Archaeology and History with Study Year Abroad

Archaeology and history together provide one of the most comprehensive approaches to understanding the human past that any degree can offer. Archaeology recovers and interprets the material remains of past societies, using excavation, scientific analysis, and careful inference to reconstruct ways of life that left no written record, as well as to shed new light on periods that are well documented in texts. History uses those written records, and the critical methods developed over centuries of scholarship, to understand how people in the past understood themselves and how their decisions shaped the worlds that came after them.

Used together, the two disciplines check and enrich each other in ways that neither achieves alone.

At the University of Reading, this four-year full-time programme includes a year abroad, giving you the opportunity to study at a partner institution in another country and to experience different national traditions of historical and archaeological scholarship. Reading has strong research traditions in both disciplines and is particularly well known for its work in landscape archaeology, the archaeology of Europe, and the history of the ancient and medieval worlds. You will develop skills in the close reading of textual and material sources, in the construction of rigorous arguments from incomplete evidence, and in communicating your findings to different audiences.

A typical entry tariff of 120 points reflects the programme's accessibility.

Graduates of archaeology and history programmes work in museums, heritage organisations, archives, local government, the civil service, journalism, education, publishing, and the charitable sector. Archaeological fieldwork experience, often built into the degree, opens specific pathways in commercial archaeology and cultural heritage management. Many graduates continue to postgraduate study in archaeology, history, heritage management, or archive studies, deepening their expertise in a particular period or problem.

The combination of rigorous evidence-based thinking and strong written communication is valued across many fields beyond the obviously historical.