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Updated: Human Osteology Postgraduate Courses in the United Kingdom

14 Aug

Note: I originally wrote this post a few years ago in order to outline the available human osteology/bioarchaeology postgraduate courses in the United Kingdom as a guideline for the degree fees and topic availability.  However since then a number of substantial national and international changes have occurred.  These include, but are not limited to, the increase of undergraduate tuition fees to £9000.00 per academic year; the general increase of the price of Masters degrees; the new availability of student loans for Masters students; changes to Disabled Students Allowance from the 16/17 academic year onward; the transfer of some Student Finance grants to loans; the Government White paper released in May 2016 outlining challenges and changes needed in higher education, etc.

One of the more important changes was the outcome of the referendum in the United Kingdom whether it to remain or not a part of the European Union, this resulted in a very tight result in which the majority voted to leave the European Union.  This process will take many years, but the Government of the United Kingdom recently stated that it would guarantee European Union funding for projects signed before the Autumn Statement until 2020.  Doug, of Doug’s Archaeology, has an interesting and somewhat depressing post on what Brexit could mean for archaeology as a sector more generally. 

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Whilst I was doing some light research for another article I made a quick list of every course in the United Kingdom that offers human osteology as a taught masters (either as an MA, Masters of Arts, or as an MSc, Masters of Science) or offer a distinctive human osteology module or component within a taught masters degree.  Human osteology is the study of human skeletal material from archaeological sites.  Human osteologists study bones to identify age, biological sex, pathology and pre- and post-mortem trauma alongside other avenues of research in human behaviour and activity, such as investigating diet and mobility of post populations.  The subject is generally only taught as a Masters level within the United Kingdom.

Within the list England as a whole is well represented within the universities highlighted, Scotland only comes in with two entries whilst Wales and Northern Ireland, as far as I know, offer no distinctive osteological courses at the Masters level.  Further to this the reader should be aware that some universities, such as the University of Leicester, offer commercial or research centers for human and animal osteology yet run no postgraduate courses that provide the training in the methods of osteoarchaeology.  Thus they are excluded from this list.

This information is correct as of September 2016, but please expect at least some of the information to change, especially in relation to course fees for United kingdom, European Union, and international students.  It should be noted here that the education system in the United Kingdom is internationally well-regarded and the educational institutions are often in the top 10% in world league tables; however it can be very expensive to study here, especially so in the consideration of prospective international students.  Please also take note of the cost of renting (especially in London and the south of the country generally) and the high cost of daily living compared to some countries.  The list is not an exhaustive attempt and I am happy to add any further information or to correct any entries.

Other Sources & Prospective Student Advice

As well as the list below, the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology also have links to human osteology and bioarchaeology courses in the United Kingdom.  You check the list out here.  The British Archaeological Jobs and Resources (BAJR) site, ran by David Connolly, also has a plethora of useful resources to check as well as an active Facebook group which is a great place to ask for advice.  I’ve also written a second post to compliment this one which entails what you, the prospective student, should keep in mind when looking at degree courses to pursue. You can check out that post by clicking the title here: Questions to remember when considering a postgraduate course in human osteology.

skull-saxon

An example of an archaeological skull. Image credit: source.

Courses in the United Kingdom, please note that the fees stated are for full time students.  For part time students the price is normally halved and the course carried out over two years instead of the usual one year that is common for Masters within the United Kingdom.

MA/MSc Degrees in England

Bournemouth University:

  • MSc Forensic Osteology (UK/EU £5500 and International £13,500, from 17/18 UK/EU £5750 and International £14,000).
  • MSc Biological Anthropology (UK/EU £5750 and International £14,000, from 17/18 UK/EU £6000 and International £14,500).

University of Bradford:

University of Cambridge:

  • MPhil Human Evolution (amazingly there are 18,000 skeletons in the Duckworth Collection!).

Cranfield University:

UCLAN:

University College London:

University of Durham:

University of Exeter:

  • MSc Bioarchaeology (Offers choice of one of three core pathway topics, including human osteology, zooarchaeology and, new for the 16/17 academic year, Forensic Anthropology) (UK/EU £6900 and International £15,950).

Universities of Hull and York Medical School:

  • MSc Human Evolution (A very interesting course, combining dissection and evolutionary anatomy) (UK/EU £6650 and International £15,680).

University of Liverpool:

Liverpool John Moores University:

University of Manchester:

  • MSc Biomedical and Forensic Studies in Egyptology (course under review).

University of Oxford:

University of Sheffield:

University of Southampton:

University of York:

MA/MSc Degrees in Scotland

University of Dundee:

University of Edinburgh:

The following universities offer short courses in human osteology, osteology, forensics or zooarchaeology

Short Courses in England

Cranfield University:

University of Bradford:

  • On occasion run a palaeopathology course, please check the university website for details.

University of Sheffield:

Note: I am still genuinely surprised there are not more short courses, if you find any in the United Kingdom please feel free to drop a comment below.

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A University of Hull and Sheffield joint excavation at Brodsworth carried out in 2008 helped to uncover and define a Medieval cemetery. Image credit: University of Hull.

A Few Pieces of Advice

A piece of advice that I would give to prospective students is that I would strongly advise researching your degree by visiting the universities own webpages, finding out about the course specifics and the module content.  If possible I’d also visit the department and tour the facilities available and seek advice from the course leader with regards to potential research interests.  I would also always advise to try to contact a past student and to gain their views on the course they have attended previously.  They will often offer frank advice and information, something that can be hard to find on a university webpage or from a course leader.  Also please do be aware of the high cost of the United Kingdom tertiary education as prices have been raised considerably in the past few years and are likely to rise again, especially so in comparison to cheaper courses on the European continent.

Finally, if you know of any other human osteology or bioarchaeology Masters or short courses in the United Kingdom please do comment below or send me an email and I will add it to the list here.

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Dearne Archaeology Valley Day 2014

7 Jun

I recently had the great pleasure of attending the Dearne Valley Archaeology Day (DVAD) 2014 conference, which was organised by Elmet Archaeology and the Dearne Valley Archaeology Group, in Wath upon Dearne, South Yorkshire.  As readers of this blog may be aware that I recently posted my own abstract for the talk (here), which focused on the value of blogging archaeology and introduced this blog to members of the public as well as to archaeologists and historians.  It was certainly a first for me to talk at a conference, and I had never thought that I’d actually be talking to an audience about blogging and my own site, but it just goes to show you never quite know where blogging will take you.

archillustrat

Kate Adelade‘s archaeological illustration stall.  Kate has previously wrote about cannibalism for this blog here.

The event was well attended and included a great range of speakers who covered a variety of topics in the archaeology and heritage areas.  As well as the speakers (a full list can be viewed here), there were also stalls on a number of projects from around the local area.  Jennifer Crangle, a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, was present as well with her stall on the medieval Rothwell Charnel Chapel project (of which I’ve previously discussed here) and Kate Adelade had her modern presentation displaying her fantastic archaeological illustration skills on show.  In fact I was quite impressed by each and every speaker at the day long conference, especially by the different styles and approaches that they all took.  I also learnt a great deal about various projects around the UK and further abroad.  Humour, as I discovered, really can help a talk a great deal too.  David Connolly, of BAJR and Past Horizons fame, really proved this during his animated talk about the Scottish hillforts (or rather ramped and ditched enclosures of unknown date and function) in the Lothians, as part of the on-going Rampart Scotland project.  David’s talk focused on the Iron age site of Sheriffside for his talk, and the great work that him and his team of volunteers underwent to target viable radiocarbon samples to help phase the site.

There were some great talks on community projects too, such as Mercian Archaeological Services CIC on-going Sherwood Forest Archaeological Project and a nice little round up of the great work that Elmet Archaeology have so far conducted in South Yorkshire.  Elmet further whetted the audience’s appetites by highlighting some future projects as well,  including the investigation of a WW2 POW camp at Hickleton Hall, near Doncaster, which promises to be pretty interesting in unearthing the physical remains of a legacy of war.

There were also talks that really grabbed my imagination in the size and scale of their ambitions and detail.  The first was by Victoria Donnelly, a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, that focused on her research on the grey literature of the archaeological record.  This is a part of the fascinating EngLaId project, which aims to characterise and explore the extent of the archaeological landscape in England by studying English archaeology from 1500BC to AD1086.  Victoria focused her talk on her own research into the grey literature and, with the use of GIS magic (Geographical Information Systems), provided some great examples highlighting the focus of commercial archaeological investigations.  Who, for instance, knew that, in England, Suffolk County Council are one of the bigger archaeological researchers in England?  I certainly didn’t and it was an eye opening presenting into the mystery of the oft maligned grey literature that all archaeological investigations produce.

Of a particular interest to me, due in part as of having studied in Sheffield itself, was Andrew Whitham’s talk on the Sheffield General Cemetery, which was opened in 1836 to accommodate a range of burials in the burgeoning industrial city (Sayer 2010: 29).  I had known about the site thanks to reading Elmet Archaeology’s own osteoarchaeologist Lauren McIntyre and University of Sheffield researcher Linzi Harvey’s 2012 survey report of the non-conformist crypt, but I had not realised the sheer size and subterranean magnificence of the site, nor of the effort in the construction of the site itself.  Andrew’s magnificent talk highlighted the fact that the General Cemetery was, unfortunately, a failure of Sheffield with many residents of the burgeoning city of Sheffield not wanting to be interred in the numerous space saving crypts, and instead wanting to be interred individually in graves.  The General cemetery today is a place that is well loved and respected by the city as a key piece of the history of Sheffield, and a place of recognition for understanding the changes in burial law for non-conformist burials.

As it happens I am currently reading archaeologist Duncan Sayer‘s Ethics and Burial Archaeology (2010), a fantastic Duckworth Debates in Archaeology book that focuses on contextualising the understanding how we approach buried human remains, both from a historical point of view and of an archaeology wide industry perspective.  Sayer, currently a researcher at the University of Central Lancashire, has worked extensively as a field archaeologist on many of the recent post-medieval cemetery excavations in Sheffield.  Indeed the Sheffield cemeteries make up a large portion of the case studies used in Ethics and Burial Archaeology and are used as examples of the troubles of trying to both understand the construction of graveyards and of understanding the now-outdated burial laws of the 19th century in a modern context.  It is a must read for any archaeologist or interested member of the public to understand the unique and difficult position that the UK currently finds itself in regarding the law of excavation and retention of human remains.

But finally at DVAD we had the day double-ended by talks on the Egyptian dead by both Dr Campbell Price, of Manchester Museum, who discussed the appeal of mummies in museums and by Prof. Joann Fletcher, of the University of York, who highlighted the value of working with the non-cadaver material of mummies in both Egypt and the wider world.  Both talks were eye opening regarding the practice of how the archaeology and heritage sector study and displays human remains.  It was great and inspiring to see such passion and invigoration with which the results of studies carried out by Fletcher et al. were conveyed to a largely public audience.

elmetarchdavid

The beginning of my own talk on blogging archaeology.

But coming back to my own talk, which was held at the beginning of the day, I have to admit that I was quite nervous before and during the start of my own talk, but you live and learn.  As the talk went on I did become to feel more comfortable about the topic and of my own knowledge.  However I have taken away a few points on how to improve my own public speaking, and I aim to use these to help address the issues that I faced during my own presentation at DVAD.  In fact I think this would probably be a pretty good topic for a future blog post, as presenting and communicating at conferences, and at public talks, is a pretty good skill to have and a must if archaeologists are to present the importance of their research to a wider audience.  There was one point in the talk that I had hoped to make but had unfortunately forgot to include it.  That is that the blogging format is an evolving body of text, one that needs constant revision and refinement but is, nonetheless, one of the strengths and one of the weaknesses of the blogging format.  Content, not format, is the important part of any communication, especially in the blogging world where the audience faces so many distractions at the touch of a button.

My own talk was actually influenced by the fantastic blogging carnival that Doug, of Doug’s Archaeology, carried out ahead of the SAA conference in April of this year.  My own five blog entries for the carnival forced me look again at why I blog archaeology, the effect it has had for myself and for understanding the benefit of discussing the importance of the human skeletal remains in archaeology generally.  I should also state here that I am extremely grateful to Kristina Killgrove (of Powered By Osteons), Doug Rocks Macqueen (of Doug’s Archaeology), Sam Hardy (of (Un)free Archaeology) and Katy Meyers (of Bones Don’t Lie) for providing quotes on why they blog, which I used in my presentation as examples of the reasons.  It is these bloggers, and many others, that provide me with the inspiration to carry on blogging.

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed my day at DVAD.  I met some great people, I learnt a lot and I had a wonderful time whilst doing so.  I owe a big thank you to Chris, Alex and Lauren at Elmet Archaeology for all of their hard work for putting on a great conference, and here is to next years conference!

It seems that we have also entered the season of the (bio)archaeology conference.  This weekend will see me attending the University of Durham Engaging with the Dead conference, and it is an event that I am particularly looking forward to.  It will be two packed days of exploring changing human beliefs about the body, death and mortality over 8000 years.  The event will have a particular focus on the archaeological remains of human bodies and of traces of mortuary culture in Britain and the Levant, as a part of the on-going Invisible Dead project, which is itself based at the University of Durham.

Note

The photographs here appear with the courtesy of Alex Sotheran.

Learn More

  • The Elmet Archaeology blog has a nice little summary of the day’s speakers along with some great photographs, read more here.
  • The University of York Mummy Research Group Home Page has detailed information on the analysis of the many mummies that the group has looked at and continues to study.
  • The Rampart Scotland homepage can be found here, with information on the range of hillfort sites in Scotland and the importance of these longstanding monuments in the landscape.
  • The EngLaID home page, the project to analyse change and continuity in the English landscape from the early Bronze Age to the Domesday survey, can be found here.   The site blog also have a review of DVAD here.

Bibliography

McIntyre, L. & Harvey, L. 2012. Non-Conformist Crypt Survey, General Cemetery, Sheffield. Report No. GCN01. University of Sheffield. Unpublished report.

Sayer, D. 2010. Ethics and Burial Archaeology, Duckworth Debates in Archaeology. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd.

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Human Osteology Courses in the UK

22 Jan

This is something I should have done a while ago.  Regardless, whilst I was doing some light research for another article I made a quick list of every course in the UK that offers human osteology as a taught masters (either as an MA – a Masters of Arts or as an MSc – Masters of Science) or offer a distinctive human osteology module or component within a taught masters degree.  England is well represented within the universities highlighted, Scotland only comes in with two entries whilst Wales and Northern Ireland, as far as I know, offer no distinctive osteological courses at the Masters level.  Further to this the reader should be aware that some universities, such as the University of Leicester, offer commercial or research centers for human and animal osteology yet run no postgraduate courses that provide the training in the methods of osteoarchaeology.  Thus they are excluded from this list.

This information is correct as of the 8 January 2014, but please expect at least some of the information to change.  I think we could likely see a raise in the tuition fees for MSc and MA courses within the next few years, as a direct knock on effect of the upping of undergraduate fees.  It should be noted here that the education system in the UK is well-regarded, and it’s educational institutions are often in the top 10% in world league tables; however it can be very expensive to study here, especially so in the consideration of prospective international students.  Please also take note of the cost of renting (especially in the south east of the country) and the high cost of daily living.  The list is not an exhaustive attempt and I am happy to add any further information or to correct any entries.

skull-saxon

A example of an archaeological skull. Image credit: source.

MA/MSc Degrees in England

Bournemouth University:

University of Bradford:

University of Cambridge:

  • MPhil Human Evolution (amazingly there are 18,000 skeletons in the Duckworth Collection).

Cranfield University:

Liverpool John Moores University:

UCLAN:

University College London:

University of Durham:

  • MSc Palaeopathology (Fees available on request, expect UK/EU £5000 and International £14,000).
  • MSc Evolutionary Anthropology (Fees available on request, expect UK/EU £5000 and International £14,000).

University of Exeter:

Universities of Hull and York Medical School:

  • MSc Human Evolution (A very interesting course, combining dissection and evolutionary anatomy) (UK/EU £4620 and International £16,540).

University of Liverpool:

University of Manchester:

  • MSc Biomedical and Forensic Studies in Egyptology (course under review).

University of Oxford:

University of Sheffield:

University of Southampton:

University of York:

MA/MSc Degrees in Scotland

University of Dundee:

University of Edinburgh:

Please be aware of changing program fees, as some of the above information has come from the 2012/2013 course fees, and these can, and are likely, to change during the next academic year.  In conjunction with the above, a number of universities also run short courses.

The following universities offer short courses in human osteology, osteology, forensics or zooarchaeology.

Short Courses in England

Bournemouth University:

Cranfield University:

Luton Museum

Oxford Brookes University:

University of Bradford:

  • On occasion run a palaeopathology course, please check the university website for details.

University of Sheffield:

I am surprised there are not more short courses in the UK.  If you find any in the UK please feel free to drop a comment below!

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A University of Hull and Sheffield joint excavation at Brodsworth carried out in 2008 helped to uncover and define a Medieval cemetery. Image credit: University of Hull.

Note: A final note to prospective students, I would strongly advise researching your degree by visiting the universities own webpages, finding out about the course specifics and the module content.  I would also always advise to try and contact a past student and to gain their views on the course they have attended.  They will often offer frank advice and information, something that can be hard to find on a university webpage.  Also be aware of the high cost of UK tertiary education as prices have been raised considerably in the past few years and are likely to rise again.

Furthermore if you know of any other human osteology Masters or short courses in the UK please comment below or send me an email and I will add it to the list here.

Further Information

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