Ancient History and Archaeology with FY

Ancient history and archaeology are disciplines that complement each other in the most productive way: ancient history works with written texts, coins, administrative records, and literary sources to reconstruct the political, social, and cultural life of the ancient world, while archaeology recovers and interprets the material remains of past societies, including everything from monumental buildings to the contents of rubbish pits. Together, they give you access to the past through multiple types of evidence, developing a richer and more rounded understanding than either discipline can achieve alone.

At Birkbeck College in London, this part-time programme is designed for students who want to combine serious academic study with work or other commitments. Birkbeck's long tradition of evening teaching means the programme is structured to be genuinely accessible to adult learners, and the intellectual quality is uncompromised. You will engage with textual sources from the ancient world, studying how ancient authors wrote about history, society, religion, and politics, and you will also gain hands-on experience with archives, museum collections, and archaeological practice, learning the practical methods by which material evidence is gathered, recorded, and interpreted.

The combination of textual and material approaches trains you to think across different types of evidence and to understand the limits as well as the possibilities of what we can know about the past.

London's extraordinary concentration of museums, archives, and ancient collections makes Birkbeck a particularly stimulating place to study this subject, and the programme takes advantage of those resources as part of the curriculum. Graduates from ancient history and archaeology programmes go on to careers in museums and heritage organisations, archaeological fieldwork and cultural resource management, teaching, publishing, archival work, and the civil service. Many continue to postgraduate study in ancient history, classical archaeology, heritage management, or related fields, building on the combination of textual and material expertise developed during their undergraduate degree.