Archaeology/ Latin

Archaeology and Latin are two disciplines that share a deep connection through the ancient world, and studying them together at Glasgow creates a particularly coherent intellectual combination. Archaeology, as the current description of this programme makes clear, is the study of how people in the past interacted with their world, recovered through the detailed examination of their objects, sites, monuments, and landscapes. It is fundamentally a material discipline, concerned with what can be known through physical evidence rather than text alone.

Latin is the language of Rome and of the literary, legal, and intellectual tradition it produced, a tradition that shaped European culture for well over a millennium and that remains an essential tool for anyone studying the ancient Mediterranean world in depth. The two disciplines reinforce each other: archaeological evidence illuminates the contexts in which Latin texts were produced, and Latin sources provide the narrative and conceptual frameworks within which material evidence is interpreted.

At the University of Glasgow, this part-time programme allows you to study archaeology and Latin while managing other commitments. Glasgow has outstanding strengths in both disciplines, with active research in classical and prehistoric archaeology, Roman Britain, and Latin literature that informs the teaching you will receive. In your archaeological studies, you will engage with theory and method including excavation, survey, artefact analysis, landscape archaeology, and the intellectual history of the discipline.

In Latin, you will develop your linguistic ability through close engagement with a range of texts, from prose authors such as Caesar and Cicero to the poetry of Virgil and Ovid, developing the grammatical precision and contextual understanding needed to read Latin with genuine fluency.

The programme includes a year abroad, giving you the opportunity to study in another academic environment and to engage with archaeological sites and collections beyond the UK. This is a significant intellectual broadening experience for students of the ancient world.

Graduates from archaeology and Latin programmes pursue careers in heritage and museums, classical education, academic research, conservation, archaeology and cultural resource management, and the cultural sector more broadly. Postgraduate study in classics, archaeology, ancient history, or heritage studies is a natural progression.