically explore key issues behind this transformation, and investigate theoretical and practical foundations of digital communication and media and their relationship to contemporary culture. You will study the cultural, political, economic, technical and regulatory contexts from which digital communication and media have emerged and in which they continue to operate. To link conceptual frameworks to real-life experiences and situations, the module also provides opportunities for you to explore the interactive forms and practices that result from the use of digital communication and media through a range of both individual and group activities. This module is worth 20 credits. 

Explore how film can be regarded as an art form through the study of avant-garde cinema in early 20th century Europe.

We’ll start by looking at what is meant by the term ‘avant-garde’, and consider the development of experimental filmmaking in the context of artistic movements such as:

• Futurism
• Cubism
• Dada
• Surrealism
• Constructivism

The focus will be on developments in Germany, France and the Soviet Union and consider key trends from abstract animation to Cinema Pur.

We’ll also explore some key concerns of non-mainstream cinema such as:

• Narrative
• Abstraction
• Reflexivity
• Spectatorship
• movement, time and space

You’ll examine how experimental film engaged with modernity, including the aesthetic and political strategies of the European avant-gardes.

By the end of the module you’ll be able to:

• contextualise the avant-garde in relation to broader artistic and historical developments
• understand the relationships between film and other media

This module is worth 20 credits.

During this year-long module you'll:

• think about industries, audiences and surrounding debates from a social and cultural viewpoint
• learn about the way that social and cultural meaning is produced by film and television programmes​
• explore the social practices that surround the consumption of media, such as movie going and television viewing

Some of the specific questions we might look at together include:

• How do value judgements shape the way in which movies and television programmes get made
• What is "good" television?
• What challenges are public service broadcasters, like the BBC, facing and how should they address these?
• How have writers and producers attempted to use television drama to enact social change?
• What kind of TV programmes are preferred by streaming services and why?
• How might binge watching impact on the viewer's experience and social communication?

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module develops critical modes of attention to the mediation of identity. On our screens and in our headphones, we shape and reshape our selves. Media do not reflect identities but play an active role in bringing them into being. This module takes up the question of 'identity politics', enhancing students' knowledge and understanding of key identity categories that have been advanced and problematized by media scholars, such as gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, national, regional and local belonging, age, ability and disability, and more. The module also interrogates the mediated forms these identities take, considering the politics of looking and visual culture, the politics of hearing and auditory culture, and the politics of affect, emotions and embodiment. The module encourages historical as well as contemporary perspectives.

Described variously as an era of dissent, revolution and experiment, the 1960s offers a unique vantage point from which to explore a range of issues and topics pertinent to media and cultural studies. The art of the period brings into view a volatile world where distinctions between different media were becoming blurred (as in performance art, for instance) and where inherited ideas, hierarchies and values were contested, if not exploded. Notions such as the Establishment, the underground, celebrity, obscenity, mass culture, alongside those of personal identity (gender, race, class, sexuality) were all subject to radical questioning in an era where events, such as those of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, challenged the received order of things. This module critically evaluates the idea of the 1960s, starting with its status as a fabled decade that is said to cast its shadow today. Historiographical and geographical questions structure the module.  When and, crucially, where were ‘the Sixties’? Was it primarily an Anglo-American phenomenon? Was it the 1950s until 1963? Did it end in the early 1970s, as some believe, with the Oz Trials?  These and other questions will help us to demythologise the period and begin investigating it anew.

In this module you'll learn how show business is broken down into 'show' and 'business' in film, television and promotional industries and examine how creative decision-making, technology and legislation influence those industries. You'll also learn about how advertising and market research influence the design and production of media in certain regions and how film and television industries have developed in different contexts and periods. This module is worth 20 credits.