I’m Paul Garwood, I’m senior lecturer
in Archaeology and also Head of Quality for
the School of History and Cultures. I’ve
degrees in both Archaeology and Anthropology,
which I guess is why I’m often called to
give these talks. It’s a rare combination
in some respects.
What I’m going to do in the next half an
hour or so is very briefly introduce the two
disciplinary areas, just to clarify really
what they’re about, and what we think they’re
about. And before saying a little bit about
the two departments that deliver the programme,
my own department, that’s Classics, Ancient
History and Archaeology, and the department
of African studies and Anthropology. And then
I’ll move onto saying a little bit about
the programme, exactly how it’s structured,
how it works, before moving onto a few general
points about studying Archaeology & Anthropology
at the University of Birmingham and career
directions that our under graduates and graduates
take at the end.
Well I think the place to start is to observe
that Archaeology & Anthropology are two really
quite distinctive disciplines, with very,
very different histories in the way that they’ve
developed over time. Nonetheless, have a great
deal in common, and a whole host of synergies
of one kind or another. At a very general
level, they’re both concerned with exploring
cultural diversity, other ways of being human,
and across all space and time. So if you put
the two together, we cover everything human
that is ever been anywhere across the last
– well, going on for 3 million years or
so.
Now of course we do come to this subject matter
with rather different agendas and histories,
and of course methods. The Archaeological
way in is through material evidence. So we
are specialists in material culture and other
kinds of material evidence, for example paleo-environmental
evidence, reconstructing ancient landscapes
and that kind of thing. And we use a host
of other techniques that allow us to, as it
were, contextualise and organise that information,
including some high techy things these days,
including satellite imaging and so on.
Archaeology, by virtue of all this, is a global
discipline. There’s no bit of the human
past in a way that we can’t get it through
either direct material evidence of human action,
or human impacts on the environments in which
they lived. So we’re concerned with everything
everywhere, which is human. About 2 and a
half million years ago plus, to the present.
And of course this involves engaging with
thousands of different diverse cultures, most
of which are extinct. And, for which, there
are no voices from the past, from the people
themselves, we have to as it were, give them
voices through the material evidence that
we recover, interpret and analyse and interpret.
Of course, sometimes we’re lucky – there’s
a bit of written source material that goes
along with, but in fact the written word,
the detailed documentary source material,
is actually very rare before the late Middle
Ages. Even in places where you do have a lot
of literary texts, they tend to be concerned
with mature, adult, white males, talking about
things they’re interested in – it’s
quite restricted in terms of the subject matter.
Archaeology gets all the way, completely around
that.
Anthropology is similarly global. It’s concerned
with investigating all contemporary recent
cultural worlds, through ethnographic observation
– that’s direct engagement with people
on the ground – you ask them what they’re
thinking. Through a whole range of other kinds
of media, photography, film, music, documentary
source materials of a host of different kinds,
and with respect particularly to historical
ethnography but also contemporary ethnography
as well. And of course, there is no pass of
the human world that is not accessible to
the ethnographer, and to the Anthropologist.
And that includes ourselves. And I think one
of the things which is very distinctive about
Anthropology, but also Archaeology, is that
it routinely casts a light on our own perceptions,
viewpoints, beliefs, our own aesthetics, which
are generally speaking, very different from
everyone else we’re studying, and also in
themselves, quite strange, difficult to fathom.
If you start thinking about our own cultural
lives, we do all sorts of things which are
very odd. Once a year, we get a tree – which
a lot of us do – and we stick it in a corner
of a living room and we stick tinsel and lights
on it. What on earth is that all about? And
it’s very, very odd. There’s a very interesting
Anthropology of Christmas. So just to give
you an example of where you can actually look
at the nature of our own existences and start
to see in a way, its strangeness, and the
need for it to be understood and analysed
using an Anthropological approach.
Now there are two departments that deliver
this programme. My department is Classics
Ancient History and Archaeology – CAHA for
short – and we cover the Archaeological
side of things. We’re one of the larger
departments of Ancient World Studies in the
UK, and what’s quite unusual about us is
that we are genuinely multi-disciplinary and
extraordinarily diverse. So we’re not only
Archaeologists, but we’re Ancient Historians,
Classicists, Egyptologists, Ancient [05:35]
expert, an unusual beast, our Byzantine studies
and so forth. So there’s lots of range of
potential for looking at a host of cultural
worlds Archaeologically, and also historically
through this department. We have an international
search profile – I’ll come back to that
a bit later on. And we teach quite a wide
range of under graduate programmes.
Our sister department, African Studies and
Anthropology, has an international reputation
in Anthropology and is one of the leading
research departments in African studies in
the UK. This is quite important Anthropologically,
because a great deal of British Anthropology
is routed in African ethnography. So you go
out to the late 19th Century, middle 20th
Century, much of the fundamental foundations
of the discipline were forged in that African
ethnographic encounter. So it’s right at
the heart of the discipline, and right at
the heart of the department. They’ve also
got a great Danford Collection of West African
art, and a whole host of research fields – and
we’ll come back to those shortly.
We do rather well in the various university
guides on offer out there, if you want to
cast an eye on these. I’m not going to labour
this actually, they’re a very blunt tool
in terms of giving a sense of ranking and
that kind of thing. All I would say is that
we are consistently in the top 10 for both
Archaeology and Anthropology. I think that’s
the measure to take away from such a model.
And what we do? Well, we’re very, very diverse
indeed. This is just a – calling this together
– a smattering of the kinds of projects
which are ongoing at the moment. First Farmers
– that’s complete transformation of ways
of life that one sees in the onset of the
appearance of agricultural technologies. We
have major fieldwork projects over many, many
years on Stonehenge landscape, which are ground
breaking from the point of view of geophysical
and geoarchaeological methods. Death ritual
in early Bronze age Europe was another area
of study. Landscape Archaeology of bog bodies,
a nice one, and some really interesting stuff
coming out of that as we speak, if you like.
Rome provincial society, palaeoentomology
- that’s bugs of various kinds - we have
a specialist in the department who deals with
that. And on the more Anthropological side
of things, such as African oral and print
culture, pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial
histories, gender figures, of course in Archaeology
and Anthropology a lot for example and Archaeology.
Education, its legacies, religious difference,
and Caribbean Islamic worlds. Then we’ve
got new models and areas such as Anthropology,
for example, just coming out on stream next
year, that relates to that research.
So just to emphasise one thing I think, which
is important, and that is our programmes and
our modules are research led. So, in other
words, not only are they up to date with the
very cutting edge end of thinking, analysis,
the knowledge base for the subject areas,
but they also feed in our own research as
we’re actually doing it. I think that’s
particularly visible with things like field
projects. Because when we’re out in the
field, doing things which relate directly
to our research interest, and that feeds directly
into the student experience and directly to
the modules that we teach. So, if you come
to Archaeology & Anthropology at Birmingham,
you really are at the front end of that work.
And in addition to that of course, in your
own research, say for your third year dissertation,
you become the specialist in that own little
field in which you work. So I think you become
researchers in your own rights, often in a
very powerful way.
So that’s the background. Turning to the
nature of the programme itself. All the entry
information, the kinds of entry requirements
that you need, of course, they’re very available
on all our pages and other media, so you can
look at that and check that out for yourselves.
So I won’t labour the point.
The programme – what I’ll very quickly
do, is to quickly run through the 3 years
of the programme, to give you a flavour of
what it amounts to, so you have some sense
of the nature of the modules, the kinds of
teaching, kinds of subject areas. If you come
to our office, if you apply to us, you get
an offer, you can come to our offer holder
visit days in Spring, and then of course we
then go through this kind of information in
a lot more detail. And you can really interrogate
us on content if you wish.
But just to give you a flavour of things.
In the first year, there are a range of modules
which are intended to set a common foundation
of knowledge and understanding. There is of
course either Archaeology or Anthropology
taught as A Levels – everyone is really
coming to this new. So it’s kind of Year
0 context, where the fundamental frameworks
of knowledge and understanding, have to be
built into place in order for you to progress
into later years in a confident way. So on
the Archaeology side, we have a couple of
modules which introduce you to the really
big frameworks. On the one hand, understanding
Archaeology, that’s the slightly wacky ways
we think sometimes, and the way that we come
to think in the ways that we do. And the kinds
of approaches we apply to looking at the past.
That’s everything from development of theories
of human cultural diversity, and how one looks
at that over time and space. Through to things
like the nature of material evidence, and
classic themes like trade, migration, bringing
things like DNA and isotopic work, which is
transforming our understanding for instance,
of prehistoric Europe, with all sorts of population
placements genetically taking place, which
we didn’t realise before it happened. So
that builds that framework of knowledge on
the one hand.
And secondly of course, Archaeology is a hands
on discipline. Unlike historians I have to
say, are rather constrained – there’s
a set of texts, and those texts don’t expand.
So what historians tend to do, is read the
same text again, again and again, and read
it differently each time. Whereas with the
Archaeologist, if we have run out of text,
we go out and dig a new hole. We basically
create a new chapter. So in effect, for the
Archaeologist, the knowledge increment is
exponential. It’s limitless. There’s no
limits to new information that we can generate
that we then feed into our analysis and understandings
of the past. And this is absolutely fundamental
to the discipline. We go out there, and we
excavate and we analyse, and study landscape
and study monuments, and we extract all this
information and the Archaeological student
has to have a grounding in this. And understanding
of how that actually works, what the rationales
are, what the methods are techniques are that
we apply. In part, we do this through an Archaeology
field school, a 3 week period in the field.
I’ll say a bit more about that shortly – where
you get yourselves muddy as part of the programme.
And then finally, on the Archaeology side,
there’s a couple of classes in – well
a couple of courses if you like, in Year 1
where with your tutorial group, you work through
a series of topics that relate to a particular
field, in which the staff member is specialist.
For example Aztec society, the Parthenon,
whatever it might be – and again, a whole
range of essential study skills that sets
you in good store for pursuing academic study
in a Higher Education environment.
On the Anthropology side, they have a number
of modules which again, are intended to build
in those fundamental frameworks. There is
thinking Anthropologically. And I think those
new to Anthropology, it can be a bit of a
shock to understand quite the way that Anthropologists
think, because it does involve over turning
all your preconceptions, assumptions, what
you think is common sense. Because our common
sense is not their common sense, if you like.
So in order to really get out of our own mind
set, which also forces us to look and reflect
upon ourselves, the only way to do this is
to think very differently about the nature
of the subject matter we’re concerned with.
To try to get, if you like, in the heads of
those other people that we are interested
in studying as well as ourselves.
There is model on the Anthropology of Africa,
that sets – big ethnographies if you like
- the way one understands the peoples of the
African continent. Anthropology in its regions,
so the range of different thematic and regional
approaches to study, which is quite diverse
actually, there are different Anthropologists
in different parts of the world. And of course
we’re all concerned with studying societies.
So there is that component of Sociology, which
has to be built into an Anthropology degree
programme. And there’s comparative Sociological
analysis and study. So that’s Year 1.
In Year 2, it starts to free up very, very
quickly indeed. So in the first year, there’s
a little bit of choice of one or two areas,
but essentially it’s a set programme to
set those foundations in place. In Year 2,
there’s much more room for choice. So, on
the Anthropology side, they’re quite keen
to keep on developing the theoretical and
ethnographical side, which they do in a 20
credit module. And also, a research skills
development module, which introduces you to
the nuts and bolts of ethnography, how you’d
actually do an ethnographic project. You also
have to do two Archaeology modules, but these
are optional, from a very wide range of choice.
And this is just a sample really – things
like Human Remains, which is popular, Field
Archaeology if you liked it in the first year,
Imperial Egypt, which is a kind of period
era study that you could do, a range of research
seminars. You could choose one, for example,
things like Archaeology in the lab, Environment
Archaeology, Virtual Worlds, which is using
a whole range of software to virtually reconstruct
past environment, past monuments, past landscapes
and so on – which tends to use games software
very often in terms of how we use that in
Archaeology. Quite a nice skill set. And there
are others. I’ve actually forgot to put
Roman Archaeology on the screen there, sorry
about that. I’ll add it for the next talk.
In addition to that, you choose too more options.
And you can choose two Archaeology ones, two
Anthropology ones, one Archaeology and one
Anthropology from everything else that’s
available in the year that you haven’t already
chosen. So it’s very much open. The kinds
of Archaeology modules I’ve already covered,
but on the Archaeology side, things like Ritual
and Religion, Urban Anthropology, Ethnographies
of Marginalised communities, Aid NGOs and
development, and a range of others too, in
any one year.
Finally, in Year 3, it is completely open.
In other words, you increasingly through the
3 years, construct your own degree programme.
In the third year, you can choose to do a
dissertation, your own individual research
project, which is a 40 credit component, which
you could do either in CAHA, or in DASA, or
if you didn’t want to commit yourself to
that big 40 credit piece of research, you
could do a CAHA extended essay, like a mini
individual project, which is a new thing.
Quite common in history, and new for us.
Our dissertations are generally speaking,
marvellous. There’s some really brilliant
work – our external examiners every year,
they comment very favourably on the kind of
individual research work that our students
do. And sometimes they do integrate Archaeology
and Anthropology together, or Archaeology
and sort of Inherited areas for instance,
in a host of different ways. So for example,
just in the last 2 or 3 years or so, the Archaeology
of Caribbean Piracy – can you see pirates
in the Archaeology record? Actually you can,
here and there, quite nice. Things like looking
at the display of human remains, bodies in
museums in North Western Europe, a student
actually went out, went to Germany, went to
Denmark, went into Ireland already, went to
look at museum, and looked at the ethics of
body displaying human flesh, if you like in
a museum environment, and why we do this and
how we should do it. So there’s a host of
different possibilities. In fact it’s pretty
limitless in terms of what you can do. All
you have to do is persuade a supervisor to
supervise it. It has to be viable.
And then beyond that, you have to choose 1
Archaeology module and 1 Anthropology module
from the wide range of choice on offer, and
beyond that it’s entirely open. So the kinds
of things available in the third year include
Death Burial in Society – that’s something
I do. Anthropology of Islam, Kinship Gender
and Sexuality, Roman Religion – there’s
a host of CAHA special subjects – Stonehenge
and Mycenae, that’s one of mine - Anthropology
of Migration, Humans Environments, African
Popular Culture and so forth. So the range
of possibility is very great indeed. Sometimes
selected to go along with dissertation, very
often not.
Finally, if you wish, there is a variant to
this programme which is the Archaeology and
Anthropology with a year abroad programme.
And that involves going in one’s third year
– so you go away for the third year, come
back for a fourth year for the third year
part of the programme – where you go to
another university around the world. And the
host university, you undertake a range of
courses equivalent to a year of study at Birmingham.
And it’s credited to Intermediate level.
You do have to achieve sufficient grades in
your first year in order to apply for this,
and of course there are sometimes issues when
it comes to language. In other words, if you’re
going to France, and it’s taught in French,
you have to be fluent in French, for instance.
But quite a lot of universities that our students
go to, are – they use their English speaking
– and so I had a Skype meeting with a student
last week, in Saskatchewan in Canada, doing
an interesting Liberal Arts stuff, there’s
lots of places that one can for that year
abroad. And it’s very popular, and the students
who do it, report back really favourably on
their experience. It does count towards your
degree result, but it’s only – [crash
in the background] – crash, bang – 25%
of Year 2. So it’s actually a smidgeon of
the overall degree result that rests on that
year abroad activity.
Well just to start to wind things up – just
a few quick comments about some of the nature
of our teaching environments and what we do.
We particularly favour small group teaching
– in fact virtually everything that we do
is small group. It’s very rare to be in
a class of more than 20 people. Usually it’s
sort of 15, 16, 17, that kind of number. Occasionally,
a bigger lecture based modules where you might
have 30, 35 people in a room – but they’re
relatively rare as part of the programme.
Of course we build in the usual sorts of things
– museum visits and field trips as part
of the programme. There’s a really good
one in the first year, going to a couple of
museums and actually having a look at the
displays, and in second year, there’s a
module where you deconstruct the logics of
museum exhibition and design in a couple of
examples.
The practical class end of things, huge variation
in terms of what we do. There’s everything
from lab based stuff with microscopes, through
to hands on – Bronze age sword handling,
that kind of thing. Flint napping – there’s
all sorts of stuff that one can do. And of
course there are field schools.
At field schools, both at Level 1, Level 2
– Level 1 is compulsory one – this is
run by academic staff within the CAHA. All
the project design organisations in house,
or the first aid, the insurance, health and
safety cover – it’s everything that we
do to make sure it’s right. And of course,
as I said before, our projects relate to our
ongoing research projects. And students – well
they were told to wave their hands around,
but they really genuinely do enjoy themselves
hugely as part of these projects. A couple
of recent example, ones which are kind of
ongoing at the moment – is the Birth, which
is an Iron Age marsh fort, which is a very,
very strange place with earthworks that don’t
go all the way around. It’s all for show,
it would seem, at the front end. It’s got
nothing to do with the fence – something
else is clearly going on here. It’s a really
interesting project. And Stonehenge landscapes,
a geological programme – a phase of fieldwork
finished last year, we’re planning more
work in Stonehenge landscape in the future.
That involves all sorts of work based on originally
geophysical survey, the biggest geophysical
survey ever mounted in the world. It's been
undertaken by us, along with our colleagues
in Vienna. And more recently we had another
project based on electromagnetic conduction,
where we’re geologically excavating, geologically
archaeology excavating a range of features
across the landscape to explore those data
sets and providing, producing some amazing
new evidence from the landscape. It’s really
targeting things that no one’s every looked
at before, so it’s not surprising finding
new stuff, which is interesting.
Our resources in Birmingham are really good
for these areas of study. Our library collections,
I think it’s fair to say, are excellent
– they’re outstanding. Both for teaching
and for research. We have a museum, so we
have the CAHA department museum, with all
sorts of interesting odds and ends in, which
we use for teaching. So Greek, Roman, new
recent materials, some pre historic materials
and so on. There’s a Danford Collection
of West African Art, the Barber, a Fine Art
collection, a student Fine Art around the
corner, which is also used by us, a departmental
teaching research collection – the Eton
Myers Egyptology Collection which we have
in an outbuilding. And of course, we have
very close connections with Birmingham Museum’s
collections and various collaborations with
them, including access to collections, sometimes
for teaching purposes, like Bronze Age and
metal work.
Birmingham is, I think, a changing city. It’s
one of the most modern cities I guess, in
the UK. It’s certainly the youngest – the
last census data that has been circulated,
it’s a growing, young, dynamic city – it’s
a kind of mini London, in terms of all the
kinds of things going on here, and sort of
fabulous art culture and so on. I think the
university itself is very much part and parcel
of the centre of this. And has gone through
a programme of really significant infrastructural
and resource investment over the last few
years. I think one of the fruits of this is
this amazing green space, which I’m sure
other folk have mentioned, but a park in the
middle of the university, which is rather
wonderful.
So just to finish, I think there are a number
of things which we’d want to emphasise that
stand out about the programme. It’s research
led, the teaching and learning process, small
classes, very, very varied learning experiences.
The kinds of transferable skills we inculcate
I think are very highly valued. So the ability
to stand up in front of a group of people
in a room and deliver a fluent talk. That’s
something we train our students to do for
3 years. So by the end, it’s an effortless
capability. And it stands people in such good
stead when it comes to things like going for
interviews for instance. You get two disciplines
for the price of one, is probably rather good.
In terms of both Archaeology and Anthropology
of course. And it’s through the 3 years,
you do develop, without any question whatsoever,
independent research skills, which are again,
hugely encouraged by us, and hugely desirable
out in the employment sector. And it provides
you with a way of thinking about the world,
which is highly critical. It is highly analytical.
And it allows you, I think, to arrive at your
own conclusions about what it is that you
see around you very effectively.
And where do our students go? Well, as in
common with Arts and Humanities programmes
I think everywhere, we find our students go
into huge range of different careers, different
sectors. Our cultural heritage museums would
be the kind of obvious one. NGOs, aid development
– a lot of our students do law conversion
courses. Journalism, creative industries - a
student has, just this year, has already got
a job in a software design in London. Local
government, education of course, teaching,
charities, business management, and there’s
a huge sector of commercial planning and curatel
Archaeology, which is a hugely growing area
– thousands of Archaeologists in the UK,
with big projects like High Speed 2, High
Speed 2A – they’re so big, that there
aren’t enough Archaeologists in the country
to actually deliver on them, as well as all
the other kinds of activity that’s taking
place as well. And of course, many of our
students go on to post graduate studies at
Masters level, sometimes Doctoral level, and
continuing in a few cases to Post-Doctoral
research, academic careers – very high placed
jobs in a range of institutions, such as the
British Museum, for example.
So that’s Archaeology and Anthropology at
Birmingham. Programme details of course are
on the web, and you’re very welcome to grill
me now, if you have any questions.
