Archaeology, Anthropology and Art History

Archaeology, anthropology and art history is an intellectually ambitious combination that approaches the full range of human experience from three complementary perspectives. Archaeology recovers the material remains of past societies and uses them to reconstruct how people lived, worked, and created meaning. Anthropology studies human diversity in the present and recent past, examining how different cultures organise social life, belief, and production.

Art history analyses visual objects and their meanings, asking how images, objects, and spaces communicate and how they are embedded in their cultural and historical contexts. Together, these three disciplines create an unusually rich and cross-cultural understanding of what it means to be human across time and space.

At the University of East Anglia, this three-year programme develops your skills and knowledge across all three disciplines simultaneously. You will engage with archaeological evidence and fieldwork methods, develop the ethnographic sensibility of an anthropologist, and learn to read visual culture with the close attention to form and context that art history demands. The degree encourages you to draw connections between what different materials and methods can reveal, asking how artefacts, social practices, and images illuminate each other.

UEA has research strengths in all three of these areas, and the degree benefits from a genuinely multidisciplinary academic environment.

Graduates from this programme find roles in museums, galleries, and heritage organisations, where the combination of archaeological knowledge, cultural understanding, and art historical expertise is particularly valuable. Heritage management, curatorial work, and roles in education within cultural institutions draw many graduates. Academic research and teaching, typically through postgraduate study, are pathways for those who want to develop specialist expertise.

Cultural consultancy, roles in international development with a cultural dimension, and work in documentary film and media are further destinations. The analytical and communication skills developed across this degree also transfer into journalism, publishing, and public sector roles where the ability to engage with complex cultural material is valued.