Ancient Cultures [MSc] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The first drop spindle I made was a wooden dowel pushed through a lump of air-drying clay. It wobbled, spun for about three seconds and produced thick, lumpy yarn. I weighed it on our kitchen scales, then made a lighter one, and the thread became noticeably finer. That small exercise in my second year at university changed the way I read finds reports. A spindle whorl was no longer just an entry in a catalogue but evidence of a hand, a fibre and a decision about what kind of thread someone wanted.

That curiosity became my undergraduate dissertation. I compared spindle whorls recorded in published excavation reports from several Roman-period rural sites in northern England, noting weight, diameter and material where these were given. The project was mostly patient spreadsheet work, and much of it involved deciding what I could not say. Some reports gave no weights, some whorls were broken, and a few objects described as whorls might have been beads or weights for something else. In the end I argued, cautiously, that the range of weights at most sites suggested households spinning several grades of yarn rather than a single standard product. My supervisor's main comment was that my discussion of the gaps in the evidence was the strongest part, which pleased me more than I expected.

Reading Elizabeth Barber's Prehistoric Textiles showed me how much can be reconstructed from fragments, impressions and tools when textiles themselves rarely survive. It also made me aware of how narrow my own focus had been. Barber moves between the Aegean, Egypt and the Near East, and between archaeology, language and art. I would like to work in that broader way, looking at craft and daily labour across different ancient societies, and placing material evidence alongside texts and images rather than treating them as separate subjects. The idea of the chaîne opératoire, following an object through every stage from raw material to discard, gave me a useful framework for the dissertation, and I want to test it against cultures and periods I have not yet studied.

Since graduating I have worked early shifts in a supermarket bakery. It is repetitive work, but it has taught me to manage time carefully and to notice how routine tasks are organised: who does what, in what order, with which tools. I find myself thinking about ancient bread ovens and grinding stones more than I probably should at five in the morning. On one evening a fortnight I volunteer with a local archaeology society, washing, bagging and labelling finds from a community excavation. I am not running anything, but I have become reliable at careful recording, and I have learnt how quickly context is lost when a label is smudged or a bag is mixed up.

Outside archaeology I play fiddle in a ceilidh band at village halls and weddings. Learning tunes by ear from older players has given me a respect for knowledge passed on through practice rather than writing, which is close to what I find most interesting about ancient crafts.

Postgraduate study would let me develop the skills I lack, particularly reading ancient sources with more confidence and handling objects directly rather than through other people's reports. I hope to build towards a research project on textile production that draws on more than one region and more than one kind of evidence. I can offer steady, careful work, an honest approach to incomplete evidence and a practical sense of how things were made, and I am ready to widen my perspective considerably.