Archaeological science postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in archaeological science grew out of a fairly unglamorous task. In my second undergraduate year I volunteered to help sort a box of unstratified pottery from a parish excavation, and found that the fabric descriptions in the original 1970s archive could not be reconciled with what I was holding. Some sherds recorded as one local fabric plainly contained shell; others did not. I could describe the difference with a hand lens and a written key, but I could not say where the clay came from, or whether two visually similar sherds were genuinely the same product. That gap between careful description and material evidence is what I want to work on.

My degree gave me a broad grounding in prehistoric and medieval archaeology, method and theory, and I chose the more analytical options wherever they were available: environmental archaeology, artefact studies and a practical module on survey and recording. My dissertation compared hand-drawn and photogrammetric recording of a group of decorated medieval floor tiles held in a local museum store. I built the models myself from a borrowed camera and free software, taught myself enough of the processing workflow to produce usable meshes, and then assessed how well each method captured stamp wear and glaze loss. The honest conclusion was that photogrammetry was better for measurable surface relief and worse for interpretation, because drawing forced me to decide what I was looking at. Working through that argument taught me more about the limits of evidence than any reading, and it left me wanting the analytical training to ask compositional rather than purely visual questions.

Alongside the dissertation I worked with another student on a small finds illustration guide for our departmental field school. It was a manageable, unexciting job that had to be right: agreeing conventions, testing the sheets on first-year students and rewriting the sections they misread. Dividing the work and then checking each other's pages was good practice for collaborative laboratory reporting, where consistency matters more than individual style.

Since graduating I have worked part-time as a technician's assistant in a college science department, preparing reagents, calibrating balances and pH meters, maintaining equipment logs and supervising basic practicals. It is routine work, but it has made me comfortable with standard operating procedures, sample labelling and the discipline of recording what actually happened rather than what was meant to happen. I have also become familiar with handling chemicals safely and with the paperwork that goes with it. In the evenings I have been improving my quantitative skills, working through introductory statistics in R using open teaching materials, mainly so that I can interpret multivariate plots rather than simply admire them.

I continue to volunteer with a community excavation on a post-medieval farmstead, where I now help supervise the finds tent and run the flotation tank. Watching charred cereal grain and fish bone emerge from sediment we had almost written off has been the clearest demonstration I have had that the questions a site can answer depend on how it is sampled.

What I want from postgraduate study is structured training in the techniques I have so far only read about: petrography and thin-section analysis, geochemical characterisation, isotopes and biomolecular approaches, along with the sampling theory and statistics that make results defensible. I am particularly drawn to ceramic provenance and production, because it connects laboratory data to questions about craft organisation and local exchange that first interested me in archaeology. In the longer term I would like to work in a commercial or museum laboratory, contributing specialist reports on excavated material. I am realistic that this means years of careful, repetitive work, which is precisely the part I enjoy.

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